Quarantine baking experiments
May. 9th, 2020 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinOnce we were shut in I decided to revive my old bread-machine oatmeal-bread recipe, only to discover that (1) my bread machine was dead, and (2) my yeast was all dead. It can survive in the freezer for a long time, but evidently not most of a decade.
Instead of trying to repair the 20-year-old machine, I threw it out, and decided to get into doing it by hand. We managed to get this comically huge industrial-sized double package of Fleischmann's instant yeast from BJ's, so we have effectively infinite yeast at this point. Bread flour is hard to get, but I got some all-purpose and some whole-wheat flour. I don't have a bread pan so I'm making peasant loaves on a cookie sheet for now.
Instead of posting whatever recipe I used last, I'll be more useful and say that the recipes I'm converging on are all variants of this simple one:
The basic recipe
4 cups some kind of flour, plus more as needed (see below)
1/2 tsp instant yeast
2 tsp salt
2 tsp some kind of sugar
2 cups warm water
Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the warm water and knead it for about 10-15 minutes. Initially the mixture will probably stick more to your hands than to itself. Add small amounts of extra flour (a tablespoon or so at a time) and keep kneading until it doesn't. Eventually it will be an elastic dough ball with a nice doughy texture.
Cover that in the bowl and let it rise for a couple of hours or so. With basic white bread you'll see it double in size. Punch it down if you like, put it on the cookie sheet, shape it into a loaf, put some artistic slashes in the top and let it rise, I don't know, 30-60 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 450F. Bake the bread at 450F for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 375F and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the crust looks nice and browned. Take it out, let it cool for 15-30 minutes, then serve.
Yeast
I'm using instant yeast, which is the identical stuff also called "quick-rise yeast" or "bread machine yeast", because it's what I got. This stuff is convenient because you can just mix it with the dry ingredients and it will work.
You can likely use other kinds of yeast identically in the above recipe, except you can't just mix it in dry, you have to do the "proofing" thing that you can look up somewhere else, where you put it in water with something to feed it and make it bubble. I don't have experience with that.
You can shorten the rise time by bombing the mixture with far more yeast, but you get this obvious yeasty flavor that you've probably tasted in bread-machine recipes (you can see that I used way more in my old recipe). There's a point of diminishing returns for that.
You can use less yeast and wait longer, and it might do good things to the flavor--today I tried 1/4 tsp and a four-hour rise, but I'm not sure it made a big difference. I haven't tried retarding the rise in the fridge overnight, or any tricks like that (experiments will probably happen in the future).
Ingredient variations
This recipe works fine with all-purpose white flour to make a basic white bread--you don't need bread flour. You can substitute in wheat flour for at least one cup of the white and it works basically the same.
Today I tried adding about a quarter cup of oatmeal to the mix as well. That, or substituting in a lot of whole-wheat flour or other whole grains, is going to make the loaf rise less, I think because the bran breaks up the formation of gluten (everything I know about this comes from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking). So the oatmeal bread will be a denser loaf; you might try waiting for it to rise longer, but in my experience with the oatmeal bread, even with my old bread machine, a lot of the rise you get is actually going to happen at the beginning of baking. With white bread, it gets more of its rising done before that and is fluffier.
The salt actually strengthens the gluten network, something I didn't realize until recently. According to McGee, this is because the ions neutralize electrically charged regions on the gluten protein that would otherwise make adjoining molecules repel each other. I'm not using a huge amount of salt, but putting in some does help the bread to rise and retain its shape.
You can use brown sugar in place of white; I usually do that--I think it tastes better but it doesn't make a huge difference. I'm using much, much less sugar than I used to with the bread machine. I suspect you don't actually need any in this recipe, but I haven't tried leaving it out entirely.
Adding other stuff
My old oatmeal-bread recipe was more complicated and involved milk and oil. I'm not sure any of that was doing anything good aside from affecting the flavor a bit. Putting in oil tends to have a similar effect to adding oatmeal, in that it weakens the gluten and therefore makes the dough rise less. It might increase the shelf life a bit and give it a moister texture. But I'm leaving it out now.
I actually have some wheat gluten that I bought ages ago. Adding a bit to the mixture can help with the oatmeal variant. Bread flour is just white flour with more gluten than all-purpose.
Instead of trying to repair the 20-year-old machine, I threw it out, and decided to get into doing it by hand. We managed to get this comically huge industrial-sized double package of Fleischmann's instant yeast from BJ's, so we have effectively infinite yeast at this point. Bread flour is hard to get, but I got some all-purpose and some whole-wheat flour. I don't have a bread pan so I'm making peasant loaves on a cookie sheet for now.
Instead of posting whatever recipe I used last, I'll be more useful and say that the recipes I'm converging on are all variants of this simple one:
The basic recipe
4 cups some kind of flour, plus more as needed (see below)
1/2 tsp instant yeast
2 tsp salt
2 tsp some kind of sugar
2 cups warm water
Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the warm water and knead it for about 10-15 minutes. Initially the mixture will probably stick more to your hands than to itself. Add small amounts of extra flour (a tablespoon or so at a time) and keep kneading until it doesn't. Eventually it will be an elastic dough ball with a nice doughy texture.
Cover that in the bowl and let it rise for a couple of hours or so. With basic white bread you'll see it double in size. Punch it down if you like, put it on the cookie sheet, shape it into a loaf, put some artistic slashes in the top and let it rise, I don't know, 30-60 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 450F. Bake the bread at 450F for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 375F and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the crust looks nice and browned. Take it out, let it cool for 15-30 minutes, then serve.
Yeast
I'm using instant yeast, which is the identical stuff also called "quick-rise yeast" or "bread machine yeast", because it's what I got. This stuff is convenient because you can just mix it with the dry ingredients and it will work.
You can likely use other kinds of yeast identically in the above recipe, except you can't just mix it in dry, you have to do the "proofing" thing that you can look up somewhere else, where you put it in water with something to feed it and make it bubble. I don't have experience with that.
You can shorten the rise time by bombing the mixture with far more yeast, but you get this obvious yeasty flavor that you've probably tasted in bread-machine recipes (you can see that I used way more in my old recipe). There's a point of diminishing returns for that.
You can use less yeast and wait longer, and it might do good things to the flavor--today I tried 1/4 tsp and a four-hour rise, but I'm not sure it made a big difference. I haven't tried retarding the rise in the fridge overnight, or any tricks like that (experiments will probably happen in the future).
Ingredient variations
This recipe works fine with all-purpose white flour to make a basic white bread--you don't need bread flour. You can substitute in wheat flour for at least one cup of the white and it works basically the same.
Today I tried adding about a quarter cup of oatmeal to the mix as well. That, or substituting in a lot of whole-wheat flour or other whole grains, is going to make the loaf rise less, I think because the bran breaks up the formation of gluten (everything I know about this comes from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking). So the oatmeal bread will be a denser loaf; you might try waiting for it to rise longer, but in my experience with the oatmeal bread, even with my old bread machine, a lot of the rise you get is actually going to happen at the beginning of baking. With white bread, it gets more of its rising done before that and is fluffier.
The salt actually strengthens the gluten network, something I didn't realize until recently. According to McGee, this is because the ions neutralize electrically charged regions on the gluten protein that would otherwise make adjoining molecules repel each other. I'm not using a huge amount of salt, but putting in some does help the bread to rise and retain its shape.
You can use brown sugar in place of white; I usually do that--I think it tastes better but it doesn't make a huge difference. I'm using much, much less sugar than I used to with the bread machine. I suspect you don't actually need any in this recipe, but I haven't tried leaving it out entirely.
Adding other stuff
My old oatmeal-bread recipe was more complicated and involved milk and oil. I'm not sure any of that was doing anything good aside from affecting the flavor a bit. Putting in oil tends to have a similar effect to adding oatmeal, in that it weakens the gluten and therefore makes the dough rise less. It might increase the shelf life a bit and give it a moister texture. But I'm leaving it out now.
I actually have some wheat gluten that I bought ages ago. Adding a bit to the mixture can help with the oatmeal variant. Bread flour is just white flour with more gluten than all-purpose.
Textural issues
Date: 2020-05-10 02:01 pm (UTC)You will be powerfully tempted to cut the loaf and start eating it right after it comes out of the oven. If you do, the texture won't be great--the middle will be sort of wet and porridge-like and may separate from the crust when you're trying to slice it. If you can live with that, knock yourself out. It's much better if you wait for the loaf to cool down a bit.
Once it's cut, the exposed surface of the loaf will start to go stale after only a few hours. My best advice is to learn to appreciate this as a textural variation, or toast it--when toasted it makes no difference. I used to try wrapping cut loaves in plastic wrap to stretch it out, but that just makes the crust kind of rubbery. A paper bag or breadbox might help a bit.