Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients (7 page)

Having said that, sometimes we just can’t resist, especially with rolls or very small loaves where gumminess is less likely to be a problem.

The top crust won’t crisp and brown nicely:

• Be sure you’re using a baking stone where called for, and preheat it for at least 30 minutes, in an oven whose temperature has been checked with a thermometer.
  
• Bake with steam when called for
  . Use one of the methods described.
  
• Try the shelf switcheroo: If you’re a crisp crust fanatic, we’ll give you one ultimate approach to baking the perfect crust, but it takes a little extra work (remember, this does not apply to egg-enriched breads). First off, place the stone on the bottom shelf, not on a middle shelf as specified in the recipes, and start the loaf there. Two-thirds of the way through baking, transfer the loaf from the stone directly to a rack on the top shelf of the oven (leave the stone where it is). Top crusts brown best near the top of the oven, and bottom crusts brown best near the bottom. This approach works beautifully with free-form loaves, but also helps crisp the crust of hard-crusted loaf-pan breads, where popping the bread out of the pan and transferring shelves makes a big difference. With this approach, you can permanently park your baking stone on the very lowest rack, where it will help even out the heat for everything you bake, not just bread. Then there’ll be no need to shift around the stone or racks just because you’re baking bread.
  

Overbaking Problems, Dryness

The crust is great, but the crumb (interior) is dry:

• The bread may be overbaked. Again, make sure your oven is calibrated properly using an oven thermometer.
  
• Another possibility is that the dough was dry to begin with. In traditional recipes, there’s usually an instruction that reads something like “knead thoroughly, until mass of dough is smooth, elastic, and less sticky, adding flour as needed.” This often means too much flour gets added. Be careful not to work in much additional flour when shaping.
  

Flour blobs in the middle of the bread:
Be sure to completely mix the initial batch. Using wet hands to incorporate the last bits of flour will often take care of this. This can also be caused when shaping the loaves, with extra flour that gets tucked up under the loaf.

Varying the Grain That Covers the Pizza Peel

Most of our breads are baked right on a hot baking stone, after having been rested and slid off a pizza peel. Cornmeal was the usual “lubricant” in our first book. It prevents the loaf from sticking to either the pizza peel or the hot stone. But cornmeal is only one of many options. We tend to use cornmeal for the more rustic, full-flavored loaves, and whole wheat flour for the more delicate breads, like the French baguette. Even white flour works for the purpose (as in pita and pizza). But coarser grains like cornmeal are the most slippery, and fine-ground wheat flours may require a heavier coating to prevent sticking (sometimes you’ll have to nudge the loaves off with a dough scraper (see
Equipment
), especially for pita bread). Mostly, though, the choice of grain on the pizza peel is a matter of taste. We’ve used Malt-O-Meal cereal or oatmeal in a pinch, and Zoë’s mom once used grits! Rice flour, commonly used in gluten-free baking, is particularly slippery and makes a great choice. And you can substitute parchment paper for any of these grains, provided that you peel it off for the last third of the baking time.

Problems and Frequently Asked Questions from Readers

“MY LOAVES AREN’T RISING MUCH ON THE COUNTER AFTER SHAPING.”

After being shaped, our breads don’t rise as much on the counter as loaves made from traditional (nonstored) dough. The success of our approach depends on keeping the dough wet (so it doesn’t resist bubble expansion as much), and handling the dough as little as possible to preserve the bubbles created in the initial rise in the bucket at room temperature. Our loaves get proportionally more rise from “oven spring” than from “proofing” (proofing is the rise you see while the formed loaves are resting/rising at room temperature). Oven spring is the sudden expansion of gas bubbles in the dough during the first minutes in the oven. You can almost see the loaf popping up if you have a glass window in your oven. So, if you’re disappointed in how much (or how little) rise you get on the counter from formed loaves, don’t despair! Oven spring will make up for the difference. If you aren’t getting good oven spring, check your
dough consistency
and
rise time
.

“MY LOAVES STUCK TO THE PIZZA PEEL WHEN I TRIED TO SLIDE THEM OFF.”

Sometimes a loaf, pizza, or flatbread will stick to the peel, especially if it has rested too long (pizzas in particular should not sit for long before sliding into the oven). There’s a simple solution. Before attempting a slide, we always shake the peel a bit to be sure that nothing is stuck. If it moves well, you’ll be fine when you slide it into the oven. If it’s not moving well, sprinkle flour or cornmeal around the edge of the loaf and use a dough scraper to nudge some of it under the loaf, unsticking the stuck area. Now you should be able to slide the loaf easily into the oven. To prevent this, increase the amount of cornmeal or flour you’re using under your loaves, or switch to parchment paper, which is easier on cleanup. This will also help if you’re having trouble with smoking cornmeal on the stone or at the bottom of the oven. The paper slides into the oven with the bread and is peeled off two-thirds of the way through baking for best bottom crust results. We peel the paper off because most parchment products have a silicone coating that partially prevents the escape of moisture from the bottom crust into the stone, and that moisture can prevent crisping.

“MY LOAVES ARE ODDLY SHAPED.”

The loaf flattens and spreads sideways while resting on the pizza peel:
Sometimes loaves expand well while resting, but too much of the expansion is sideways rather than up. If every loaf is ending up as flatbread, there are several possible explanations.

• The dough is
  too
  wet: Make sure you’re using the right amounts of liquid and dry ingredients.
  
• Not enough flour was dusted onto the dough while shaping the loaf: The flour helps effective shaping.
  
• You’re using flour with a low-protein content: Be sure to use
  unbleached
  all-purpose flour; bleaching removes some of the protein from flour. Protein in wheat flour is mostly gluten, which is essential for providing good structure to the loaf. If the gluten content is too low, you’ll have trouble getting high, domed loaves. If you want to use bleached or other low-protein flour, you need to increase vital wheat gluten in the recipes.
  
• The dough is a little too old: When the dough becomes “weepy,” with liquid separating out from the dough, it’s probably lost too much rising power to produce beautiful domed loaves. It still tastes great, but it may be best used as flatbread, or baked in a loaf pan. You can also work in a little more flour and allow it to sit for at
  least 2 hours
  .
  

Odd-shaped loaves:
If you haven’t used enough cornmeal or flour on the pizza peel, a spot of dough may stick to it. As the loaf slides off the peel, the spot pulls, causing an odd-shaped loaf. Solution: Use more cornmeal or flour on the pizza peel, or switch to parchment paper, especially if the dough is particularly sticky. You can also add flour to the dough during the stretching and shaping step, which will require your loaf to rest longer before baking.

Another cause of odd-shaped loaves is ineffective slashing—slash at least a quarter-inch deep and keep the blade perpendicular to the crust. If you don’t cut deeply enough, the bread will burst open oddly.

“I LIVE 4,000 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL AND MY BREAD IS COMING OUT FLAT!”

There can be a big difference in how yeast behaves if you live above 4,000 feet. With less air pressure constraining the rising dough, it rises too quickly, and then collapses abruptly, giving you a dense result. The following changes can help you avoid that:

• Decrease the yeast to 2 teaspoons.
  
• Increase the vital wheat gluten in the recipes. You may need a little more water to keep the dough at its usual consistency.
  
• Use more salt, up to an extra half tablespoon if you like the flavor and aren’t on a low-salt diet. This slows the effect of the yeast.
  
• Do the initial rise overnight in the refrigerator (see
  the refrigerator-rise trick
  ), and consider mixing the dough with cold liquids.
  

Each of these techniques allows the dough to rise more slowly, giving it more time to achieve full height.

“THE CRUMB OF MY BREAD IS DENSE WITH SMALL HOLES, HOW DO I FIX IT?”

The following tips can help you to achieve a crumb with a nice open hole structure.

1. Make sure that your dough is not too wet or too dry
, as both extremes will result in a dense crumb. Double-check the recipe to see if you are using the right amount of water for the type of flour you use. The most common problem we hear about is too-dry dough made with higher protein flours such as King Arthur All-Purpose or any bread flour. These are fine, but they absorb more liquid than typical all-purpose flours. To account for the difference, you will need to increase the water by up to ¼ cup.

2. Handle your dough very gently.
We find that people often want to knead the dough at least a little, especially if they are experienced bread bakers. This knocks gas out of the dough and can give you a dense crumb. When shaping the dough, be very careful with it in order to leave as many of the air bubbles intact as possible. These bubbles create the holes in the bread. Shape the dough for only 20 to 40 seconds.

3. Kitchen temperature, loaf size, and rest time:
If your kitchen is much cooler than 68 degrees, or your loaf is larger than 1 pound, you may need to let the dough rest for more time than specified in the recipe.

4. Batch age:
If you are using dough that is close to two weeks old, you may want to stick to pizza, pita, or another flatbread. The yeast will not have its full power, and if baked as a high loaf it may come out denser than you want. Another option is to use overstored dough to start a new batch, using the “old-dough” method (see
Lazy Sourdough Shortcut
). This will really jump-start the complex flavors of your next batch.

5. The refrigerator-rise trick:
Shape your dough into a loaf, free-form or loaf-pan, cover loosely with plastic, and let the pre-shaped loaf rise in the refrigerator for 8 to 14 hours. Allow it to rest at room temperature during the short oven preheat, and then it is ready to bake. Here’s one way to do it that allows you to have the dough risen and ready for the oven pretty much as soon as you walk through the door after work.

• The first thing in the morning, cut off a piece of dough and shape it as you normally would. Place the dough on a sheet of parchment paper, cover it loosely with plastic wrap, and put it back in the refrigerator, where it will sit for at least 8 hours and up to 14 hours. The dough will spread slightly, and may not seem to have risen at all. Don’t panic, it will still have lovely oven spring. Because you don’t handle the dough at all after the refrigerator rise, the bubbles in the dough will remain intact.
  
• Right before dinner
  , uncover your dough and allow it to rest at room temperature while your oven preheats to the recommended temperature with a stone set on the middle rack. When the oven is hot, slash the loaf as you normally would, and bake as directed in the recipe.
  

“MY BREAD IS EITHER TOO SALTY OR NOT SALTY ENOUGH! HOW DO I ADJUST THE RECIPES?”

The recipes in the book were tested with Morton brand kosher salt (for adjustments if you use other kinds of salt; it’s the coarseness that varies). Readers of our first book will notice that the recipes are a little less salty than they were in
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.
The amounts we settled on were pleasing to us and to our testers, with a fairly typical salt level compared to most of the recipes used by home bakers. But you can adjust the salt to suit your own taste. If you find our recipes too salty, decrease the salt by 25 to 50 percent and see what you think. Below that threshold most but not all people will find the bread flat-tasting (the texture will be different as well). People accustomed to a low-salt diet can decrease the salt all the way to zero (or use potassium-based salt substitutes—).

If you find our recipes too bland, you can adjust the salt upward, by 25 to 50 percent. Beyond that the salt will begin to inhibit the action of the yeast and your breads won’t rise well.

“CAN I DECREASE THE YEAST IN THE RECIPES?”

Some readers asked us whether our technique works with less yeast. Why? Experienced sourdough bakers sometimes prefer the more delicate flavor of a dough risen with less packaged yeast. Some traditionalists believe that rising the dough very slowly, with very little packaged yeast, builds better flavor.

We weren’t convinced of this when we wrote
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
—many of our busy readers value the quicker rise that you get when you use the 1½ tablespoons of yeast called for in our recipes. And we think that our flavor is pretty darn good, especially when the dough ages a day or two.

But if you have more time, our recipes work beautifully with less yeast. We tested two ways, first halving the yeast (about ¾ tablespoon), and then dropping it way down to ½ teaspoon for a whole batch. Both work, but they work slowly. For the ½ teaspoon version, you need to give the dough 6 to 12 hours for its initial rise in the bucket (4 to 5 hours for the ¾ tablespoon version). But the dough will not need additional time after shaping; the 90-minute rest worked just as well for low-yeast dough as for high-yeast dough.
Active
time is still 5 minutes a loaf—it’s just the passive resting and rising times that escalate when you switch to the low-yeast version. See what you think and have fun by experimenting.