Secrets
of Great Breads
Often
we field questions about making great bread. Great bread is a matter
of using the right ingredients and the right techniques—there’s
no single secret that will make perfect bread. But really great bread
is readily attainable. We’ve compiled our list of what goes into
great bread.
1. The right flour.
2. An understanding of yeast.
3. A good dough conditioner.
4. A baker’s thermometer
Now this isn’t
everything that goes into great bread but the baker that is armed with
these four tools are likely to be baking great bread.
Recently we stated
that if there is a secret ingredient that bakers use it’s the
flour. So we put the right flour on the top of our list.
To understand how
important flour is, you need to understand just a little about gluten.
Gluten strands are formed from the proteins naturally occurring in wheat
flour. It's what gives bread its chewy texture. If you use a flour with
a higher percentage of protein, you will have more gluten. Most commercial
bread bakers are going to use flours with 10 to 14% protein--bread flour.
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Commercial bakers
have access to dozens of different flours. If you want really good bread,
buy a good quality bread flour--even if you have to make a deal with
a local baker.
If you buy your
flour at the grocery store be aware that all flours are not equal. For
bread you want a bread flour. Name brands are likely to do a better
job of holding to a specification and will provide more consistent results.
You can get an idea of the protein content from the nutrition label.
Divide the grams of protein by the grams in the serving size to get
the approximate percentage of protein in the flour (subject to rounding
error). For home baking, you want at least ten percent and preferably
higher.
Yeast is a living
organism. The gases expelled by the growing yeast are what leavens the
bread. The skilled baker recognizes that with the dough, he or she is
culturing a living organism and that the yeast must be growing in the
right culture to create the gases to make light airy bread. The right
culture is primarily a function of moisture, temperature, and pH or
the acidity level.
Read
on to learn more about yeast and how it functions >>
This brings us
to our dough conditioner. Dough conditioner alters the pH of the dough
(among other things) so that it enhances the growth of the yeast and
it makes the dough more extensible. All else being equal, dough conditioner
can make a good bread great.
You can buy dough
conditioner (or dough enhancer as it is sometimes called) in some grocery
stores or you can get our dough conditioner. Ours is a commercial dough
conditioner that we have found to be very good and that we use in all
our breads. You can buy dough conditioner from us but, for a limited
time, we’ll give it to you free with your order of $25 or more.
Get
your free dough conditioner here >>
And finally, a thermometer
has been called the baker’s secret weapon. We would not think
of making bread without one. We use it to measure water temperature.
(When we use our bread machines, we measure the water temperature to
exactly 80 degrees—not one degree off. When we make bread in our
stand-type mixer or by hand, we use water between 100 degrees and 110
degrees.) We nearly always measure the temperature of the bread when
it comes from the oven. And you can use a thermometer to measure the
temperature of the dough to make sure that you have the right temperature
for your yeast to thrive in. You can buy an insta-read thermometer at
most department stores but as a convenience, we offer a baker’s
thermometer on our site.
Buy
a baker’s thermometer here >>
If you don’t
have a free copy of Baking
Ingredients and How They Work, we recommend that you get one here.
There is no obligation—you can download it and print it for free.
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