Are you a bread baker? Or a bread buyer?
A flour-up-to-the-elbows and proofing timers on your phone type of person, or someone who considers “yeastiness” a bit unpleasant and at your place bread comes in a bag; frankly you worked very hard to get out of the kitchen so why mess it up?
I’m here as your cheerleader to switch you from buyer to baker. It’s not difficult and far out it will make your house smell delicious. But the main reason you should bother is for your own good health. We need to make a big switch from buying to making.
The contents of shopping trolleys have changed dramatically over the past twenty years and just in the last ten have seen a steep escalation in processed and pre-made foods.
And that bread we bought from the bakery thirty years ago? It is nothing like the bread we buy from the supermarket now. Supermarket bread is designed to stay fresh for days, and the only way this can be achieved is with food chemicals and emulsifiers, neither of which are good for our bodies.
Bread generally has had a bad wrap in the last decade or so.
Sometimes demonised along with other carbohydrates, it’s often the first thing people forgo when trying to eat better or lose weight. Unless you’re allergic to it though, properly-made bread has a lot to offer in terms of nutrition – it’s not an accident that most Western cultures have relied on bread as a diet staple for generations – we’re just making it wrong.
Plus, sandwiches! Toast! There’s so much to love. This column today is not a hymn to making sourdough, we’re going to build up to that because we love properly-made sourdough!
It’s the old-fashioned way of leavening bread, made from a starter of fermented flour and water, the fermentation process makes sourdough bread easier to digest and devoid of the emulsifiers in all supermarket “bagged” bread. But it requires management of said starter, and a little bit of technique, so we’re going to start with what I call ‘Long Ferment Bread’ which achieves many of the same benefits, with no fuss. In fact the first time I saw this bread I thought it was sourdough!
Next, let’s talk about flour. All flour in Australia is not created equal, we grow hard wheat and soft wheat, one is ground into plain/ all purpose flour and the other is ground into bread flour.
Hard wheat is higher in protein and develops better gluten, and is sold as bread flour or bakers flour. Use that for bread baking and leave your plain flour for making biscuits, cakes or scones. The other thing I’m going to suggest is, if you can, buy organic. It’s shorthand for pesticide and herbicide-free and frankly I’d prefer my bread without Roundup, you too?
This bread will not be ready for lunch if you start it in the morning, that’s a different recipe.
This is a long fermented bread that we’re going to prepare and then leave to do its thing for a whole day before we touch it again. And that time that we give it will give us perfectly digestible fluffy bread, made on good flour, without chemicals or emulsifier nasties, ready for sandwiches and toast and all the good things, PLUS now you are a bread baker. That’s cool. Nice to meet you.
3.5 cups (525 g) white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
2 teaspoons salt
1.5 cups + 2 tablespoons (415 mls) water
In a large bowl combine the flour, yeast and salt. Add water and stir well – the dough will be dryish, make sure all the flour is incorporated. Cover the bowl with a cloth (or a shower cap!) and let it rest for at least 18 hours or ideally 24 hours at room temperature.
The dough is ready when the surface is dotted with bubbles. After the long fermentation, and leaving the dough in the bowl, pull the dough from the bottom over the top of itself, turning the bowl as you go. Keep working until you form a ball. It’ll still feel pretty wet. Leave it to rest for half an hour. Come back in half an hour and using just enough flour to keep the dough from sticking to the work surface or to your fingers, pull the dough out of the bowl and pull it out into a rough rectangle. Fold the dough into thirds in one direction, and then the other (a bakers three-way-fold, like an envelope.) Now firmly shape it into a ball, and try to get a nice tight surface.
Now either:
1. put dough into a loaf tin to rise for about 2 hours; OR
2. put dough bottom side up into a floured bread-rising basket and let rise for about 2 hours; OR
3. sprinkle a cotton or linen teatowel with flour and place the dough bottom side up on towel and dust with more flour. Fold the teatowel over the dough and let rise for about 2 hours.
When it is ready, dough will be more aerated and puffy and will not readily spring back when poked.
At least half an hour before the bread is ready to bake, heat your oven to 230 degrees (Celsius). If not baking in a loaf tin, put a heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in the oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, carefully remove the pot from the oven.
If using a bread-rising basket, prepare a square of baking paper, turn the basket upside down and gently drop the dough (right-way-up) on the paper, score the top of the loaf with a sharp knife or razor, pick up the paper by the corners and transfer the bread to the preheated pot and put it in the oven.
Without a basket, slide a hand under the tea towel and turn the dough over into the hot pot, seam side down; it may look like a mess, but it’s OK, it will straighten out as it bakes. Alternatively, gently drop bread onto a piece of paper and use that as a sling to get the dough into the hot pot.
Cover your pot with the lid and bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake for another 10 minutes, until the loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack before cutting.
If baking in a loaf tin, bake for 30 mins only, or until the loaf sounds hollow when knocked on the bottom.
We often keep a batch of this dough in the fridge for days at a time and just break off pieces as required, shaping them into balls and leaving on the bench for an hour before rolling flat and popping into a preheated hot dry frypan and cooking for approx. 2 mins per side.
This dough makes our favourite pizza base, we actually prefer it to sourdough. Make it up as per the recipe. When you’ve done that first pull into a ball and left it for 30 mins, we take it out and cut it into 4 or 5 pieces and roll each piece into a ball. Leave the balls to rest for at least 2 hours. Then roll out, form into pizzas, top with pizza goodness, cook in a hot preheated oven (210 degrees) for about 15 mins.
Just one more note: If using wholemeal flour for this bread you’ll need to increase the amount of water to approximately 480mls or until you can mix the dough and there are no dry bits left.