Art of making bread

I written about bread before, but only about buying and eating it (and Dragon could probably write a book about it too). But I also love baking bread, and nothing beats well made fresh bread that's just come from the oven. Years ago, back in my student days in Nottingham, I used to make all the bread we ate until my wrist couldn't take kneading anymore and I had to stop. Ever since I've been thinking about getting back to baking bread again - maybe if I had a bigger kitchen I could get a machine that would do most of the kneading for me.

At the moment I'm in the middle of a baking craze - when I was younger I used to bake quite a lot, especially cakes, but since I moved in with Dragon that all stopped as Dragon doesn't really like cakes (and if I ate it all myself... well, you know). So this week I took out my old and trusty baking book Suuri Leivontakirja - Kotilieden parhaat leivonnaiset to look trough some of my favourite cake recipes. But I came across some traditional recipes for rolls instead. So I got inspired and made some carrot rolls yesterday.

0.5 liters of milk or water
50 g live yeast - or dry instant yeast, for quantity look for instructions on the packet
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp honey
200 g raw shreadded carrot
1 dl wheat bran
~ 12 dl bread flour
3 tbsp oil

Many sources say that recepies are the most important thing when making bread - I disagree. I think nothing beats experience. Something will always be different in your kitchen compared to the person who wrote the recipe - be it flour, water, yeast... only you know how things work in your kitchen. So it takes a bit of time, but it's surprising how fast - after one or two loafs - you figure it out. Weights, measurements, timings, oven temperatures - they are not carved in stone unlike some books tell you.

There are some things you need to understand about chemistry behind bread making. Yeast loves warm, wet and sweet - but is not too keen on hot, cold or salt. Kneading is not just about mixing the incredients - it's about activating the gluten in flour that makes the texture of your bread, nothing else does this than the physical pummling of the dough. The reason I didn't include instructions for the carrot rolls is that all bread making instructions for any recipe can be broken down to these seven steps:

1. Mix flour, water (and other liquids), salt and yeast thoroughly. First mix yeast with sugar and little of the warm water and wait until it's frothy. Then what I do is put all the flour on the work surface and mix it with other dry incredients - then making a well in the centre of the heap where all the liquid goes.
2. Kneading for gluten. By hand, or course - and I find that using a work surface instead of a bowl works better for me. At first it may be difficult to figure out what the dough should feel like, so use your watch - this should take 7 to 8 minutes. At this time it's also important to observe the dough to make sure you're not putting too much (or too little) flour in it - it's quite normal that you need more or less than in the recipe. Dough is good to go when you can spread little out between your hands and it streches to a very thin skin without breaking (also called "window test"). The dough should be a little sticky at all times, as well as smooth and elastic.
3. Leave the dough to rise. Put in into an oiled bowl and cover with a cloth - if you put it into a warm place it will rise more quickly, but you can put it into the fridge too (only it will take days then). This can actually be quite useful too - you can put your dough into the fridge, then go out and take it only out when you're ready to bake it. The dough has risen enough when it's doubled in size.
4. Knocking the dough out again. This is done so that the bubbles that have formed are broken and can be distributed evenly. At this point you want to shape your dough - loafs or rolls, whatever you want.
5. Second rising. Again, leave for about half an hour in a warm place - this is also one of those things you need to practice with. Remember that bread doesn't rise in the oven anymore like cakes that use baking powder - so you need to let them rise enough to get nice and puffy bread.

6. Baking. Well, kind of obvious - for temperature and time, follow the instructions (for carrot rolls 225 C and 10 - 15 minutes) as a guideline but as always nothing beats experience. Generally bread is cooked when you tap the bottom of it with your finger and it sounds hollow - this can be difficult to judge in the beginning though, so use the recipe's guidelines and learn to judge what a good bread sounds like.
7. Cooling. Warm bread is delicious, but hot bread is disgusting - it's not set yet properly. So put it on a cooling rack and be patient!

I hope the instructions don't scare anyone - it's not my purpose to make you feel like you're going to fail totally the first time. I just think that most people try making bread at some point and it doesn't turn out too well, and they give up - but what they need to do is try again, the second time will be much better. Also one of my "tricks of the trade" I was using back in my bread making days was to take aside some dough - ball about size of a fist - and then next time mix it in with the previous batch (replacing about 10% of the flour in the recipe). You can store the dough ball in a plastic bag in the fridge - day or two, or until it smells too sour (I actually kept the dough ball in the fridge for a week and it was still fine, so it's not that difficult). This not only helps the rising process, it also gives the bread character.

I suggest you give it a try some day. Nothing beats fresh bread.