Bread Matters (17 page)

CHAPTER SIX FIRST BREAD AND ROLLS

‘Bread recipes are almost valueless, because they are so dependent on yeast speeds and the variable nature of flours.’
WALTER BANFIELD,
Manna: A Comprehensive Treatise on Bread Manufacture
(Maclaren, 1937)

There are not many different ways of making bread. It could be argued that all you need to make bread are flour, water and some form of yeast. Other bits and pieces may be interesting but they don’t change anything fundamental. So I promise not to confuse you with a load of superficially different recipes. I would rather introduce you to a few basic doughs, suggest some variations and take you with me on an open-ended journey into bread. Simple bread and rolls are a good place to start.

In the recipe for Basic Bread I describe the method in some detail. Treat this as a template for many of the other breads, where repetition of the same instructions might become boring.

A note on ingredients

To avoid endless repetition I do not preface every ingredient line with the word ‘organic’. However, all the recipes have been developed with organic ingredients and I recommend their use throughout, for reasons explained in Chapter 2. If you cannot get hold of everything you need from a certified organic source, the recipes will work just as well with non-organic ingredients.

You can substitute wholemeal flour for white or vice versa in all the recipes. Loaves made with a substantial amount of wholemeal flour will need a bit more water and will expand less than those made entirely with white flour.

Basic Bread

This is the simplest possible yeasted dough. It can be worked into all kinds of shapes or augmented with other ingredients to produce different flavours and textures.

To complete this bread in about 4 hours, aim to make the dough at about 27°C. If you want to do this accurately in order to get a feel for what dough at this temperature feels like, follow the formula on page 68.

The yeast quantity shown in the recipe is fairly small. In winter you may wish to increase it a bit to allow for the difficulty of keeping a relatively small piece of dough warm in normal kitchen conditions.

Makes 1 large or 2 small loaves

600g Stoneground strong wholemeal flour

5g Sea salt

400g Water

8g Fresh yeast

1013g Total

Flour or seeds for the top

Weigh the flour and salt into a bowl. Measure the total amount of water and pour about a quarter of it into a small jug or bowl. Dissolve the yeast in this water by stirring it gently with your fingers. (If you are using traditional active dried yeast, stir the granules around for a moment or two and then leave them to soften; they will probably float to the surface. In a few minutes they should be beginning to dissolve and foam a little.) Pour the yeasty water into the bowl with the flour and salt and add the rest of the water. Use one hand to hold the bowl and the other to begin mixing the dough (you could use a wooden spoon but it’s just another thing to wash up, and hands are more effective anyway). As soon as all the dry flour has become wet and the dough has begun to form, scrape it out of the bowl on to the worktop and begin kneading.

Do not add any flour at this stage, even if the dough seems to you to be rather wet. If it seems too dry, add some more water. As you knead, the flour will absorb the water and the gluten structure should begin to develop. Knead for 10-15 minutes. If you are using a mixer, rather less time will be needed. At the end of the mixing/kneading process, the dough should be soft, slightly silky to the touch and with a definite elasticity that was not there at the beginning.

Make sure the bowl is reasonably clean and put the dough back in it. Don’t worry about oiling the bowl: it’s a waste of oil and makes washing up more difficult. Cover the bowl with a polythene bag that is big enough not to come into contact with the rising dough. Leave the bowl in a warm place (around 25°C, if possible).

After 2 hours, the dough should have risen appreciably. If it has grown significantly in less than 2 hours, you can either ‘knock it back’ by gently folding it over on itself a couple of times and leaving it to rise again, or you can simply progress to the next stage.

Grease one large loaf tin or 2 small ones with some fat or vegetable oil; a hard fat such as butter is better than liquid oil because the latter tends to run down the sides of the tin and form a pool in which the base of the loaf partially fries. Tip the dough on to the worktop again. If you plan to make 2 small loaves, divide it in half. Using the barest flick of flour to prevent the dough sticking to your hands or the worktop, roll the dough into a sausage about twice as long as the longest side of the tin. Flatten this sausage with your knuckles and then fold it in three. Again, knuckle the dough down until it is a flattish rectangle about two-thirds the length of your tin.

Starting at the edge furthest from you, fold it over and roll it up, trying to keep the dough under some tension but not folding it so tightly that it tears. Finish your roll with the seam underneath and then pick the whole thing up and place it in the tin. If you intend to cover the surface with seeds or flour, it is better to do this before the dough goes into the tin. Have a shallow bowl of flour or seeds available and roll the freshly moulded dough piece in it, ensuring that what will be the top of the loaf, i.e. the side opposite the seam, gets well covered. If the stuff doesn’t stick very well, your dough surface is too dry. Get some water and rub it over the dough or spritz it using a household sprayer with warm water in it. Then dip the dough. Place it seam-side down in the tin. The dough should roughly half fill the tin (a little less if the dough is made from white flour).

Set your bread to prove in a warm place, covered with a stiff plastic bag or large bowl to stop it drying out too much. It is important not to let the dough touch the cover as it rises otherwise it may stick and damage the loaf structure when the cover is removed.

Preheat the oven to 230°C or its hottest setting. When the dough has risen appreciably but still gives some resistance when gently pressed with the pad of one finger, put the loaf or loaves carefully into the oven. Bake for 30-40 minutes, turning the heat down to 200°C after 10 minutes.

Turn the bread out of the tin and check that it is done (see page 122). Don’t be afraid to put it back in the oven for a few minutes if you are not sure that it is fully baked. If the bottom seems rather pale by comparison with the top, turn the loaf out of its tin and put it on one of the oven’s wire shelves to finish baking.

When you are happy that it is done, cool it on a rack to stop the bottom sweating and going soggy.

Bread with Old Dough

This is identical to the Basic Bread recipe except for the old dough, a piece of basic bread dough that has been kept for at least 24 hours, preferably in the fridge. The difference in flavour and texture contributed by the old dough is considerable. If the tangy flavour from the acids in the old dough is too strong for your liking, reduce the proportion of old dough in the recipe. You will still enjoy improved texture and keeping quality. The salt level is reduced because some salt comes into the mix via the old dough.

Makes 1 large or 2 small loaves

500g Stoneground strong wholemeal flour

4g Sea salt

330g Water

8g Fresh yeast

160g Old dough

1002g Total

Make a dough with all the ingredients except the old dough, as for Basic Bread. Knead for about 5 minutes, then add the old dough. If the latter has become very soft and sticky, you may need to add a little more flour to achieve a dough that is just manageable. As you continue to knead, you may notice the acids in the old dough beginning to condition the gluten, i.e. making it softer and more extensible.

Let the dough rise for about 2 hours, then divide it as required, mould it and place in greased tins. Prove and bake in a hot oven as for Basic Bread.

Milk Bread

The addition of milk to a bread dough has a pronounced softening effect on the crumb. This, and the nutritional benefit of the extra calcium, is probably why it was a nursery favourite. For those striving for softness in dough, milk is a much better way to achieve it than the hidden enzymes added by the baking industry. Whole milk gives the fullest effect, but semi-skimmed will still make some difference.

Putting 4 round pieces of dough together in a tin creates a slightly corrugated top, reminiscent of the fluted, tubular tins traditionally used for milk bread.

Makes 1 small loaf and a mini plait

260g Whole milk

5g Fresh yeast

200g Stoneground strong wholemeal flour

200g Strong white flour

4g Sea salt

669g Total

Egg, beaten with a little milk, to glaze

Warm the milk to the required temperature (see page 68) and dissolve the yeast in a little of it. Combine all the ingredients, then turn the dough out on to the worktop and knead for about 10 minutes. You should notice that it has a softer feel than one made with water. If it feels rather sticky on the surface, persevere with kneading and adjust the flour only towards the end. This should remain a fairly soft dough.

Let it rise for up to 2 hours. Then divide the dough into 2 pieces, one weighing 500g and the other about 150g (you always seem to lose a little along the way). Divide the larger piece into 4, mould into rolls and place them side by side in a greased small loaf tin. To enhance the crust colour, brush the top with egg beaten with a little milk. Roll the smaller piece of dough into a sausage about 30cm long and make it into a one-strand plait or knot it as if you are tying the first part of a bow. Put it on a baking tray lined with baking parchment and brush with egg glaze, being careful not to leave a ‘tide mark’ round the edges.

Prove under cover as usual. The freestanding plait will probably be ready to go in the oven first, partly because, not being constrained by a tin, it will have expanded in all directions and partly because it will look more attractive if it jumps and splits just a little in the oven – if it is over-proved, the dough strands are more likely to merge into one another, reducing the definition of the shape.

Start baking at 210°C and reduce the temperature to 190°C after 10 minutes. A slightly lower temperature is required because the milk sugars in the dough make it more likely to take colour as it bakes and the egg glaze accentuates this effect. If you get it right, the result will be a glossy, dark brown crust and a crumb that is soft without being pappy. The plait, being smaller and unprotected by a tin, will bake in as little as 15 minutes, the loaf in 30-40, as before.

Rolls

Rolls are essentially very small loaves of bread, but size does affect them in various ways. They have a greater proportion of crust than loaves, so they have to be baked in such a way as to avoid becoming all crust with not much crumb. One very common strategy is to place them so close to each other that, as they expand, they touch their neighbours and ‘batch’ together: where two rolls touch there is no crust, only crumb. Another way of limiting the formation of a hard crust is to dip the rolls in flour before proof: the flour coating interferes with the development of a firm crust and produces a softer surface, which teeth can tear more easily. Rolls often have some fat in the dough to help keep the crumb soft.

Heat can penetrate to the centre of a small volume of dough quite quickly, so baking time is reduced, as is the danger of the dough not being cooked in the middle. Rolls can therefore be baked at a high temperature, quickly forming a crust and retaining maximum moisture in the centre.

Hot rolls

I fired my first ‘Scotch’ brick oven in 1977, using hardwood offcuts from local sawmills, and it built up a prodigious heat as I piled on the logs in the afternoon and evening ready for the next morning’s baking. We never knew its precise temperature because it didn’t have a thermometer, but we knew it was right when a certain crack in the front of the oven started to widen. As the bakery got busier, we needed to get the oven ever hotter so that it would bake more bread on a single firing: there wasn’t time during the baking day to heat it up again. The first things into the fiercely hot oven were baps – ten trays with 54 baps on each. The whole oven full baked in three minutes. A few seconds’ delay in getting them out could have been disastrous, but quick work with one person on the peel (the flat shovel on the end of a long handle) and another shooting the baps off into wire trays resulted in wonderfully moist rolls with a thin crust flecked with a hint of toasted flour.

Baps

This recipe is for a straight bap dough. You could use white flour instead of wholemeal but if it is made with white flour in 3 or 4 hours from start to finish, there will be insufficient time for much flavour to develop by comparison with the sponge-and-dough method given for Scottish Morning Rolls (see page 149). One way of improving an all-white dough is to use a fat with definite flavour. Lard was the traditional favourite. Vegetarians might prefer butter or a well-flavoured olive oil. Remember, however, that fats that are liquid at room temperature tend to depress dough volume a little.

Made with wholemeal flour, these rolls have plenty of flavour even after a relatively short fermentation. But even wholemeal gains a roundedness and pleasing tang from an overnight sponge and, more importantly, the long fermentation helps break down phytic acid from the bran (phytic acid can make certain important minerals in the flour inaccessible to the human body).

The recipe uses a higher percentage of yeast in order to create a lively dough that will give the baps good lift in the oven. If you use salted butter, you could reduce the amount of added salt in the dough a bit, although some people may find the amount recommended quite low already.