Bread
Center to the types of items I think I want to point out here is Bread. Nothing I’ve come across is both so simplistic and complicated at the same time. Four key ingredients and a lifetime of struggle in the same small package. Not actually being a huge fan of bread, I make and eat a lot of it. To me, it’s like something I yearn to perfect yet will not ever. I’d like to make my first bread post of what I can only assume will be many to be generic and personal.
I like making dough. I’m not one of those people who like the feel of it nor the outcome. I like the science of it all and the difficulty. What is the humidity in my kitchen today and how does the recent and current humidity impact my flour’s basis of hydration? OK, now I need a humidity-controlled proofer. What do you mean there aren’t any of those on the market for home cooks that have any level of accuracy? Well shit. Be it proofers, ovens, or even consistent quality of flours with specified protein or ash content, the odds are stacked against us compared to professional bakers. Hell, we don’t even use the same type of yeast and are often stuck in the mindset of volumetric measurement as our base for communicating recipies. It’s not easy trying to perfect a loaf or a pie without some help and I’m trying to fix that.
I purchased a proofing cabinet that allows for induction based heating to hold the cabinet at a specified temp but it’s not terribly accurate and the method of ‘adding humidity’ to the cabinet is a joke – a small tray over the heating source. It is much better than a ‘warm place in your kitchen’ that many recipes indicate but by no means comes close to the bulk ferment rooms that are well controlled in the commercial world. However, I’ve watched commercial baking process go awry as well. Seeing truckloads of bread getting thrown away just because they were a shade too dark was my first major awe moment in baking. It looked perfect to me and was completely edible. However, the longevity of that bread wasn’t capable of making it to the market simply due to the lost hydration – the crumb would be way too brittle. That, along with the intoxicating smell, is probably what got me started on my journey.
The next step of my journey was to steal my parent’s bread machine that was collecting dust and try to see how it performed. Let’s just say instead of giving it to someone else, I ensured it died a horrible and well-deserved death. Then I went and bought 50 lbs of flour and every day I tried a single recipe of ‘sandwich bread’ from The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Most of the time it came out horribly. One day, it didn’t and it was the best home replication of commercial sandwich bread I could imagine. My problem is, as someone who is trying to control and notice as many impacting variables as possible, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to replicate it reliably. It was the softest bread I’ve had ever that didn’t include chemical extenders or commercial modifiers. I started trying to replicate it, and that became my journey to master bread. More to come, but sadly much more yet to learn.