Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients (5 page)

Miscellaneous Ingredients

Beer:
The addition of beer to the dough adds yeasty flavors that we often don’t taste using our method until the dough has stored for at least twenty-four hours. By using a little beer you can achieve the complex flavors much faster. You can use any beer except strongly flavored stouts and porters in these recipes.

Wine:
Red wine might have some health benefits (see
sidebar
), so we tossed some into our
Red Wine and Cheese Bread
. Use any wine you’d enjoy drinking; it doesn’t have to be top-shelf.

We’ve learned a
thing or two since we wrote our first book and have discovered a few additional pieces of equipment that make bread baking even easier.

EQUIPMENT FOR BAKING WITH STEAM
(You Only Need One)

Broiler tray to hold boiling water for steam:
This is our first choice for creating the steam environment needed for breads to achieve a crispy crust. Highly enriched breads (eg., challah, brioche, etc.) don’t benefit from baking with steam, because fat in dough softens the crust anyway. Pour hot tap water (or drop a handful of ice cubes) into the preheated broiler tray just before closing the oven door.
Two important warnings about glass: 1. Do not use a glass pan to catch water for steam, or it will shatter! 2. Some of our readers have reported cracked oven window glass after spilling water on its hot surface. If you want extra assurance that this won’t happen to you, cover the window with a towel before throwing water into the pan; remove before closing the oven door.

Some oven doors (and most professional ones) don’t make a great seal for holding in steam.
If your oven allows steam to dissipate and you’re not getting a beautiful crust, try one of these three alternatives to the broiler tray method:

Food-grade water sprayer:
Mist the bread three times with water from the sprayer during the first two minutes of baking.

Metal bowl or aluminum-foil roasting pan for covering loaves in the oven:
By trapping steam next to a loaf as it bakes on the hot stone, you can create the humid environment that produces a crisp crust without using a broiler tray or a sprayer. The bowl or dish needs to be heat-tolerant and tall enough so that the rising loaf won’t touch it when it rises, but not so large that it hangs beyond the edge of the stone, or it won’t trap the steam. This is a great technique for outdoor grills, which don’t trap steam even when the lid is down.

Bake inside a
cloche
or a covered cast-iron pot:
The
cloche
is a time-honored way to bake—the covered unglazed clay baking vessel traps steam inside, so the crackling crust forms without the need for a broiler tray or sprayer. If you use a
cloche
, follow its directions carefully, as these can be finicky until they’re well seasoned. The Sassafras La Cloche product comes with directions that recommend against preheating before use, but we get better results with a preheated Cloche. We don’t soak clay pots in water before use as sometimes advocated. Covered cast-iron pots also work well for much the same reason and are a little less finicky to use, but like the Cloche, they should be preheated for 20 minutes before dropping in the rested dough. Handle hot baking implements carefully to avoid burning yourself. Most enameled cast-iron vessels won’t need to be greased, but experiment with yours and grease it lightly after preheating the first time you try it. Rest the loaf on a pizza peel prepared with either cornmeal or parchment paper. Slash the dough and carefully slide the loaf, parchment and all, if you’re using it, into the preheated pot.

To bake bread dough in either of these vessels, preheat the
cloche
or cast-iron pot 50°F hotter than the recipe calls for. After the 20-minute preheat, reduce the oven to the specified temperature and add the rested dough. Some cast-iron pots will need a heat-resistant replacement knob. Finish baking, uncovered, for the last third of the baking time.

OTHER EQUIPMENT

Oven thermometer:
This item isn’t optional; you need to know the actual oven temperature to get predictable bread-baking results. A hot oven drives excess water out of wet dough, but if it’s too high you’ll burn the crust before fully baking the crumb (the bread’s interior). Home ovens are often off by up to 75 degrees. With an inexpensive oven thermometer, you can be certain to get results as good as ours. Without the thermometer, your bread-baking experiments are going to require an annoying element of trial and error.

Baking stone:
For best results, you’ll want a high-quality, half-inch-thick baking stone (thinner ones are more likely to crack). Look for a large rectangular one, preferably with a lifetime replacement guarantee against cracking. Baking your loaves right on a stone helps create a thin, crisp crust by doing two things:

1.
The stone absorbs excess moisture from your wet dough, allowing the crust to become crisp.

2.
The weight and density of the stone makes for great heat retention, evenness of heating, and heat transfer to the loaves, even in ovens that deliver uneven heat. You can bake wet dough on a cookie sheet or other nonporous surface, but the crust won’t be as good.

A bucket, large plastic storage container, or a glass, stainless steel, or crockery container with a lid:
You can mix and store the dough in the same vessel—this will save you from washing one more item (it all figures into the five minutes a day). Look for a food-grade container that holds about five quarts, to allow for the initial rise. Round containers are a little easier to mix in than square ones, in which flour gets caught in the corners. Great options are available on our Web site, or from Tupperware, King Arthur Flour’s Web site, and kitchen supply specialty stores, as well as discount chains like Costco and Target. Some food storage buckets include a tiny vent for microwave steaming, which works nicely to let gases escape early in the fermentation process. Another vented option is a beer fermentation bucket, which is sold at beer-making (home-brew) stores. You can usually close the vent (or seal the lid) after the first two days because gas production has really slowed by then. Plastic buckets are generally not airtight even when fully closed, but be careful with glass or crockery containers—you don’t want a truly airtight screw-top to be completely sealed at any time in the batch’s life. They can shatter from gas pressure. If you don’t have a vented container, just leave the lid open a crack for the first few days of storage.

And of course, you can always use a mixing bowl covered with plastic wrap.

Pizza peel:
This is a flat board with a long handle used to slide bread or pizza onto a hot stone (in Britain, it’s known as a pizza paddle, pie paddle, or a pizza blade). You can’t use anything made of plastic to transfer bread into the oven—it would melt upon contact with the very hot baking stone. Cover the peel with cornmeal or parchment before putting wet dough loaves on it or they will stick to the peel and possibly to the stone. If you don’t have a pizza peel, a flat cookie sheet with no sides will do, but it will be more difficult to handle. Another alternative is a handled wood cutting board.

Cookie sheets and silicone mats:
You might opt to bake your first bread on a greased cookie sheet that you already own. Similar results are obtained with the new nonstick, flexible silicone baking mats, which don’t need to be greased and are used on top of a cookie sheet or dropped onto a hot stone (cleanup is a breeze). Be sure to get a silicone mat rated to at least 450°F (230°C), which is the baking temperature for most of our non-enriched doughs. The silicone mats are reusable thousands of times; or, you can line your cookie sheet with single-use parchment paper, which also provides a nice nonstick surface and easy cleanup (see below). All these nonporous options give respectable results, but don’t expect the crust to be quite as good as bread baked directly on the stone, because moisture can’t transfer away from the bottom crust. For improved results, remove the bread from the cookie sheet or silicone mat and bake directly on the oven rack for the last third of baking. One advantage of the silicone mat is that it eliminates the need to grease a cookie sheet.

Parchment paper:
Parchment paper is a great alternative to cornmeal for preventing loaves from sticking to the pizza peel as they’re slid into the oven. The paper goes with the loaf onto the preheated stone. Most kitchen parchment products have a silicone coating that blocks moisture transfer to the stone, so you should peel the paper off the loaf for the last third of baking. Otherwise you won’t get a crispy bottom crust. One other advantage of parchment, even for cookie-sheet bakers, is that it eliminates the need to grease the cookie sheet.

Baguette pan (metal or silicone):
Both the metal and the silicone perforated baguette pans work wonderfully—they allow moisture to vent through the bottom crust and can replace the baking stone. They are a great way to bake several beautifully shaped baguettes at once, without crowding. They also prevent sideways spreading, which sometimes gives baguettes an odd shape when using longer-aged or wetter dough.

Banneton/brotform
:
Wicker rising baskets (French =
banneton
, German =
brotform
) have long been favored by artisan bakers for the beautiful flour patterns they impart to the loaves, but we also found they are a great way to keep our very soft doughs from spreading sideways while the loaves are rising. Smaller ones are the easiest to work with, preferably designed for one or one and a half pounds of dough (see
Bavarian-Style Whole Grain Pumpernickel Bread
).

Loaf pans and mini loaf pans:
Like cookie sheets and silicone mats, loaf pans work well but don’t promote the development of a crisp and beautifully colored crust—wherever the pan touches the bread, it’s going to be pale compared to your free-form loaves. One word of caution about loaf pans: With our wet doughs, you must use a pan with a nonstick coating, and even then, we find that a light greasing is still needed. Traditional loaf pans will stick no matter how much you grease them. We prefer the smaller loaf pans, because it’s easier to get high-moisture dough to bake all the way through in these. Ideally, pans intended for one pound of dough are the best bet, though we specify more dough since we like them filled generously (we find that so-called “one-pound” loaf pans take more like two pounds when three-quarters full). Dimensions of 8½ by 4½ inches (length/width) work best, but those numbers are approximate.

For smaller sandwich breads, it’s fun to use the mini loaf pans. They’re sometimes labeled as “number-1” loaf pans, measure about 6 by 3 inches (length/width), and hold about three-quarters of a pound of dough. They bake faster than larger loaf pans, so check for doneness sooner than the recipe calls for when using them.

Brioche pans:
Traditionally, brioche is baked either in a fluted brioche mold or in a loaf pan. The fluted mold is easy to find either on line or in any baking supply store. They are available in several sizes, with or without a nonstick coating; flexible silicone brioche molds are also available.

Bread knife:
A serrated bread knife is very helpful, because it does a great job of cutting through fresh bread without tearing or compressing, and also because it’s the best implement we’ve found for slashing high-moisture loaves just before baking the bread. Razor blades and French
lames
, usually referenced in traditional artisan baking methods, catch and stick in very wet dough—not so for serrated bread knives.

Serrated steak knife:
This is Jeff’s tool of choice for cutting a portion of dough out of a bucket. The free ones from the gas station work beautifully.

Kitchen shears/scissors:
These are handy for cutting pita bread or even pizza. Zoë prefers them to a serrated knife for cutting dough out of the storage bucket. You want shears with long blades for best results cutting the
epí
.

Cooling rack:
These are fashioned of wire or other thin metal and are usually intended for cake. They are very helpful in preventing the soggy bottom crust that can result when you cool bread on a plate or other nonporous surface.