Eddie

Contrary to many people, I did not start making bread during the pandemic. I started about three months ago, not because of boredom, but because of dire need. As some of you might know, I am a proud frenchman, and bread is engrained in french culture; we buy and consume great bread daily. This is not an option in Canada for a couple of reasons. Car-centric city planning makes walking down to your local bakery impossible. If you're lucky enough to have a grocery store within walking distance, your only bread option is most likely the typical north-american bread; an ungodly abomination. This abomination will also run you 4$ with taxes and the local bakery's bread is even more expensive.

One day, I decided I had enough and it was time for me to suppress my needs no more; I was gonna make bread, and eat it too. I have limited experience baking bread, pastries and such, so I chose to make a simple french traditional baguette. It can only consist of flour, yeast, salt and water. This is when my first hurdle came; bread needs to be cooked at a certain temperature and with specific-ish moisture in the air to turn out decently. The first is not a problem for most ovens but the latter is, as most consumer ovens do not have moisture control. This can be circumvented by baking your loaf in a dutch oven, which I possess! But this also meant that I would be restricted shape-wise to only round or oval bread (obviously vastly inferior to the chad long stick shape). This was a compromise I was willing to make, but my troubles didn't end there, I still had to find good flour. A quick note on flours in France, we have many variations of buyable flours regrouped under the T-system. Flours are graded from T-45 to T-150. Lower T numbers have less “ash content” (what remains from the wheat after it has been heated up), and higher, well, have more. Great, we can just try to match the ash content of french flour to a canadian one and we should be good, is what I would say if I was naive about us french's deceiving ways. See, ash content/T-number only matters partially, there are other factors that play a role in the taste, stretch, and stickiness of the dough. It means that I don't need to find the one flour used to make baguettes, but I can grab something that roughly matches it. I settled on regular north-american all-purpose non-bleached flour, akin to a T-55/T-65. So, was I finally ready to bake? Well no, I had to grab a recipe somewhere, adapt it to my supplies and needs, and slowly perfect it. This is where I encountered more trouble; I made a loaf daily, but for that first week, they all failed to rise. I experimented with more moisture, less flour, more yeast, more rise time... to no avail, my dough remained flat. I first was defeated, but ultimately determined to succeed. I went back to the drawing board, testing all manners of things, isolating them one by one, which could have caused my demise. I discovered that my yeast was dead, which was not surprising as the expiration date was two years ago. Whoops. Getting some actual live yeast yielded much better results (shocking), and I continued making a loaf a day, each time tweaking my recipe. To this day, there is only one thing that I still have to perfect. The vertical shape of the resulting bread, most likely related to the folding of the dough. I have scaled down my production of bread to two-three times a week due to time constraints, as it takes me around 5h to make the bread, which is too much. I will consider in the future making a big batch of dough on the weekend, taking some of it out and baking it during the week. This should reduce my daily prep time to only 1-2h tops. I will probably have to do some research into how to preserve dough in the fridge without it becoming inert and probably also tweak my recipe, invest in more equipment...

In any case, you are probably not reading this to catch my thinking about breadmaking, but for the bread. So here is the recipe, with relevant photos sprinkled around. This recipe is for two/three people, and incorporates a leaven; a small bit of dough that we prepare in advance. I like to start mine around 12-18h before making the main dough, so it has time to ferment; greatly improving the flavor of the bread. For this leaven you will need: 100g of flour, ~1.5g of yeast, 100ml of cold water. For mine, I also add a pinch of sugar (no more than 0.5g), which aids fermentation. Toss them all in a bowl, and mix them together for a couple of minutes. Cover it with a damp cloth for the duration you want it to ferment, I would advise at least 10h. This is what you should get after this time:

Now, when the leaven is done fermenting, you can start making your main dough, which consists of: 245g of flour, 4g of yeast, 150ml of warm water and 5g of salt. Those are not set in stone; you can adjust them to your needs. I would advise increasing the flour amount if you find your dough a bit too runny, and salt if the bread is not salty enough. You can compensate the yeast amount with more/less rise time. Be careful with the flour amount; too much or too little and your dough will have trouble rising, with too much also producing a very dense bread. This is why my recipe is a bit lower in flour/water ratio, to get an airier inside. Enough chitter chatter, let's get to baking. To start, toss all the ingredients, including the leaven in a bowl and stir vigorously for at least 5min. I like to use a wooden spoon, and it's a real workout on the arms. When you're done stirring, put a damp cloth on the bowl and let it rest for 30-40min.

You are now ready to knead the dough, fun! There are different techniques for kneading, which you can research online. Mine is very simple. After dusting a bit of flour on a big wooden cutting board, wetting my fingers, I simply fold the dough on the board, then merge it back together with my palms and repeat. At this stage, I don't really stretch the dough too hard because it would make it stickier and hard to work with. Make sure not to add too much flour when you are kneading; the dough with be somewhat sticky and it's normal. It took me, a lot of tries to get comfortable kneading.

When it's done, I grab a bigger bowl, toss the dough in it and cover it back up with a damp cloth, for the bulk rising portion of the recipe, which will last a total of three hours. Halfway through, I like to check on my dough and start the folding process; while still in the bowl, stretch the dough out and fold it on itself a couple of times. After three hours, I will fold it more outside of the bowl and give it its final shape (which you will choose). On my part, I do a letter-ish fold, taking a third of the dough and folding it in the middle and doing the same on the other side. Then I take my thumb and fold/roll it on itself lengthwise a couple of times.

Once the bread is shaped, bathe it in flour, toss it in your dutch oven and without covering it wait for until it doubles in size (for me it takes about 40min). This is to have the dough rise and be nice and airy in the end, and have it develop a “skin”. Before the 40min (or whatever it takes for you) are up, preheat the oven to 215C (or 420F). Once it's grown a skin, take a razor blade and score it.

When the oven is ready, dutch oven in your oven with the lid on for ~20min. Then remove the lid and leave it in the oven until the crust is nice and dark golden. You are then ready to take it out of the oven, let it rest for 10-15min and enjoy.

Congratulations, you've made bread! Don't fret it if it's garbage, my first 5-7 attempts, even after fixing the yeast, were not that great. If it turns out bad, just go back to the drawing board.

Result from the recipe

And what's inside

Above is my best-looking bread to date

As I said previously, there is still a couple of stuff that I need to get right. The main one is doing bulk batches preparations, let's say twice a week and enjoy fresh bread all week long. The first experiment with preparing the dough in advance was a success. I only had to shape it again after the dough had gone back to room temperature. This whole process, from taking the dough out of the fridge, waiting until it warmer up, shaping, rising and baking... Only took 2h30min, most of the time being spent waiting, which is way better than 5h. My bread-making journey is only starting; first of all, it is fun so I want to keep doing it, but I also have a ton of stuff to experiment with: I wanna make some garlic bread, some olive focaccia, my fiancée wants me to do sourdough bread... So expect to hear more from me on bread-related matters. In the meantime:

Thank you for reading my logorrhea, Eddie