by J. Michael Wheeler
Flour, Water, Yeast
Bread: “…the culinary domestication of…hard, bland seeds.” Harold McGee.
There’re a lot of different kinds of bread. There are ashcakes, baguettes, biscuits, bloomers, Boston brown breads, ciabattas, cobs, cottage loaves, crispbreads, granary loaves, harvest loaves, milk breads, potato breads, Vienna bread, white, marble rye, and whole-wheat breads.
There are breads made with wheat, rye, corn, barley, chocolate, fruits and veggies. There are flatbreads, braided breads, round loaves, square loaves, and sticks. There are even breads made just to hold a hot dog. Walk into a boulangerie in France and witness an entire world of breads.
That Staff of Life
But what really is bread? It’s just flour
(usually wheat), water, and yeast. You mix, you knead, you let it rise.
Shape it. Bake it. You got bread. Simple.
What’s Inside
You really need only three ingredients to make a loaf of bread.
1. Flour Grind up an edible grain fine enough, and you’ve got flour. While bread can be made from many types of flours, the main cereal grain used for bread is wheat because of its high protein (gluten) content.
For a grain to be made into bread, it must be milled (ground) into a flour fine enough to mix into a dough. The most primitive means of milling grain is the mortar and pestle, but the grind is too course for bread and is more suited to porridges and gruels.
2. Leavening You could mix flour and water together, shape it into a thin disk, and bake it; you’ll end up with a flatbread. To make a risen loaf, the “loaf of bread” loaf, you’ll need to add a rising agent such as yeast.
Yeasts are almost magical little single-celled plants. They’re a tiny, little fungus. In fact, one teaspoon contains hundreds of millions of yeast cells. The magic is that they make breads rise, grape juice turn to wine, and grains and water turn to beer.
And here’s the magic that’s important in bread making: yeast breathes air and exhales carbon dioxide, just like we do. Given a lot of air and some food (like flour), yeast grows fast and produces a lot of carbon dioxide. And it’s this gas that makes bread rise.
3. Water And water.
The Process
Mix, knead, rise, knock back, shape, bake. Eat.
1. Mix The three ingredients are mixed together to form a dough.
2. Knead The dough is then kneaded by pressing, folding, and turning. Bread flours contain a protein called gluten. Kneading stretches and expands the gluten allowing the dough to hold the gas bubbles created by the yeast.
3. Rise Then the dough is left to rise. This is where the yeast does its stuff, munching on the starches in the flours, breathing in air and exhaling carbon dioxide. Since the CO2 is trapped in the dough, it doubles in size like a bread-balloon.
4. Knock Back Then the dough is knocked back (also called punched down) to its original size. This evens out the distribution of yeast and gas bubbles.
5. Shape The dough is now shaped into loaves and allowed to rise again.
6. Bake After this second rise, we heat the loaves, usually in an oven. (If you wanted to, you could bake bread on a flat stone placed directly on a fire.)
And that’s it: we got bread!
Oh yeah, last step: Eat.
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