I mentioned during my food chem lecture that the recipe for bread dough is as simple as: flour, water, salt, yeast.  Yet I think the idea of baking bread to most people seems

1. a)intimidating, or
   

2. b)like a waste of time.
   

Actually, it’s pretty easy, and can be very little work. I’m still working on my craft (my rye bread tends to be dense) but even a mediocre home- baked loaf can be pretty darn good.

First, some useful references:

•On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. The classic.

•Jim Lahey’s No Knead bread recipe on his bakery’s website, and video at the New York Times

•My Bread by Jim Lahey. Also has good recipes for other items such as sandwiches and sheet-pan pizzas (e.g. cauliflower pizza, which sounds like madness but is darned good).  Lahey has a sequel on pizza--possibly a topic for another post.

•Michael Ruhlman’s website has a lot of bread-related material, including a good rye bread recipe.

•Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. Has ratios for a variety of foods, not just bread. 

And now some tricks:

1. 1.Use Bread Flour
   

This isn’t essential, but if you’re looking for a good chewy loaf you want to use bread flour. A more classic sandwich-bread style loaf could use regular flour, however.  What’s special about bread flour?

Gluten.

Wheat protein contains two gluten precursor proteins, called glutenins and gliadins.  Moisture plus agitation causes these proteins to aggregate (through hydrogen bonding, dispersion forces, and disulfide covalent linkages) into long elastic chains of gluten.

There are people that have an allergic reaction to gluten, and have to avoid foods such as wheat bread that contain it.  If this applies to you: you have my sympathies!

To get gluten formation in a bread dough, you need to get the proteins moving past each other so that they can uncoil and recombine.  Just as you have to get bubble gum wet and chewed for it to become stretchy and capable of trapping bubbles of gas, the same applies to wheat flour.  There’s an easy way, and a not-as-easy way, to do this, which leads to:

2. 2. Knead the dough (or don’t).
   

A classic bread dough has a 5:3 ratio by mass of flour to water. Since flour is a light powder, it can be packed to different degrees and have varying density.  This is one reason why baking is very different from ordinary cooking, and why restaurants rely on pastry chefs in addition to “regular” chefs. Pastry chefs can’t take an ad hoc “throw it into a pan and make it taste good” approach to cookery; getting ratios right is critical.  So, before we continue,

Subtrick 2a: Use a kitchen scale

Kitchen scales are useful for many reasons.  If you are on a diet, you can weigh your portions (e.g. nuts, pasta) to control your intake. You can get a decent digital one for not too much money that will last many years.

That said, bread dough is somewhat forgiving, and in the NYT video they use fairly crude measurements but still get results.

A standard 5:3 bread dough requires mechanical agitation (kneading) to develop gluten.  The stretchy-but-strong gluten network traps the carbon dioxide the yeast belch out, to trap bubbles and let the dough rise (leavening).  This is similar to the need to chew bubble gum before you can blow bubbles into it.

The old-school way to do this is to knead the dough by hand, folding it over itself repeatedly and pressing on it.  It’s a bit like performing CPR.  Some people find kneading dough can be relaxing, or a way of venting your frustrations.  However, if you just want a loaf of bread it presents a barrier to baking your own bread rather than grabbing a loaf from the store.

If you have a stand mixer with a dough hook, you can just let it do the work for about 10 minutes instead while you drink coffee, check your email, floss or whatever. 

Either way, if you can stretch the dough thin to get what’s known as a “baker’s window”, you’ve kneaded the dough enough and can afford to forget it a while while the yeast do their job (see trick 3 below). Then you give the dough a quick second knead, shape it into the desired form, let it rise again, and bake it.

This classic method of baking bread is already pretty easy, but some readers may already be thinking, “This is too much like work. I’m just going to buy a loaf already”.  But there’s another method that requires about 10 minutes of work and no kneading: the “No Knead” method popularized by Lahey.

Instead of relying on mechanical agitation to develop gluten, you can make a wetter or “slacker” dough as described by Lahey.  The greater fluidity means that molecules have more mobility, and simple diffusion over a long period of time is sufficient to develop gluten.  The main downside to this method is that you would like about 18 hours of advance notice that bread would be desirable thing to have.  If you know “I want bread tomorrow evening” then it’s literally 10 minutes of active work from flour to loaf. 

This passive approach requires more time, but on the other hand it gives an opportunity for fermentation to occur, and the development of interesting flavor.  Also, the no-knead method gives a bread with an airier interior with larger bubbles, for a more fancy-schmancy “artisinal” loaf that’s good for dipping in olive oil.

The purpose of gluten is to trap the carbon dioxide that is belched out by yeast as they digest starch.  Which leads to:

3. 3. Use bottled/filtered water
   

This may not be absolutely crucial, but tap water can contain significant amounts of chlorine.  In my (anecdotal) experience, I have the best results when I use my Brita filter-pitcher water.  I believe, if you don’t have a filter system or bottled water,  that if you let tap water sit for a while, the chlorine will dissipate, and your yeast will be happier.

Whether you use the knead or the no-knead method, there’s one final trick you can do if you want a crackly crust....

4. 4. Cook the loaf in a pot.
   

The standard method is to use a cast-iron dutch oven (if you’ve splurged on enameled cast-iron, even better).  This is most applicable when you just want a round loaf of bread (“boule”) rather than, say, a sandwich loaf in a bread pan.  Crust development is dependent on relative humidity.  Professional ovens carefully control the baking environment and inject steam at crucial moments.  High humidity early in the baking process leads to a crackly, chewy crust.  This can be simulated by baking the bread in a closed pot at first, then removing the lid and finishing the baking.

Ruhlman does his second rise in a cold Dutch oven, then bakes it, which is certainly easier, but I think the Lahey method produces better results.  He lets the dough do its second rise on a tea towel that has been covered by bran, flour, cornmeal, or similar particulate to keep the dough from sticking to the towel.  He then flips the bread into the hot pot, puts the lid on, and shuts the oven.  30 minutes later, you remove the lid so that the crust browns.  When this is done right, at the end of 45 minutes total baking you have a perfect loaf to flip out of the pot to cool.  As it cools, you’ll hear crackling noises coming from the loaf, which is a sign that you got a good crust development.  Ideally you let the loaf cool for an hour or so for the best crust, but it’s understandable if you can’t wait that long.

Once you have a basic loaf of white bread mastered, you can branch out in numerous ways.  You can add wheat flour or rye flour. You can make your rye bread with or without caraway.  You can add nuts, or fruit, or chocolate, or curry leaves, or....

If you’re really ambitious, you can try creating a sourdough starter.  This is essentially a culture of yeast and lactobacteria that you grow in a flour/water mixture.  You can use a starting source of yeast (cabbage leaves are supposed to work well), or just leave it open to whatever wild yeasty beasties happen to float around your neck of the woods.  I covered a jar of starter with cheese cloth to keep any stray bugs out, and left it in my porch until it started to bubble.  The lactobacteria that grow along with the yeast drop the pH of the starter and discourage rogue microbes from growing in it, which is where the “sour” part of “sourdough” comes from.

If you’re adventurous enough to try baking bread for the first time, I’d like to hear about your successes (or failures, for that matter).