Baking a Better Loaf of Bread

Going to read those, but meanhile, any tips on proofing that you can offer here on HN?

I also started out doing my own pizza dough. I used some youtube tutorials to work my up to baking my own sourdough breads. I've had some interesting failures along the way but I'm getting consistently good results now. Making your own bread is pretty easy, cheap, and very tasty. Using a decent quality flour helps. If you are interested in that stuff, Alex French Guy cooking has a no nonsense introduction to making your own sourdough up on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURsDaOr8hWWSiMZBLGP2...

There are a gazillion similar videos out there but this one is pretty informative and he's a bit of a food hacker.

Flour Water Salt Yeast is amazing. Transformed my view and understanding of bread.

Maybe ~10 years ago, a friend bought Peter Reinhart's BBA and I got his "Whole Grain Breads" book. We baked lots, swapped recipes and experiences. I can strongly recommend both books; obviously the Whole Grain one is better if that's your cup of tea, etc.

Regarding what TFA mentions of "gluten intolerance" - I think it's hard from a biochemistry perspective, based purely on what concentrations we're talking about, to support the hypothesis that the vital wheat gluten is a culprit. My personal theory is that it's a combination of fermentability of what you eat (which is obviously lower in "proper" bread) and mechanical properties that causes problems for people who are "gluten intolerant" but not celiac. (Just to clarify, by putting "gluten intolerant" into scare quotes, I don't mean to say it's not a real thing. Just that I personally don't think gluten is the actual bad guy.)

In addition to those books, Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread is an excellent resource.

reading the reviews I really want that book, but I don’t know why, I have never tried to actually make bread.

That should be the first thing one should learn to cook. To make some bread.

Tartine by Chad Robertson was THE book for me. It took me from so-so sourdough bread, to amazing and consistent one that constantly gets praise and is a pleasure every time.

I heartily second the recommendation for both of Forkish's books. I picked them up last summer, based on a comment here on HN. Getting my first decent loaf took a few tries, but now I bake all of our bread, whether artisanal or just sandwich bread. I usually bake with my 4-year-old daughter, and I've also been baking more desserts as well, for which I often use recipes from King Arthur Flour or Cook's Illustrated. Just made cinnamon rolls the other day. We also make pizzas every month or two, for which I can't recommend a pizza steel highly enough (unless you're lucky enough to have a home pizza oven that can reach 900 degrees).

FWSY is a great introduction to bread baking, but I think it's important to move beyond it pretty quickly. I find it quite joyless.

As an example, there's a recipe that calls for 3/16th teaspoons of yeast. Why didn't he just write 1/4 tsp? There is no way that 1/16ths of a teaspoon make any sort of difference given all the other factors at play. This kind of faux precision abounds in the book and can make the activity pretty stressful.

It's a great introduction to bread baking, but once you get the hang of things you realize the precision he requires in his recipes is simply not called for. You can bake great bread in less time, or more time, or with cooler water, or warmer water of whatever--and have more fun doing it. (Also, his sourdough recipe is criminally wasteful).

To anyone trying to get into bread: Definitely use FWSY to get a better "feel" for dough, but as soon as you do I suggest you leave it behind. Have fun. Tartine is a great second book.

Could you help me reverse engineering a bread I had, because I have no idea how to search for this. I had some grey-brown colored bread (looked like dinner rolls) in Greece that tasted so much more "real" than any American fancy bread I have had. It was firstly uniformly dry, like it sucked the moisture out of my mouth. Then it was very earthy, making my memories of american bread feel like they had sugar in it; this bread tasted like a fragrant earthy rock. Yet it was easy to eat, did not cut/scratch my mouth. What kind of recipe/process goes into making bread like that? I may be exaggerating a bit, but I do remember this was a very unique taste and feel.

As I understand it, the principle shenanigans going on with commercial flour is that they add enzymes (if you're doing this at home, it will be malt) to the flour before you take it home. Unless I'm quite mistaken -- please tell me if I am -- the whole point of a slow/retarded proof is to give the enzymes a chance to break the starch down into component sugars. When more sugars are broken out, you get both a nicer taste (it's sweet!) and a more beautiful crust (the sugars caramelize/brown).

But with home-milled flour, are there no enzymes at all? What happens to the slow-proofed dough?

Do you do anything to increase the gluten? When I've tried whole-wheat bread, it just kind of falls apart when sliced. I've tried adding "Vital Wheat Gluten", but even a tablespoon to a loaf didn't seem to help. Thanks!

I’ve been in France for a couple of months now, and I’ve found _one_ loaf that was up there with what I could get in a supermarket in Seattle, from essential baking or grand central.

There’s a lot of indifferent baguettes, and other basically white bread country loafs.

I read last year that it is not gluten that most people with “gluten allergic” is reacting to, but a protein that normally is found within “gluten”. They are now starting to produce gluten without this protein. Could be that this is the reason.

Just like milk-protein and lactose intolerance/allergic is two different things.

You should do a double-blind experiment. Isolate the human variable first. That said, I would not be surprised if there was something in the way Italian wheat is grown/processed that is the important factor.

Coming from France, finding out that there is added sugar in most products abroad (corn syrup, fructose, lactose, etc), including bread shocked me (I mean, even in mustard... which is alien to me). That may be a lead to follow?

Or that may be due to different yeasts? I'd suggest she tries to bake with imported ingredients, then local ones, and mix/match to find the culprit.

I have comment on this post that might answer your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21243525

Basically some whole wheat flour is heavily processed and reconstituted.

FODMAPS - olygoscharids that are very hard to digest. Proper fermentation reduces them. I guess the italian bread is just properly fermented and leavened.

Here is fun experiment - try her tolerance towards the simplest no knead bread made at home with long cold proofing. Like 48-72 hours. Or good proper artisanal sourdough - if she can tolerate them better you have a good piece of the puzzle.

And pasta gluten is quite different anyway from the bread one. It is made from durum wheat which is very hard and I think its gluten lacked the elasticity of the bread one.

Does she likes eats a lot fermented foods - like sourkraut and real yogurt? They have been shown to help with stomach microbiome.

Try grinding your own flour from organically grown wheat and baking bread with that. I'm guessing she won't have a problem with it since this is essentially what is going on in Italy. They just call it making bread there.

If you can bake bread with wheat from an Italian grocery store and it doesn't cause her any problems, you could probably then narrow it down to the variety of wheat. There are actually quite a few, and they can be very different. Do run some kind of blind trial though, as another poster mentioned.

I am personally invested in this question also.

Some have drawn a correlation between the use of organophosphates (one infamous compound in particular) and the rising incidence of celiac and gluten intolerance diagnosis in the USA. It may be something to look into.

Searching around and ended up here https://natalinaskitchen.com/pizza-flour-00-from-italy-or-ca... someone in the comments has had the same experience:

>As an fyi, I have stopped eating Whole grain bread due to Gluten Intolerance symptoms. However Gluten-Free bread for the most part also seems to me, Flavour-free as well! However when I have travelled to Italy/France I have had no symptoms and enjoyed pizzas, pastas and croissants with out problem. I recently picked up two products – one is La Cappicella Pasta, sold through PC which is made in Italy with Durham flour and ACE Bakery’s Non-GMO Baguette….and have had no symptoms or problems. I’ve heard it before that the preservatives and non-clumping additives etc are what can contribute to a lot of GI symptoms and I seem to be experiencing that. So pleased there are some products out there that don’t make those of us with problems like that experience pain when we eat!

Glyphosate, perhaps?

I think the bread maker was ahead of its time.

I love German bread. Whenever we are in Germany we load up on all sorts of great loads and freeze them at home. I am from the Netherlands where the bread it generally fine, but boring. German bread is much more refined and outspoken.

Yea as a german this is crazy. Everytime I go on holiday outside germany I notice how much the bread is lacking. Yes France might have nice baguettes but it's missing the whole grain breads, sourdough etc. Other countries have other strengths but germany has such a giant selection in "dark" breads it's always amazing.

to each their own. I don't like low hydration, dense breads, and I do like high hydration airy breads.

because that's what I like eating, not because that's what's pretty.

I find this video on “Nordic Nut Bread” something I really want to try to make.

https://youtu.be/BzxmIdw5oDc

I really agree with you on holes in bread, do not want.

But you may find the nut bread interesting..

In my experience, the large holes will not form if you add low-gluten flour (rye, buckwheat, oat) to the mix, even with higher hydration. I make a 100%-rye bread with flax seeds that is very dense, although highly hydrated (100-110%!). Furthermore, it needs no proofing, only a single rise in a bread pan. The crust is not that hard and can be softened further by wrapping the hot bread in a kitchen towel. Another plus is that this type of bread will not dry out or spoil for over a week (I keep it wrapped in a towel). As for the salt, I agree - 1% should be plenty.

> They have excessively hard crusts and large holes, both of which I consider defects.

I can't disagree with this enough. Gimme that hard, crispy crust with a good ear. And lots of good holes.

Although, my crumb always ends up even and fairly dense. No clue what to change to open it up. (Even with 70%+ hydration).

Yeah, I agree. It seems to happen a lot when one culture attempts to copy another. The artifact will be analysed and reduced to a few properties which are then optimised. The article talks about how British Chorleywood bread was optimised for price and how that's not right. Well, guess what, optimising food for anything except eating pleasure won't be good either.

It happened to beer. Americans discovered the centuries-old brewing traditions of Britain and Belgium and then turned the characteristics up to 11. What you get is beer brewed with so much hop it's just not pleasant any more. And so much malt that it now has to be sipped like wine. And in the end you've just got yourself another hyper-optimised product.

Some of these hipster loaves have crusts so tough that I'm seriously concerned about my teeth. But, hey, the baker has been learning how to make that gluten network even stronger so it must be good. The holes are so large it reminds me of atomic structure of matter: more empty space than bread. I can't spread butter on air. Nor can I hold cheese with a something tougher than shoe leather.

At the end of the day there is one thing that matters: is it nice to eat? If you go to France and find a boulangerie on any street corner in the country you will find a baguette. I could tell you about what makes it a baguette---the soft French, unbleached flour; the Viennese steam oven, the cultured yeast, and so on---but none of that really matters. What matters is it tastes wonderful, it feels great, and it works well with other foods. In short, it's a joy.

I've been baking breads regularly for the better part of a decade, and I just learned about Vital wheat Gluten this last year. I was blown away. What an incredibly useful tool!

I've tried this a few times. Twice, it come out great, and once it failed (I think temp was too cold and it didn't rise quite enough.)

All three times, I made a huge mess. The dry flour goes everywhere, the dough is very sticky and gets on my hands and spoon and the towel and plastic wrap the recipe has you using. If I could figure out how to not make a huge mess, it would be 100x more convenient to make.

I also use a no-knead technique -- even simpler than the one described in that NYT article -- and it's our staple 'basic bread' in the house. The interesting thing I've found is that the shelf-life is generally better than any store-bought bread I've ever had, which is weird and inexplicable to me, since I'm pretty sure those factory-made breads are stuffed with preservatives.

Same same, my partner got me a sourdough book in april, I have baked maybe 30 loaves since then. I got to a level of quality that there is no reason to buy bread anymore and it feels that store bought bread is not great when we do.

What recipe do you primarily use?

There's a classic Australian bread - Damper that's made without Yeast, it just uses self raising flour as a raising agent. https://www.taste.com.au/recipes/damper/80391c40-8eab-4e67-9... Its great to make when camping

I know this isn't without yeast, but you can start the development of your own sourdough culture without added yeast.

I purchased a large package of instant dry yeast and keep it in the fridge, in a mason jar. It lasts essentially indefinitely (I've had it for _years_.)

Part of the reason it's hard to use chemical leaveners in breads is that they only provide so much lift. A yeasted bread can go through multiple proofings and risings.

Soda bread, but just buy some instant yeast and keep it in a jar in the fridge: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0001CXUHW/

You can store yeast in the freezer for over a year, so it shouldn't be too much of a burden to buy it.

Random thought: Since you're a cake baker, that's probably going to be Cake Flour you have in your cupboard -- lower protein (gluten) content than bread flours, so you might want to get in some Bread Flour instead.

Salt rising bread qualifies, though you are unlikely to make it. It is a bit of a process, can be a little fussy, and the taste is somewhat unusual (though I like it a lot). In the words of noted food writer, Harold McGee:

"I've recently come across a fringe fermentation method that, unlike the breads and brews and yogurts and pickles and misos we know and love, isn't run by the usual benign microbes. The engine behind this fermentation method is Clostridium perfringens, a close relative of bacteria that cause botulism, tetanus, and food poisoning. It can eat flesh. It gives gas gangrene its name by causing putrefying flesh wounds that bubble and foam with flammable hydrogen. And it can make something surprisingly delicate and tasty."

https://www.popsci.com/article/science/clostridium-it-can-ki...

You just need to eat more bread

It's sourdough bread. It's way more filling then your average supermarket-bought white.

Age. 30 years ago I would do a half or almost whole loaf with the butter and sweet tea. At 47 that couple of thick slices amounting to the quarter loaf does it.

Wrt. bread making - from my short summer stint at a bakery in a remote village in USSR back then (these days you'd call it a craftsman/artisanal given what and how it was done there) - good bread takes less sugar and more time to rise like 12 hours. Industrial quickrise - 2 hours with a lot of added sugar - is in my view one of the major factors behind the current onslaught of GI, diabetes and autoimmunes.

You should be careful about letting a reasonable aversion to hipsterism become a tic. There's nothing sanctimonious about finding wholegrain sourdough bread tasty and processed bread flavorless (and it is; there's a reason the bread you buy has honey, vinegar, buttermilk and a bunch of other ingredients).