[Mike Nolan]

As someone wrote a while back, keep practicing your breads, eventually you'll eat well, in the mean time the ducks will eat well. 🙂

Seriously, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Eventually you'll learn to recognize problems before they get serious and you'll know what to do to fix them.

That's what professional bakers do every day, because conditions are not the same all the time and mistakes do happen, so you need to be prepared to deal with problems.

I've had a few total disasters, one was probably due to putting in 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, as the recipe specified, and then putting in ANOTHER 1 1/2 TABLESPOONS of salt instead of sugar! It was a brick and even the birds wouldn't touch it!

The suggestion to use an instant read thermometer is another good one, knowing when the desired internal temperature has been reached is one way to improve your success rate. Eventually you'll recognize by sight, smell or touch (thumping) when your bread is ready.

[Mike Nolan]

That is an interesting braid, and the pictures are pretty clear.

I've been practicing a six strand rectangular loaf braid using macrame yarn, but I'm not quite ready to do one in dough.

[Mike Nolan]

That wasn't in the whole grains book.

[Mike Nolan]

There's a step that some authors recommend called autolyse. This is is a rest during the mixing stage, usually before adding the yeast, that allows the flour to be fully hydrated, ie, absorb all the liquid.

Autolysis was encouraged by Prof. Raymond Calvel, a French baking researcher/instructor who was instrumental in re-energizing the French baking industry after World War II. His book "The Taste of Bread" is an interesting read, but it really isn't a cookbook, there are very few complete recipes in it. He spends several pages just on salt and the role it plays in bread!

The book was written in French ("Le Goût du Pain") but later translated into English. It is fairly expensive, especially in the original French edition.

The variance in steps between recipes and authors is interesting, some of them are probably more a matter of tradition or preference than science. There are baking sites on the Internet that tend to be rather fussy about them, insisting that there is only one RIGHT way to do things. We aren't like that, we don't all follow the same steps, even when making the same recipe. We're happy to share what works for us, and encourage experimentation to find what works best for you.

[Mike Nolan]

As BakerAunt says, a little sugar in the proofing water is fine, many recipes even recommend it, as it gives the yeast some sugar to feed on to help it grow. It's only when you have a dough that is very sweet (6% or more sugar relative to the flour weight) that you can start to see sugar inhibiting the yeast growth by depriving it of the water it needs. My mother-in-law always used to put a pinch of flour in the water, that accomplishes pretty much the same thing, though the starch in flour needs to be broken down before the yeast can access the sugar it needs to grow. There are enzymes in yeast that will break the starch down.

An old baker's trick is to add a little vinegar to a recipe, it helps it rise. The acid in the vinegar has the same effect as the enzymes of breaking down the starch into sugar, but is a bit faster.

Here are the steps that Jeffrey Hamelman gives in his book. (Each step is explained in great detail in the book.)

1. Scaling of ingredients
2. Mixing/Kneading
3. Primary (Bulk) Fermentation
4. Folding
5. Dividing
6. Pre-shaping
7. Bench Rest
8. Shaping
9. Final Fermentation
10. Scoring
11. Baking
12. Cooling

Several of these steps can be broken down into multiple stages. For example, it is not unusual to see a recipe that divides the primary bulk rise up into several stages, punching down or folding the dough between each bulk rise period. As I recall, Julia Child's French Baguette recipe has a rise, a punch down, a second rise, a second punch down, and then a third rise.

Different recipes (or different authors) will vary these steps quite a bit. There are some authors/recipes that recommend you fully deflate the dough before dividing it and pre-shaping it, and others that recommend you treat the dough very gently to avoid deflating it.

So, bench rest is the step that comes after you divide the dough up into individual loaves or rolls and pre-shape them and when you do the final shaping. This rest gives the dough time to relax, which helps the final shaping.

[Mike Nolan]

I was looking at the Popovers recipe in the KAF Baker's Companion, and the sodium level it reports for the recipe has to be way off. It says 11 milligrams per popover, but it uses 1/2 teaspoon of salt and that's about 1100 milligrams of sodium, and that doesn't count the sodium in the flour, eggs and milk. My Fitness Pal says it is about 145 milligrams of sodium per popover (12 per batch).

I think KAF has an errata page, but I don't recall the link. If you find out, I'll check to see if the sodium level for that recipe has been corrected.

I suspect I can cut the salt at least in half and it won't affect the recipe much. (I once tried Alton Brown's popover recipe, it uses a lot more salt and we thought they were inedible because of the salt level.)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

These days I always weigh ingredients that are more than an ounce or so using my digital scale. When making some recipes, like the SFBI pie dough, I even weight the salt using a micro scale that weighs in tenth of a gram increments. I also have a third digital scale that weighs in milligrams.

[Mike Nolan]

Dinner here was a NY strip steak, with sauteed mushrooms and baked potato, with blackberries for dessert. The margarine and sour cream on the potato were the majority of the sodium in the meal, but it was still fairly low sodium.

[Mike Nolan]

The debate over active dry yeast (ADY) vs instant yeast (IDY) is interesting. Here's some history on commercial yeast.

Compressed yeast cakes were developed in the 1800's by the Fleischmann brothers. Before that, bakers generally used sourdough or 'old dough' to seed their dough with yeast, or got liquid yeast from beer brewers.

When it was first introduced during WW II, active dry yeast always needed to be proofed in warm water, but ADY has improved over the years. Many bakers now state that they don't bother to proof their ADY, but the yeast manufacturers still recommend it.

Instant dry yeast was developed in the 1990's and does not need to be proofed, it can just be mixed in with the flour.

These days cake yeast is hard to find, I've seen it in the freezer section at the grocery store but I've also been told that freezing yeast cakes kills off a lot of the yeast. ADY and IDY can both be frozen, I've know of bakers who had IDY that had been in the freezer for five or more years and still worked fine. Large commercial bakers buy liquid yeast in 1 gallon containers, but it has a very short shelf life and isn't available to home bakers.

I generally use Fleischmann's IDY which I buy in 1 pound packages at Sams Club. In all the baking I've done, the only recipe that didn't work well with IDY was James Beard's Monkey Bread recipe, from "Beard on Bread", a classic book on bread baking and one that has been ranked as the favorite book on bread by several generations of bakers. It worked much better with ADY.

Ive got some SAF Gold osmotolerant yeast, which is designed for sweet dough recipes, but I haven't tried making Monkey Bread with it yet. Sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it attracts water, so, like salt, it can inhibit yeast growth. Recipes that have more than 6% sugar by bakers weight (eg, compared to the flour weight) are ones that can see sugar inhibit yeast growth by depriving it of the water it needs to grow.

[Mike Nolan]

Commercial proof boxes are usually set somewhere between 80 and 90 degrees and at 80% humidity.

Studies have shown that yeast actually grows fastest at about 102 degrees and a humid environment also encourages yeast growth because yeast needs moisture to grow.

But speed isn't necessarily the primary goal when making bread; the faster your yeast grows, the less time there is for the enzymes in your dough to act upon it, enhancing flavor. So it always comes down to a trade off between time and flavor.

In a commercial bakery, time is money, and keeping to a predictable schedule is important, it's expensive to have bakers standing around waiting for their dough to rise. Temperature, humidity and barometric pressure change from day to day, proof boxes help keep things on schedule.

[Mike Nolan]

Yes, welcome back Mike.

[Mike Nolan]

I find one of the most important steps in making bread is the 5-15 minute bench rest between scaling/preshaping and final shaping. That makes final shaping easier and definitely makes for a higher final loaf.

Another good book is Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman. He's the lead baker at King Arthur Flour and the book is written on a level somewhere in between home baking and commercial baking, though the recipes are all sized for home baking. The chapter on the various steps to making bread is very well written.

[Mike Nolan]

I definitely approach cooking with an engineering perspective. I make notes on nearly every recipe I try, often writing right in the book! When I'm trying to design a new recipe, I take more extensive notes in a lab book. (You'll find I often recommend people make notes on their recipes noting what worked and what didn't.)

A number of years back my wife gave me a recipe her mother had written for honey wheat bread. I had to adapt it quite a bit (it called for lard, among other things), but for several years it was our daily bread, and I made it at least once a week. These days we don't eat as much bread as we used to, and our younger son has moved to California, but I still make it about once a month. You can find it here: Honey Wheat Bread

I also mill my own whole wheat flour using a Nutrimill impact mill my older son gave me for Christmas about 6 years ago.

If your mixer is that old, it might be from the days when Hobart owned Kitchaid. (Look on the band around the mixer and see if it says 'Hobart' on it.) Mine is the one we got as a wedding present in 1972 and it's still working great. If so, it's a real work horse of a machine, most people think the quality of KA mixers went down after the company was sold in the early 90's, though it appears to have gone back up in the last few years. If mine died, I'd be in a quandary, because I also have the pasta maker attachment. I'd probably buy the bottom-of-the line KA mixer for things like pasta and whipping egg whites but I'd look very hard into a something like an Ankarsrum or Bosch mixer for breadmaking, or maybe even a 12 quart table-top commercial mixer, though that'd be overkill.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

For lunch today I took some of the chicken noodle soup I made the other day and added some sauteed mushrooms. Definitely perked it up a bit, and I made a note to add mushrooms to the 3 quarts of it that I froze.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I know from experience that you can cut salt down to about 1% by baker's weight (eg, relative to the weight of the flour) before you start to notice any significant effects or difference in taste.

I've made Tuscan bread a few times, it is salt free. It's pretty bland and tends to be very airy, because there's no salt to inhibit the yeast. I've eaten in a Tuscan restaurant, the bread is meant to be dipped in spicy sauces.

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