TIPS FOR GREAT ARTISAN BREADS
1. Use King Arthur flour. It is blended to be consistently high in the proteins that make up gluten. Their All-Purpose flour at 11.7% has more protein than other brands’ bread flours. Their Bread Flour is made from hard spring wheat and runs 12.7% protein, truly high-test flour. The main benefit of using KA flours is their consistency bag-to-bag, season-to-season. No other flours come close. Once you perfect your bread making skills you can experiment with other flours, but until then this will eliminate one variable from the equation. I did such an experiment, and you can read about it!
Shopping Tip: Get KA A/P, Bread, and Whole Wheat flours at (some) Walmarts. Can't affort KA flour? Try the store brand flours at Whole Foods and Trader Joes.
Note: Do NOT use bread flour for sweet breads, quick breads, biscuits, muffins, pancakes, etc. or they will be tough! I use cheap, store brand, unbleached all-purpose flour for these products. Also, avoid bleached flours, even commercial / professional ones.
2. Use instant yeast as follows. Start with water at 110˚F in your measuring cup. Measure it into your work bowl. Add an equal amount of flour by volume. Stir to make a batter. Check the temperature. If the batter is under 100˚F stir in the instant yeast. If you have time, let it sit for 15~30 minutes "autolyse" while the sponge develops. Then mix in salt. Finally mix in a second equal amount of flour.
Here’s how it works: Although you start with 110˚F water, the cold work bowl will cool it a few degrees and the cold flour (from an unheated pantry or unheated cabinet) should cool it some more... hopefully to between 95~100˚F. Letting it sit for an hour gives the yeast a head-start on growing and developing flavors. When you add the salt, the yeast growth will be cut in half, but at this point is should be growing like crazy. Adding the second dose of flour will drop the temperature further to just about right for the initial rise.
3. Use Diamond Crystal kosher salt. This is approximately half as dense as table salt. ALL my recipes are geared for it. If you substitute table salt cut the amount in half. I also recommend this brand because their crystals are essentially hollow and dissolve faster than other brands.
Use the same salt all the time for consistency. Sea salt, for example, varies in salinity depending on where it came from. Israeli salt from the Dead Sea is different from Mediterranean sea salt which is different from Californian sea salt. As nice as sea salts are (and they are the rage these days), take the advice of Chef Michael Ruhlman and stick with kosher salt. As a bread topping, however, you can and should use coarse sea salt so the crytals won't dissolve.
4. Leave yourself reminders so you don’t forget anything or add something twice. Measure yeast and salt out into ramekins on your work surface to remind you to add them. You’ve seen celebrity chefs on TV do this, and it’s for a reason. Later, if they’re empty you’ll know “it’s in there.” When you shape your dough and it is going through the final rise, leave your lame or serrated knife in front of the loaves as a reminder to slash them before they go into the oven. Similarly, put your spray bottle near the oven door as a reminder to spritz.
5. Don’t over-flour. As soon as you go past 2x the volume of water by volume, be very careful to add as little flour as possible. For example, to make a small 2-loaf batch of demis, start with 2 C of water and be very careful once you go past 4 C of flour... using just enough on the outside to permit handling but keeping the inside as wet as possible.
For those of you with a digital scale, use the "bakers percentage" method and weight your ingredients. You want your water between 68~70%. Remember, bakers percentage is not of the total, but of the flour's weight.
6. You can start your dough in a mixer, but finish it by hand. You can add twice as much flour as water by volume (see above) using the paddle on your mixer. After that, turn the dough out and finish it by hand, adding as little additional flour as possible.
7. Don't use a mixer’s dough hook to knead. If you can use the hook without it sticking, you’ve already added too much flour.
8. Never punch your artisan dough down. You can stretch it out and fold it in thirds after each rise. This is called ‘taking a turn on the dough.”
9. Take time. You can hurry things along using a little extra yeast and rising in a warm oven when absolutely necessary, like in class when we have only 2.5 hours, but any other time you should slow things down. This will allow more flavor to develop.
CONTINUE TO TIP #10