The art of baking bread (amateur rundown)

Well, that was 2011, and a happy new year to you all! As promised, today is for bread. Fortunately, the upside of our long break is that you have all fed your sourdough starters to a happy and healthy state, ready for some serious baking. Right?

So. What I’m not going to do is talk you through baking a bread. Really, there is just too much to say, and at the same time talking till the cows come home is just no use when the goal is to produce a nice loaf of bread. As with raising the starter, I think the best way to go is to pick somewhere to start and commit to looking up any problems you encounter or questions you have. Forums on bread-baking websites can be a huge help, and I would love to have a discussion here if anyone has questions or hints to share. What I will do is give a small list of things that would have been really helpful to know when I started baking. (Whether they’d have made a difference is another matter, particularly with regard to the fretting…)

So here goes: A Few Things I Have Learned, or: The Art of Baking Bread (Amateur Rundown):

1. Patience. There are so many elements that feature into what kind of bread you end up with, and you just can’t get them all right at the same time. It takes time to learn, and probably some barely edible breads (stock up on soup ingredients), but for me, anyway, a few adjustments along the way all of a sudden yielded a bread that totally blew me away.
2. Don’t fret about the stuff you can’t control. Sure, a wood-burning oven with massive bread stones and steam injection would produce a crust that would make you swoon. But your own shaky oven might surprise you. Make it work!
3. Don’t slavishly follow the recipe. Depending on your particular brand of flour, you may need as much as 10% less or more water. Start by holding back at least 10% of the water, and add more as necessary. This is a tricky one though, because sourdough is relatively wet; probably wetter than you’d think is right, and often practice is just as useful in being able to handle wet sticky dough as more flour. My guideline is to use just enough flour to make sure that I can ultimately shape the dough well. This means that the dough is still very wet and sticky when it has just been brought together, and just soft after kneading. If you’re done kneading and after resting the ball for a moment you still can’t pick it up without having it stick to your fingers, introduce some more flour.
4. I’m a convert to the slap-and-fold method of kneading. It works really well for sticky, wet, rye sourdough. There’s an amazing video here in which you can witness the transformation, by means of bare hands only, of a sticky blob into an irresistibly soft, supple, smooth dough. Bread magic!
5. I believe that getting better at shaping the bread has made the single biggest difference from the first bread I baked to what comes out of my oven now. It really makes the difference between a blob that just spreads out a bit further as it bakes and a nicely shaped loaf that is subject to the magical phenomenon of “oven spring”. Watch some videos that show you the tricks (I found this one helpful). Once you get the hang of shaping, it will also be easier to judge the consistency of your dough. Basically, you want to keep the dough as wet as possible without it being so sticky that you can’t get good surface tension on the shaped ball.

Sourdough miche bread

Get the recipe (and some gorgeous photos) here!

- Naomi