Pillow Road

Over past year or so, I’ve been baking bread in various ways. I’ve tried moving from making bread once in a while to making bread more regularly, which is to say, I’ve wanted to get in the habit of making bread so that it could become easier to do and the results more predictable. And I hoped to learn more about the whole process. While making any loaf of bread is really not that difficult, the more you do it and the more recipes you try (and some of the mistakes you make along the way), all are important to understanding what you’re doing and acquiring new techniques that yield subtle improvements. So I’ve had a number of bread baking sessions, particularly over the last couple months, gravitating around a series of three books.

The first book, “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day”, whose title is a bit misleading, has the great virtue of not requiring too much work to produce a loaf of bread. It eliminates kneading from recipes. More importantly, the book encourages you to make a batch of dough and then let it sit in the refrigerator until you are ready to bake it. This allows you to break up bread baking (say that three times) into two separate task: the preparation of the dough, which can be done ahead, and the shaping and baking of a loaf, which be done in an hour or so when you want to eat bread. I could prepare the dough on the weekend, and then let it sit in the refrigerator until a night when I wanted to bake bread for dinner. Otherwise, bread baking is an activity that requires you to be around all day.

This book has an appealingly “revolutionary” promise that it is changing the way you can bake bread. There is some sense that the authors have figured out which common practices are unnecessary such proofing yeast and kneading the dough. However, there’s still plenty of techniques to master and get good at. One challenge I had was, prior to baking, moving a loaf from a pizza peel to a hot baking stone in the oven. Corn meal is used on the pizza peel to make it easy to shake the loaf off on to the baking stone but I would nonetheless find that there was some sticky part of the loaf clinging to the peel. At this critical stage, you can disturb the shape of the loaf.

The “5 minutes a day” bread recipes were reliable and the loaves had good flavor. I did find the bread to be dense. Sometimes the loaves didn’t rise as much as I expected, resulting in a flattened, round loaf.

The second book I began using was “Essentials of Baking by Williams-Sonoma”. (The book just happened to be in our house, and had been mainly used for its cake recipes.) I got interested in the book’s sourdough recipe. I acquired a small batch of starter from a friend of a friend and started feeding it regularly. Then I was ready to try my first recipe, using the leaven instead of store-bought dry yeast.

The one technique I learned from this sourdough recipe was forming a loaf and letting it sit in a towel-lined basket for the final rise. This helps the loaf keeps its round shape. When the final rise was completed, I’d flip the loaf on to the pizza peel and then into the oven. I baked these loaves on a baking stone, as I did the previous loaves from the “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” book.

The issue with using starter is that the process takes longer than a day to make bread. First, I need to start the sponge, adding flour and water to a portion of the starter and letting it sit overnight. Then I start the dough, adding the bulk of the flour to the sponge and kneading it for 5 minutes. Then I let it sit overnight (6-8 hours) for the first rise. (I could do it all on a Sunday, after making the sponge the night before, but I had to get up early to make it all work.) Then I form the loaf, putting it in the basket and letting it rise 2-4 hours. (If I wanted to do it in a single day, I used the shorter time.)

Baking the bread in our oven, I found I had to decrease the heat from 450 to 425 and shorten the duration from 50 minutes to 40 minutes. I really liked the recipe and the bread was always delicious. As sourdough, the loaf has more flavor. Again, maybe a little dense but a good crust and crumb. I used this recipe to make bread for our Christmas dinner, pictured below.

At Christmas, I self-gifted a present of a new bread book, “Tartine Bread,” which is a beautifully designed book with lots of photos. I’ve spent the last month trying to learn its techniques for making a sourdough country loaf. While the basic Tartine recipe differs from the Williams-Sonoma loaf, doing the other recipe was good preparation for learning this recipe, which is more complex and much more hands-on. Time-wise, it’s about the same to make, but I’ve found it easier to do in one day, as long as I start the sponge the night before.

The Tartine bread process is centered on developing the starter, not allowing it to get too sour. I learned a lot about the starter culture from this book, and I can’t help but be amazed by how a tablespoon of starter activates the flour and water overnight.

“When making bread with nothing more than flour, water and salt, aspiring bakers should apply their attention to learning how to control the process of fermentation.”

Another advantage of the Tartine book was its reliance on adding ingredients by weight. Once you get used to it, weighing ingredients seems smart and you can compare recipes more easily. I have a book on bread ovens, The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott that introduced me to measurement by weight.

The dough produced by the Tartine bread recipe is wet, much wetter than the two other recipes. Wet means sticky. Sticky means it gets on your hands and doesn’t want to come off. However, I think I enjoyed making the Tartine bread because of the ways that you do use your hands to mix and work the dough, although the recipe is technically a no-knead method. The problem I faced with the first few loafs was shaping the dough into rounds. There are some techniques in doing it right and it’s a little hard to see it from the pictures. However, once the loaf comes together, with just enough flour to remove the tackiness, it’s a pretty sweet feeling all around — a light, puffy loaf that seems much different than the dough you’ve been working with.

In the Tartine recipe, the bread is baked in a dutch oven at 500 degrees (dropped down to 450). The main benefit is that the dutch oven holds moisture and steams the bread so that it rises nicely. After twenty minutes, the top of the dutch oven is removed and the bread bakes for another 25 minutes and develops its deeply colored crust.

In 2006, the NY Times published Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread recipe, which I read at the time and tried. I recalled using the dutch oven before, but until I started writing this post, I had forgotten about it. The Lahey recipe shares many aspects of the above recipes.

I’ve really enjoyed the bread I’ve made with the Tartine recipe, and it is a much different bread to eat in terms of its texture and crust. I thought it took following the recipe about five times before I felt pretty comfortable with each of the steps. The photographs in the book are great but even they don’t provide all the information you need. I’ve served the bread at several meals and everyone is pretty surprised that it’s homemade.

One final reason to like the “Tartine Bread” book is that it conveys a love of bread baking and goes into a lot more detail explaining how and why its basic recipe work. You aren’t just following the directions; you are exploring and learning and maybe getting in over your head. Yes, it does take a full day to make this bread but the warm loaf at the end is the reward.

I’ve created a slideshow of the steps I followed, after having already made and added the starter: