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Nature's Nutrition |
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Whole Grain |
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Yeast Bread Hints |
WHITE WHOLE WHEAT |
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Nature's Nutrition |
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Whole Grain |
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Yeast Bread Hints |
WHITE WHOLE WHEAT |
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Making Yeast Bread by Hand 1. To dissolve active dry yeast, sprinkle it over your liquid--usually lukewarm water--and stir with a fork. The liquid should be no hotter than 115°; it should feel warm, but not uncomfortably so, to the touch. 2. Speaking of warmth, make sure none of your ingredients--eggs, milk, flour, etc.--are cold. Cold will inhibit the action of the yeast, and your dough won't rise. 3. A sponge is a mixture of liquid, yeast, and enough flour to make a sort of thick batter. A sponge softens coarse particles of grain, so that you get a better rise, because the grain is less likely to cut into the gluten, the elastic frame-work of the bread. 4. Always add flour gradually to the sponge. Once your sponge has rested, and you start adding the remainder of the flour, add it no more than a cup at a time. When the dough starts to firm up and becomes hard to stir, shake the flour on by the handful as you need it. 5. When the dough loses most of its tackiness in the blow, turn it our onto a floured surface. Flour your hands and start to knead. Kneading is easier to do than to describe. Basically the idea is to push, fold, turn, push, fold, turn, until the dough forms an elastic, cohesive mass. Kneading develops gluten, which in turn allows your dough to stretch. Average kneading time for dough is 10 minutes. 6. Putting your dough in an oiled or buttered bowl and covering it with plastic wrap prevents a skin from forming on the dough. The plastic wrap also traps heat and moisture, both of which are conducive to a good rise. 7. Once in the bowl, the dough will generally take from 1 to 2 hours to double in bulk. The key factors are temperature and the relative richness of the dough. The more butter and eggs a dough contains, the longer it takes to rise. The standard test for checking a dough to determine whether it is sufficiently doubled is to poke it with a finger; if the impression remains, stead of slowly filling back in, it is supposed to be ready. 8. To punch the dough down, do just that, with your fist and with authority, but not so hard that you tear the gluten. Punching down is almost always followed by a brief kneading to reinvigorate the gluten--which at this point is like a relaxed muscle--after its stretch in the bowl. 9. Shaping comes next. Don't be afraid to try shaping free-form loaves. 10. Cover the shaped dough loosely with plastic wrap and set it aside until doubled. The second rising always takes less time than the first, about two-thirds of the time. Always try too picture whether the volume, rather than the height, has doubled. 11. Anticipate the point at which your dough will be ready to bake--it will look quite swollen, nearly doubled, and have a spongy feel and preheat the oven 15 minutes ahead. 12. Bake the loaves with the rack set low enough so the tops don't scorch. 13. To see if a yeast bread is done, tap the bottom (turn it out of the pan if you've baked it in one) and listen for a hollow retort. If you don't hear one, put the loaf back in the oven; you needn't put it back in the pan at this point. If you're ever in doubt, better to bake your bread an extra 5 minutes or so than to find out is is undercooked. 14. Cool your loaves on a rack, out of the pans. Generally you shouldn't slice a loaf right away, because the structure is too fragile at this point to allow you do do a clean cutting job. Unless otherwise indicated, it's better to wait at least 30 minutes before cutting. Use only a sharp serrated knife to cut yeast bread. Nothing else will do. (These hints are taken from the book Country Baking by Ken Haedrich.) |
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Proverbs 11:26 |
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