I love bread. I love eating it, smelling it, and I love baking it. The first bread I ever baked was cinnamon buns. My grandmother is a baker and I must have eaten a couple thousand of her famous (in my family) cinnamon buns by now. I got the recipe from her and happily set about my first attempt at baking. Everything went fairly smoothly. The mixing and the kneading. Even got the right ratio of cinnamon to sugar. When I pulled the buns out of the oven they seemed a little flat. Then when i went to bite into one I discovered that it’s hardness rivalled that of a hockey puck. A quick look in the cupboard revealed that I had used icing sugar instead of flour!
So now you’re wondering what I’m doing writing an article about baking really good bread after such an auspicious initial attempt? Well, I went back the next day and tried the cinnamon buns again. That attempt was far more reminiscent of what my grandma pulls out of the oven and I was hooked.
So just what is really good bread? The variations of bread are staggering and I’m sure there are as many opinions about what constitutes good bread as there are members of Facebook. I have to admit that, while I enjoy soft, white bread straight from the oven, I have been bitten by the sourdough bug. I happen to think there is something amazing about starting with flour and water and growing a culture that lifts and adds flavor to the finished loaf.
Baking bread from scratch is a very satisfying experience for me. I enjoy the transformation of what is essentially an inedible foodstuff (flour) into a loaf of bread whose textures and flavors bear no resemblance to the basic ingredients. I love the feel of dough, and i think the smell of fresh bread is proof that God loves us.
So what do you need to bake the kind of bread I think is Really Good? Here’s a quick list..
- Big non-metal mixing bowl
- Mixing Spoon
- Kitchen Scale
- Cookie Sheet or Baking Sheet
- Plastic Wrap
- Serrated Knife
- Oven
That’s it. You do not need big fancy machines. Nothing with timers or crust darkness settings. If you’ve never tried it I would recommend making bread from scratch totally by hand. In this world of working on computers and business, it can be soothingly therapeutic to create something with your hands.
I won’t go into the specifics of getting a natural starter going but I have had a lot of success using the starter described in Baking Across America by Maggie Glezer. She uses a firm starter and that’s worked for me so that’s what I’ve stayed with.
Baking with a natural starter takes longer. Commercial yeast is much quicker at doing what it does. The good thing about the process taking longer with natural leavening is that it takes time for flavors to be drawn out of the grain. Of course you can make a loaf of bread in a couple of hours, but it will resemble a naturally leavened loaf, which takes 18 hours from initial mixing to coming out of the oven, in the same way that a supermarket tomato compares to an heirloom tomato. It doesn’t. Every part of the loaf will be different. The crust, the crumb, everything really. Really good bread has a crisp crust which comes from it baking on stone with steam added at the start of it’s time in the oven. It is baked free form so must be shaped as opposed to being dumped in a pan. The bread rises significantly in the oven, so much so that it needs to be slashed before baking to prevent cracking.
There are plenty of good resources out there for learning how to bake this kind of bread. Look for books by Jeffrey Hamelman, Peter Reinhart, or Maggie Glezer.
It’s really not that hard. I’m not an accomplished bread baker by any stretch of the imagination and I still turn out loaves of bread better than I could find at 98% of the bakeries I’ve been to in my life, and I’ve been to Paris.
I really think that Wonder Bread is a symbol of everything that is wrong with our culture. Instant gratification, zero substance. Bread as a metaphor for life is an interesting idea which I won’t explore here but I think it speaks to the connection between bread and people throughout the last 8000 years of human history.
Go ahead. Live a little. Spend some time making some really good bread. Your taste buds and state of mind will thank you.
Perry Johnson is an avid baker and lover of good bread and food.
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