Baking Tips

I am not a professional baker or even an obsessive baker. However, I have been baking for a long time (and baking bread for almost two years) and I have learned a lot from my experiences (and my mistakes). I thought I would share some general tips here to provide guidance to anyone who wanted to use my recipes.

About Bread:

• The Float Test: Put a spoonful of starter into some water. If it floats, it's ready. If it sinks, it is not ripe yet.

• The Windowpane Test: A test to show the development of the gluten in the bread. Stretch a small portion of the bread. If you can see light through it and the dough does not tear, the gluten is fully developed. See this photo from Wild Yeast.

• General bread-baking terminology: a walk through the process with terms defined.

• An Explanation of Baker's Percentages/Hydration Percentages.

• Oil in Bread

  • Oil in bread softens the crust (just as any fat or sweetener), which is why pizza dough and ciabatta have a thinner crust than lean artisan breads.

  • Think about the other ingredients in the bread when you choose a type of oil. For ciabatta or other Italian breads, olive oil is good. For something like challah, the taste should be more neutral like canola oil. For naan, it's up to personal palate.

• During every part of the rising stages, make sure your bread is covered. DO NOT cover your bread with cloth. This will allow a skin to form over the bread (especially if you live in a dry climate). Instead, cover with a bowl, plastic wrap, or (to have a reusable version of plastic wrap) a shower cap.

About Ovens:

• Know your oven. I adjust all my recipes to my specific oven, which is smaller than most and electric so that it will fit well into our kitchen. As such, if you try one of the recipes for the first time, make sure that you periodically check on your food in order to ensure that it spends the right amount of time in the oven.

• Convection ovens: convection ovens are ovens with a fan that blows the heat around for a more even baking experience. This works, but be careful because some bakers say it is the worst thing that every happen to bread while others say it's great. If you use convection bake, make sure that your oven is turned 25-50 degrees F below what the recipe recommends, otherwise it will cook too fast and most likely burn. If possible DO NOT use a convection oven for pizza. With pizza, you want to concentrate the heat as much as possible on the bottom of the pizza. A convection oven (in my experience) will make it a little soggy in the middle).

• Steam: Unless you have some kind of an extra-fabulous baker's oven (or an extremely badly-designed oven), you probably have an oven that is designed to vent steam. This poses a problem for bread which requires a large amount of steam in the first 1/3-1/2 of the baking process in order to finish it's final rise in the oven. For standard loaves, just bake on a baking stone with a large oven-safe pot (like a large broth pot) that fits over your stone and will not impede an up to 20% size increase of the bread. If you have a combo cooker, a dutch oven, or a La Cloche Dome or similar, this is even better. Make sure that for the last 15 minutes of your preheat, you have the broth-pot (or similar) heating in the oven. When the bread is ready to put in the oven, use oven mitts to remove the broth pot onto a heat-safe surface (I got a pretty nasty steam burn the one time I used other pot holders). Transfer the bread to the stone and replace the broth pot. Leave the broth-pot over the bread (allowing no air in) until the "steaming" is over and then remove it to bake the bread normally. This will ensure that your bread gets enough steam. Alternative, you can use a large combo cooker or a dutch oven.

About Other Things: