Most people don’t realize that the final stage of baking bread is to let your bread cool properly. Slicing into a hot loaf of bread can cause bread to tear instead of slicing cleanly through, or it can be gummy on the inside . To cool your loaves properly you need to transfer … [Read more...]
Baking Bread
After you have allowed your loaves to fully proof you will need to transfer them to your oven quickly and carefully. You don't want the oven to lose too much heat, but you also don't want to damage your loaves while you put them into the oven. The easiest thing to do is to line … [Read more...]
Scoring Loaves
Scores or cuts in the tops of loaves are there for a baking purpose as well as for aesthetics. Scoring controls the rise of the dough as it bakes. The dough needs to expand when it begins to heat up and if you did not score the tops then the crust would split open wherever it … [Read more...]
Turning Your Oven into a Hearth
For great rustic hearth breads that have crisp crusts and silky interiors you will need to make a hearth out of your home oven. While we can't all have professional bread ovens in our homes we can mimic them. The first essential piece of equipment is a baking stone. A baking … [Read more...]
Scaling and Benching Dough
Scaling and benching refers to the step that comes after fermentation where you divide your dough into separate loaves (if doing so), pre-shape them, and let them rest for a period of time. When you divide your dough into equal pieces you want to take care not to over-work the … [Read more...]
Retarding Loaves
Retarding is a technique that slows the fermentation process of your dough. This allows you the flexibility to bake your loaves at a later time. If, for instance if you want freshly baked bread in the morning you can schedule your bread baking around that by letting your shaped … [Read more...]
Proofing your shaped loaves
Proofing is the term used for the second rise of your dough, which will now be in its shaped form. Proofing times depend on different conditions such as the temperature of the room, the type and amount of yeast used, and the humidity of your kitchen. The tricky part of proofing … [Read more...]
Turning Dough or Folding
Not every recipe calls for a turn or a fold halfway through its initial fermentation but some do. Think of it as a better way to punch down dough, because it does not destroy all of the precious air pockets within the dough. There are a couple of methods that I use the first is … [Read more...]
Fermenting your dough
Fermenting your dough or letting it rise the first time is critical to having a light and airy loaf of bread. If you were to knead you dough and then immediately shape it and bake it would turn out like a hockey puck, very dense with little to no oven spring. During fermentation, … [Read more...]
Windowpane test
When you get really familiar with a particular dough you can sometimes tell if it is kneaded enough just by the feel of the dough underneath your hands, but this test isn't foolproof. So I prefer to use the windowpane method of testing the gluten development of my dough. After … [Read more...]
Resting the Dough or Autolyze
This resting of the dough occurs just after you have mixed your ingredients together. In France the term for this is called an autolyze period. All recipes can take advantage of a resting period, but some recipes will specifically say to let your dough rest after mixing for ten … [Read more...]