Corduroy Orange

Walking the Walk

I have not had store-bought bread for almost two weeks now: I’m following my own advice and baking my own. It’s turned out to be a fairly easy process; I’ve baked two batches at home (though I have been making bread at work some lately–experience which has helped my learning curve quite a bit), and each has lasted for about a week. The improvement from my first batch to my second was quite noticeable—it went from being not bad to being pretty darn good. I’ve got a couple of tips that might help you kick the store-bought habit, too.

1) Everybody says that baking is an exact science. They’re right to some extent: if you know exactly what you want and you want the same thing every time, you need to follow the same steps with the same quantities, etc. Thus, I don’t mess around with the amount of flour, water, yeast, or salt in the recipe I work from. On the other hand, I’m open to a result that may not be exactly the same each time, so I feel free to cook like a jazz musician. I add some olive oil in with the flour, salt, and yeast before I add the water; I also put in some pepper and some paprika and I’ll probably play around with some different spices in the future. It makes baking fun, and because I’m not adjusting any of the core ingredients, I can be fairly confident of the quality of the results.

2) If you’re in a hurry for the bread to rise, turn your oven on to about 200 F, let it come to temperature, then turn it off. Put the bread in there and it’ll rise in about half an hour. Take it out, punch it down, turn your oven to 400 F to preheat, and set the dough on top of the oven for its second rise; it’ll be ready for you to shape and bake in about another half an hour.

3) Remember, you don’t need to hover over the dough while it’s rising. Let it be; go take care of your other chores, or watch the “Stiller” game or something. Let the yeast do its thing for a while, then come back to it and it’ll be ready for the next step.

4) For a tasty crust, rub the dough with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt, pepper, and dried oregano or rosemary.

5) If you happen to have a Silpat or other silicone, non-stick, reuseable pan liner, it is a great way to keep an artisan loaf from sticking to the cookie sheet without using grease (I try to avoid Crisco whenever possible) or corn meal (which, in my oven, burnt on the bottom of the pan and resulted in a charred bottom crust).

6) Remember—even if your first couple attempts at baking bread aren’t quite as good as you’d prefer, you still wind up with homemade bread in the end; and if you keep at it, you’re bound to get the hang of it before too long.

Happy baking!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Cooking Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.