Breadmaking 101
Introduction
Baking bread is a wonderful hobby. It is creative, stress-reducing, infinitely variable and gives you something delicious to show for your time and effort.
But most people are afraid to bake bread at home. They fear the time involved, thinking it must take all day to produce anything edible. They fear the fragile combination of art, science and magic that makes bread rise. They are afraid that bread making requires too much precision, too many specialized tools, a room at just the right temperature. They are so intimidated by the process that they think they could never possibly do it right, so why bother? Why not just get one of those cheap, uniform loaves from the grocery store and move on with the day?
But the truth is that bread baking does not have to take all day, the basics are relatively easy to master and get easier with practice. There is science involved, but it’s simple if you understand what makes bread work. Precision is important, but so is experimentation. The necessary tools are already in most kitchens.
Moreover, homemade bread is fun to make and eat, it will impress your friends and family, is ultimately cheaper than that stuff from the store and infinitely more interesting (that is, inconsistent) and tastier than the stuff in the plastic sleeve. So don’t be afraid. Give it a try.
The Beginning
Most people start their bread-baking adventures with the most basic of breads – quick breads. These are breads that use baking soda and/or baking powder as a leavening agent rather than yeast, so they rise in the oven and don’t have to be proofed, or allowed to rise, before they are baked. These recipes usually include few ingredients, can be mixed by hand in a bowl and can be made from start to finish in around an hour. It’s about as close to instant gratification as baking gets.
This is where I started, when I was a kid, making my great-grandmother’s banana bread. This is one of those basic, old-timey recipes that is basically a list of ingredients and the fabulously vague baking time of 30 minutes to an hour. It was the only from-scratch bread that I remember my mother making, and it always makes me happy, even though (or probably because) it’s really simple.
There is great variety in the quick bread world, from sweet breads and muffins, popovers and coffee cakes to savory cornbread, biscuits, scones and soda bread. A baker and his or her family could be pretty happy with just creations made without a single packet of yeast.
Sure, there are tons of commercial mixes available for these kinds of bread, and that’s a fine place to start. I’ve been known to use a bagged mix for lemon-poppy seed muffins. But it hardly takes any more time to make them from scratch and it’s much more satisfying to do it that way. There’s really no reason not to.
A “quick” history
For thousands of years, bread has been a major part of both the diets and the collective culture of humans. Bread has been made from all kinds of grains, from the wheat, rye and corn still popular today to barley, oats, rice and other grains few people consume now. As its popularity as a staple grew, so did its place in mythology so that now some of the most famous quotes and clichés are about bread. Our daily bread, bread is the staff of life, the best thing since sliced bread, the list goes on. We break bread when we get together with friends. Bread is slang for money, and was used for money in ancient Egypt, where the people who worked on the pyramids were paid in bread. Many pantheistic cultures worshipped deities of bread, and St. Peter, the first Pope, is the patron saint of bread, as well as of fishermen and clockmakers.
Though even today bread baking is a relatively simple prospect, technology has changed the way we make bread dramatically. Originally a mortar and pestle was used to grind grains into flour for bread and no leavening agent was used, which created a product somewhat like modern-day tortillas. The Egyptians developed the first grinding stone and also created some of the first yeast bread, a happy accident of the warm climate, which was a haven for wild yeast. That's also why ancient Egyptians were among the first to make beer. We also have the Egyptians to thank for closed ovens used to bake bread.
Of course the Egyptians aren't the only ones who contributed to the evolution of this great staple. The Romans, too, were fond of yeast breads and had, by 500 BC, developed a stone wheel "quern" for the milling of grain. This style of mill was the only way to do it before the industrial revolution, and the same process is still used today for stone-ground wheat. The Romans also take credit for the first "mechanical" dough mixer, powered by horses and donkeys. And the preference among rich Romans for white bread still persists across Europe and the Americas, as invading Romans spread both their technology and their tastes.
The Romans also contributed to the philosophy of bread, if you can call it that. Plato thought the ideal state would be one where people would eat whole wheat bread made from local wheat, according to the Web site for Elizabeth Botham and Sons, a British bakery. The Romans also had lots of great names for the various types of bread they enjoyed, from "hurry bread" to oyster bread, named for what it was eaten with, not what it was made from. There was also cakebread, oven bread, tin bread and Parthian bread. There were rich egg breads, acorn, groat and millet breads, and breads made with cheese.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the spread of towns led to an increase in commercial baking and the formation of bread guilds, another Roman idea somewhat like a union for bakers to protect their interests, set prices, etc. The British were big players in the guild drama, with an official body, the Assize of Bread, formed in 1266 to regulate the size and price of bread. Then, in 1307, the white and brown bread bakers separated into their own guilds, where they would remain until 1569, when Queen Elizabeth I united them into the Worshipful Company of Bakers, which still exists today and has a fabulous logo.
In the Industrial Age, access to Chinese silk allowed for more accurate sieves, which produced cleaner flour and, thus, whiter bread. Baking tins popularized the loaf shape we all know and love today, enabling those uniform slices that make sandwiches so great. In the 1830s, the Swiss invented roller mills that easily separated the wheat germ from the bran. This is the system that is commonly used today for milling flour.
All this time, home bakers were making their own yeast from water, flour, potato, salt and sugar, which would sit in a warm place until the yeast formed. This sort of starter could be kept alive indefinitely. But, like other leavening agents available at the time, compounds such as saleratus (derived from salt), hartshorn (ground deer antler), cream of tartar and pearlash (ashes, usually wood, seawead, pea or bean stalk ashes), produced unpredictable results, according to Beth Hensperger's "The Best Quick Breads."
In the 1800s, people learned that bicarbonate of soda creates carbon dioxide in the presence of acid, which could be harnessed to make bread rise. According to clabbergirl.com, the Web site of the famous baking soda company, housewives made their own baking powder from baking soda and sour milk or buttermilk. This too was inconsistent, but better than the older methods.
Then, in 1835, baking soda and cream of tartar were mixed into a prepackaged baking powder. In the 1850s, monocalcium phosphate acid was added to the mix. It was cheaper than cream of tartar and was better than earlier mixtures because it didn’t release all of its leavening power during the mixing stage, but continued to rise in the oven. Forms of this chemical are still popular in modern-day baking powder.
In 1859, Eben Norton Horsford, cofounder of the Rumford Company, formulated Rumford Baking Powder, a calcium phosphate baking powder. It was dependable and less expensive than other available products and considered to be healthier than cream of tartar.
The 20th century was a time of great change for bakers, when the widespread availability of gas and electric ovens made baking much more predictable. Machines for slicing and packaging bread were invented, and sliced bread became the best thing since unsliced bread.
Today the variety of commercially available breads and baked goods is vast. Many people go their whole lives without ever baking bread for themselves at home, a skill that was essential a couple of generations ago. Sure, there’s a lot to be said for convenience, and for the fact that the government regulates the quality of bread and requires nutrients be added to all breads that are not made from whole grain.
But there’s a lot more to be said for the even greater variety of healthy and delicious quick breads you can make at home. Think about pumpkin bread, old-fashioned Southern biscuits, jalapeno cornbread, lemony scones, chocolate muffins and spicy coffeecakes. Think about the smell of blueberry nut muffins fresh from the oven. Think about how much happier these homemade baked goods will make you and your family.
Learning to bake bread is a grand adventure that never ends. There are always more recipes and techniques than you will ever have time to try. But that’s a huge part of the fun. The more you bake, and the more you explore and learn about baking, the more you will want to bake. Join me in learning about quick breads and you will see what a wonderful and rewarding hobby bread baking can be.
Lessons
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