Ah bread, the staple of every diet to the point that you call other staples of things “the bread and butter” of that topic. Yet how many people just grab a loaf from the store and don't actually make any bread? I know I was among those people, until early last August. See, in my faith, that time is known as “loaf mass”, a time to celebrate early harvests and make bread. My boyfriend, who did not know much of my faith, around that time asked me if I even was religious as he saw nothing of my faith. So, that Saturday, I started up a celebration feast of all the things we'd grown in the garden that year, along with me making a homemade thyme bread. I had never made a bread before and despite how much work goes into it, on paper it's pretty simple: mix ingredients, let it sit, kneed bread, let it sit again, and then put it in the oven. Done. Simple. Yet it varies a lot for each recipe and some require some specific types of flour or yeast and for a newcomer, the differences can be very...scary to say the least. So, let's take the scary out of bread making and soon, you'll no longer buy rustic loaves from the store: you'll make your own.
First let's go through ingredients: water, flour, yeast, salt. Water is pretty simple, most recipes will give you a decent hydration (aka the amount of water/flour by weight, we'll cover this topic in a later post because it's a little intensive) so go by what your recipe tells you. Salt is also simple but where people get into trouble is the flour differences. You can ideally use two different types of flour for bread: all purpose or bread. All purpose is the stuff you usually buy from the store, and can make some pretty decent bread. Do avoid using bleached all purpose though, it may give your bread an unexpected and unwanted taste. However, if you're going for the artisan came out of a fancy bakery style of bread, you should go for the bread flour. It has more gluten than your standard flour so it makes for chewier breads. Also you can mix in some whole wheat flour but do not use it for your whole recipe unless you want inedible block. Finally we have the yeast, normally sold in two varieties: active dry or instant. Main difference is that active yeast needs to be mixed with some warm water before it can activate while instant does not. That one is up to personal preference, as in the end, they are both just little organisms that eat to make our beer and bread.
So, you mixed your ingredients, it's been hanging out on the counter and probably has risen up quite a bit. Now how do you knead this thing? If you're lucky enough to have one of those big stand mixers, put that dough hook on and mix on medium it for a few minutes. You want to make sure that the dough is clinging to the dough hook and has let go of the sides of the bowl. Then just fold it into the shape you'd like. For those of us who cannot yet afford a standing mixer (like me), we gotta do this by hand. Find a spot to work the dough in your kitchen, maybe even put something like a cookie board or cutting board down if you don't wanna mess up a table, and set it up. First flour the area you are putting the dough on and keep the flour close, it will keep your hands from getting too gross. Key with this is to do gentle motions, you want to work the dough, not beat it up like it owes you money. Main technique is to press the dough down with the heel of your hand and move it away from you, and then left the edge of the dough that you just dragged away and fold it over. Just keep doing that and sprinkle flour if things start getting sticky until your dough is smooth, elastic and forms a ball. If you can't stretch that dough like a rubber band, it ain't done yet. When it hits that point, stop kneading. You can over-knead bread and that just leads to inferior breads. Now it's either going to go in the oven, or sit a bit before it goes in the oven.
So, now you know how breads work basically, but what about flavors? My bread had thyme in it, a lot of it in fact but you can add so many different things to your dough to spice it up. Herbs, cheeses, or even fruits and nuts can be added into a bread to give it a bit of a surprise for someone biting in. Just think of what you like baked into a bagel and you could probably do it in a bread form. Now, tell me below what sort of bread you'd like to make or any recipes you've tried recently. For those who follow my twitter, I did a (mostly) live tweeting about making Irish soda bread and corned beef with a ton of veggies for St. Patrick's day. That was really interesting for a quick bread. Please comment below and look to the top of the page for a link to my twitter for more live tweets of my cooking experiences!