Air: Baking’s Key Variable – Biological Leaveners (part 2) – Yeast in breads

Check Your Yeast!

In baking, proofing can refer to a few different things:
checking that your yeast is alive, allowing the dough to rise, or allowing the shaped
loaf to rest and rise before baking.

Whatever you call it, you should make sure that your yeast is alive before
proceeding to work with it. Measure out 2 teaspoons (10g) of the yeast and 1 teaspoon
(5g) of sugar into a glass and add ½ cup (120g) of lukewarm water (105°F / 40°C). Stir
and let rest for two to three minutes.

You should see small bubbles forming on the surface. If you don’t, your yeast is
dead—time to head to the store.

You probably don’t need to check your yeast every time you use it, especially if
you’re using instant yeast and storing it in your fridge. If you notice that your
doughs aren’t rising as expected, though, give the yeast a quick check.

Proofed yeast will bubble up and foam (left); dead yeast will
separate out and not foam (right).

Bread—Traditional Method

If you’ve
never made bread before, a simple loaf is easy enough to make, and perfecting it
will keep you busy for many years. This is one of those recipes that’s worth making
several days in a row, making one change at a time to understand how your changes
impact the final loaf.

In a large bowl, whisk to thoroughly combine:

1 ½ cups (180g) bread flour

1 ½ cups (180g) whole wheat flour

3 tablespoons (30g) gluten flour
(optional)

1 ½ teaspoons salt (2 teaspoons if using kosher or
flake salt)

1 ½ teaspoons instant yeast
(not
active dry yeast)

Add:

1 cup (240g) water

1 teaspoon (7g) honey

Stir just to incorporate—maybe 10 strokes with a spoon—and allow to rest for 20 to
30 minutes, during which the flour will absorb the water (called
autolysing).

After the dough has undergone autolysis, knead it. You can do this against a
cutting board, pressing down on the dough with the palm of your hand, pushing it away
from yourself, and then folding it back up on top of itself, rotating the ball every
few times. I sometimes just hold the dough in my hands and work it, stretching it and
folding it, but this is probably unorthodox. Continue kneading the dough until it
passes the “stretch test”: tear off a small piece of the dough and stretch it. It
shouldn’t tear; if it does, continue kneading.

Form the dough into a ball and let it rest in the large bowl, covered with plastic
wrap (spray it with nonstick spray to avoid it sticking), until it doubles in size,
normally about 4 to 6 hours. Try to store the dough someplace where the temperature is
between 72°F / 22°C and 80°F / 26.5°C. If the dough is kept too warm—say, if you’re in
a hot climate, or it’s too close to a heating vent—it will double in size more
quickly, so keep an eye on it and use common sense. Warmer—and thus faster—isn’t
necessarily better, though: longer rest times will allow for better flavor
development.

After the dough has risen, give it a quick second kneading—more of a quick massage
to work out any large gas bubbles—and form it into a tight ball. Coat it with a light
dusting of flour, place it on a pizza peel (or piece of cardboard), cover it with
plastic wrap again, and allow it to rest for another hour or two.

Note:

Yeast produces both acetic and lactic acid at different rates depending upon
temperature. Ideal rising temperature is between 72°F / 22°C and 80°F /
26.5°C.

If kept too cold, dough will be tough and flat due to insufficient gas
production, and the final loaf will have uneven crumb, irregular holes, and a
too-dark, hard crust.

On the other hand, dough risen in an environment too warm will be dry, lack
elasticity, and break when stretched, and the final loaf will have sour-tasting
crumbs, large cells with thick walls, and a pale/whitish crust.

While waiting for the dough to proof, place either a pizza stone or a baking stone
in your oven and set it to 425°F / 220°C. (No pizza stone? Use a cast iron griddle or
cast iron pan, flipped upside down.) Make sure that the oven is fully heated before
baking—a full hour of preheating is not unreasonable.

Just before transferring the dough to the oven, pour a
cup or two of boiling water into a baking pan or cookie sheet and set it on a shelf
below the baking stone. (Use an old cookie sheet; the water may leave a hard-to-clean
residue on it.) Alternatively, you can use a spray bottle to squirt the inside of the
oven a dozen or so times to increase the humidity. (Be careful not to hit the light
bulb inside: it can shatter.) Upping the humidity will help impart heat into the bread
faster and will also prevent the outside of the loaf from setting prematurely, giving
the bread better oven spring—the rise that occurs as the loaf
heats up in the oven before the outside of the loaf sets and becomes, essentially, an
exoskeleton.

With a serrated knife, lightly slash the top of the loaf with an “X” and then
place it into the oven. Bake until the crust is golden brown and the loaf gives a
hollow sound when rapped on the bottom with your knuckles, about 30 minutes. You can
also check for doneness using an instant-read thermometer; the internal temperature
should be above 205°F / 96°C and ideally around 210°F / 98.5°C, which is the
temperature at which starches in flour break down.

Allow the bread to cool for at least 30 minutes or so before slicing; it needs to
cool sufficiently for the starches to gelatinize and set.

Notes

• If even at the ideal rising and baking temperatures your bread is
  still coming out too dense, try reducing the amount of whole wheat flour to 1
  cup (120g) and increasing the bread flour to 2 cups (240g).

• For a slightly more complicated method, try starting with a sponge:
  a prefermentation of flour, water, and yeast that allows for better flavor
  development. Instead of adding all the flour and water together at the
  beginning, mix half of the flour (180g) with 4/7 (140g) of the water (ideally,
  at 75°F / 24°C—if it’s any warmer, oxidation will impact the flavor) and all of
  the yeast (7g), and allow that to rise until bubbles start to form on the
  surface and the sponge starts to fall. Once this stage is reached, mix the
  sponge up with the rest of the water (100g), add the rest of the flour (180g)
  and salt (7g), and allow the mixture to rise per the earlier instructions. 

• While the exact science of what causes bread to go stale is still
  unknown, a couple of different mechanisms are reasonable suspects. One thought
  is that, upon baking, starches in flour convert to a form that can bind with
  water, but that they slowly recrystallize after baking and in doing so release
  the water, which then gets absorbed by the gluten, changing the texture of the
  crumb. Then there’s the crust, which draws away some moisture from the middle of
  the bread, causing the texture of the crust to change. Regardless of the exact
  mechanism, storing bread in the fridge speeds up these changes in texture while
  freezing does not, so keep your bread at room temperature or freeze it. (The
  only benefit to storing bread in the fridge is that it slows the growth of some
  types of mold.) Toasting the bread above the temperature at which starches
  gelatinize reverses some of these changes.

• Try adding rosemary, olives, or diced and sautéed onion during the
  second kneading. Or, use only bread flour and add some large chunks of
  bittersweet chocolate.