Baking Bread: Lessons and Experiments. ~mike gradziel. to the index page The kitchen gets too hot some weeks in summer so I don't bake as much now, but when the weather is cool and I'm going to be home all day I bake baguettes and freeze them for making sandwiches all week. They lose the crispy crust but still taste better than anything from the store.
I'm also experimenting with a black bread for eating with soup or at breakfast with butter and - my new favorite - filet mignon seared on the grill, topped with sauteed green onions and accompanied by two eggs sunny side up, and seared tomato. Black bread warmed in the microwave until tender like the steak, and cut into little triangles... mmmm! I am working to cut out all the superfluous ingredients, but it seems that strong coffee and cocoa powder and blackstrap molasses are here to stay. I've occasionally made bread for perhaps fifteen years without knowing what good dough feels like. To correct this, in December 2008 I enrolled in a week-long Artisan Bread course at the San Francisco Baking Institute. Atop a hill in south San Francisco, this spacious baking laboratory awaits your trials at mixing and shaping dough under the guidance of skilled instructors who know how to operate the giant industrial ovens and dough mixers which speed along the preparation of forty-kilogram batches of dough. They teach the lessons of master baker Michel Suas, a man with an impressive resume known around the world. I baked a lot of bread - dozens of loaves, each batch a little different in its mixing intensity or fermentation time or flour type. Next came weeks of experimentation at home where I tried to re-create what seemed so easy in class with electric mixers and expert bakers. I tried different flours, bought scales to measure ingredients accurately to fractions of a gram, and modified my oven to bake better bread. See my results farther down on the page. It's the middle of March, three months after my class, and I can finally say I'm almost ready to move on from the baguette to a new recipe. This means I'm finally producing baguettes at home the way they're meant to be: light, puffy, thin-crusted, crackling and bubbly and golden; fluffy and cream colored inside with irregular loose structure, all mixed by hand using an overnight pre-fermentation for the best possible flavor. My loaves have to be loaded crosswise because my kitchen is small, so they get a little crooked coming off the peel. Oh well.
My formula: 68 percent water, 1.6 percent salt, 0.33 percent instant dry yeast; and of course 100% white bread flour, all by mass. Pre-ferment overnight at room temperature 34% of the flour with an equal part water and 10% of the total amount of yeast. Mix by hand - I mean with your hands - until the dough is mixed and starts to gain strength, about 3 minutes. Fold several times over the next 3-3.5 hours keeping the dough 75-80 degrees F. Each fold involves folding over both edges, one after the other (like closing a book) left to right then right to left, rotating 90 degrees, and folding over both edges again, then inverting back into the oiled lidded rectangular plastic tub to rest in a warm place. Actually I never take it out of the tub, folding in place. When it does come out for pre-shaping I handle it as little as possible, folding each piece over a couple times to add more strength to the loaf. After it rests and is finally shaped with another fold, it rises for an hour while the oven heats up with its stone. I run steam into the oven, load the peel, slash the loaves with a sharp knife, load the oven and immediately introduce about 3/4 cup of boiling water, mostly by sloshing the hot water into a pan in the bottom of the oven (close the door quickly) but also via my copper feeder tube running in through the oven vent. I keep the steam kettle going for three or four minutes. It's essential to have a massive amount of steam when the dough first goes into the oven - this is when moisture beads up on the cool dough and keeps it pliable while the loaf puffs up. Here are some photos from the class:
A week-long baking class costing as much as 250 loaves of artisan bread is a luxury of sorts for non-professional bakers like me, but what yould you pay for a lifetime of fresh loaves? I went home for the winter holidays and immediately updated Mom's ten-year-old French bread recipe to bring it on par with the best of any bakery - same oven, same flour, just different techniques and steam in the oven. Back in San Mateo a few weeks later, Nick and I got together to work out some lessons from class; we devised a new water injection approach to getting steam into the oven with the door closed. I continue to work at the same baguette recipe we made so many times in class. Repetition is key to succesful learning and experimentation; this is what you won't get in a 1-day class. At SFBI, after a week almost everyone was shaping dough reasonably well. The other students were a mix of mid-career or retired folks toying with the idea of opening small bakeries, younger people like me with other jobs, and more serious bakers who would use their skills right away. Everyone had a good time - so if you have a week free and like to bake, go ahead and sign up for class! Back to my baking story... Baked on a cookie sheet in my conventional gas-fired oven, my breads came out with thin pale dusty crusts; I wanted crunchy golden flavorful crusts so I made two oven improvements: Oven Stone. Bread needs to be baked on a thick stone surface as hot as the rest of the oven. Ideally, the bread would be surrounded by such surfaces on all sides, but I'm starting with a stone base first. At a local stone yard I bought a piece of Connecticut Bluestone 18 x 12 x 1 inches for $11 (Cheap compared to a specialty pizza stone, but imagine paying to pave a whole patio!). Oven stones need to be seasoned before their first use to slowly remove water, or they may crack; I cleaned mine with a stiff brush and running water, then put it in a 200 degree oven for a couple hours, and then gradually turned up the heat to dry it thoroughly. Never wash a stone after seasoning; just brush it clean. This stone fits in my oven with 2 or 3 inches between the sides of the stone and the oven walls. The stone is sawn smooth on one side and split on the other side (which is normally the exposed, natural-looking side). I bake on the smooth side so it's easier to slide a peel under the bread. Bluestone is a type of tough dense sandstone popular for patio pavers, and considering its density (I measured it), its capacity to store heat should be right in line with traditional masonry oven materials. The bread picture above compares loaves baked on the stone (top) and on a cookie sheet (bottom). Oven Steam. The popular suggestion of setting a heated cast iron pan low in the oven and sloshing some water in after loading the bread hasn't brought me the golden glossy crusts I desire, though once I came close to the golden crust while also blowing out my oven pilot light with a flood of water and steam. When the relatively cool bread goes into a hot steamy oven, water will condense on the dough while it puffs up rapidly, warmed by the hot baking stone. The dough is still alive with yeasts and natural bacteria in this first phase of baking, and in a final burst of chemical activity a dough surface is established that later carmelizes to a wonderful crust. Keeping the surface moist also prevents the dough from becoming trapped inside a dried skin that would prevent maximum rising in the oven. Modern commercial ovens allow bakers to inject steam; to get this in my home oven, I piped in steam from a teakettle on the stovetop (the picture shows a cold oven; when it's hot, you don't see the steam).
My gas-fired oven has a convenient stovetop vent through which I ran 3/8" copper tube; I put one end of the tube through a cork stuck in the spout of a tea kettle, and I plugged the other end of the tube with a wad of aluminum foil. I drilled an arrangement of small holes in the tube to direct steam as evenly as possible over my baking surface.
	At left, results of a steaming experiment: portions of identical dough baked separately show the difference in crust coloration with and without steam (left loaf: no steam; right loaf: with steam). Crust flavor was better too. Shape and volume differences were due to dough handling rather than steaming. I kept the no-steam loaf covered with plastic so it went in fairly moist and puffed up just as well as the steamed loaf. I steamed the bread for the first 5 minutes of baking. However, this isn't really satisfactory - it's dull and the crust softens as the bread cools.
I need massive amounts of steam right at the start of baking to compensate for the venting of the oven air in my gas oven. I've tried various combinations of piped-in and sloshed in water and steam; it's evident that the dough needs all its steam instantly at the moment the bread goes into the oven. If the dough warms up even a little too much, the crust gets good color but no shine and little crackling. Too much steam and the crust is very dark and tough. The best results for me come from sloshing water into a hot iron pan before closing the oven door, then immediately injecting water via copper tubing directly onto a pan on the oven floor. Turning off the oven flame for a couple minutes helps keep the steam in while the dough gets its final rising. The result: glossy, crispy crusted bread that crackles as it cools like a good baguette should! The experiments continue.. I've compared some different flours with no distinct differences in the resulting bread, but had noticeable improvements in flavor using a pre-fermented dough mix left out overnight. Next: moving on from the much-practiced baguette to dark wheat-rye breads good with butter and hot soup. Dough Cloth ("couche"). Who knew there was perfection to be had in the simple dough cloth? I used a heavy cotton canvas for pie crusts and biscuits and bread for a while, but the bake masters say natural linen is best for bread.
	Linen fibers wick moisture away from the dough surface to develop a skin on the underside which doesn't stick to the cloth. A little flouring is necessary too, though natural waxes in raw linen cloth make it fairly non-stick. From SFBI I bought some linen 18" wide (its smell makes me think of worn-in leather saddles and horses.. turns out that's just the way flax smells). It's greenish-brown and you can also get it from art stores (for painting, like canvas - not sure if it's treated with anything though even though they say "natural"). The cotton canvas worked ok too, before it got too oily from pie crusts.
	For best results, the bread must be cool in the warm steamy oven the instant the oven door is closed. This means the scoring has to be done outside the oven, and an oven peel must be used to deliver the bread to the oven without disturbing it. I made a 19" wide peel sized specifically for baking bread in my oven, using 3/32" thick birch plywood and a piece of oak for the handle. Works like a charm!
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