Breadmaking Notes

If you are not into breadmaking, this might be the blog entry for you to skip.  I won't be offended.  Heck, I'll never even know.

Ok, Dave, Dad, and probably Andrea N, now that it's just us, let's geek out on breadmaking.

A while back I tried making bread, and I'm talking about yeast breads.  I can already make a good loaf of banana bread, zucchini bread and other non-rising breads, but yeast breads are a lot harder for me.  A couple weeks ago I got back into it, and I've had some amazing success thanks to a few things I've learned.

1. The best yeast on the market comes from the bulk bin at WinCo.  Forget Red Star, skip the Fleischmann's -- you need bulk-bin WinCo yeast.  Great news: It's dirt cheap.  This is the only yeast I've ever gotten anything to rise with, including the fancy wet yeast I was given at the bakery at our grocery store, New Seasons. (But thanks, New Seasons, for always being willing to give me something to try for free.  I've enjoyed the chia seeds.)

2. Skip the bread pans and make boule.  This is a new discovery for me, as I'd always made a loaf bread from this recipe for Fabulous Homemade Bread.  That was my go-to bread before, and it always turns out, but now I'm onto this recipe for boule.  I love the little round loaves, and they're awesome for toast, sandwiches, whatever.

3. Credit for my greatest loaf goes to this video.  It's a video for making sourdough, and I discovered it because I want to do sourdough next.  But I used some of this guy's technique to make this loaf of non-sourdough bread pictured in the foreground below.

Isn't that a gorgeous loaf a bread?!  I actually took it out of the oven too soon, so it could have been even better than this.  If you're at all into bread making, I highly suggest you invest the 11 minutes 10 seconds it takes to watch the whole video.  In case you're only moderately interested, here are the highlights.  At 2:45 he shows you a cool technique for 'kneading' the dough using a slap and fold method.  (I don't own any of his tools -- the scraper or proofing bowl -- so I improvised and mine turned out fine.)  But the real gem of this video is his technique for getting the perfect crust, starting about 9 minutes in.  He cooks it for the first 20 minutes in a cast iron dutch oven, which essentially steams the bread for the first part of the cooking, giving it a nice, glossy, hard and crackly crust.  Another tip I found online has you leave a broiling pan in the oven during preheating, and when you put in the bread, you add a couple cups of water to the broiling pan, which immediately bubbles and steams up your oven.  Shut the door quickly to hold all that good steam in there.  The two loaves above were cooked using the broiler pan steam method, but the one in the foreground spent the first 20 minutes in the dutch oven.

So next I'm onto sourdough, thanks again to the New Seasons bakery, which offered me some free sourdough starter.  If anyone out there has good recipes or tips on sourdough, I could use them.

By the way, this is last week's loaf.  You can see the improvement.