Homemade bread is fragrant, crispy, tasty and, of course, healthy. It is prepared from simple, proven ingredients. In this case, the flour can be whole grain, wheat, rye. For variety, it wouldn’t hurt to add sesame seeds, seeds, nuts, honey, pumpkin.
It is baked in any available form: a round cast-iron frying pan, on a baking sheet with high sides, in a special bread pan.
Description
The most correct and complete bread recipe begins with sourdough (see photo below). It is necessary to prepare a starter (sourdough) using flour and water. You can also purchase it in a store in dry form and dilute it with water in the required proportions before kneading the dough (information is indicated on the package).
The so-called “eternal” leaven, which consists of flour and water, is very popular. It is initially prepared for several days, and then the base is simply stored in the refrigerator until the next batch of dough.
Amazing Homemade Bread Recipes and Baking Secrets
What could be more appetizing and cozy than the aroma of freshly baked bread? And the taste of bread made at home with your own hands cannot be compared with any store-bought baguettes and ciabbattas! St. Petersburg baker Ivan Zabavnikov generously shares his knowledge with us.
Steam oven at home
I am often asked how my bread turns out to be almost gigantic in size with a relatively average weight of dough. So, steam during baking has a direct bearing on this beauty. Steam allows the bread to rise as much as possible in the oven without uncontrolled bursting.
The dough piece increases in volume, the cuts on the crust become shiny, and the bread becomes beautiful. Steam also affects the special crispiness of the crust! Steam in the oven is created using 100 ml of boiling water, which needs to be poured into a cast-iron frying pan that heats up with the oven. It can be placed in the bottom of the oven. Place the bread on a baking sheet or baking stone, pour in boiling water, and close the oven. To release steam, after 10–15 minutes, open the oven door for 2–3 seconds. If necessary, remove the remaining water so that it does not evaporate. You can also throw ice cubes into the container or spray the oven with a spray bottle, but in my opinion, boiling water is enough.
Olive bread with semolina
Richard Bertinet is a famous French baker who came up with his own baking technique. A special method of kneading dough is a whole science according to Bertina, however, it is not so difficult if you get the hang of it. I recommend serving olive bread with semolina based on Richard Bertinet's bread with butter...
Olive bread with semolina based on the bread of Richard Bertinet
Bread without hassle and fuss
Here is an extremely convenient method for creating sourdough bread for those who can devote only a little time to bread. In the morning before going to work, you set up the dough. When you return home, you immediately knead the dough, beginning the process of gluten development. Have dinner, play with the children, walk the dog, read or watch a movie. Knead the dough again. Do 1-2 warm-ups. And before going to bed, form a loaf or roll, put it in a proofing basket and put it in the refrigerator at 4 ° C. Bake bread the next day before or immediately after work. The taste of the bread (with almost 18 hours of proofing) is more intense.
Tomato bread: very tomatoy, very flavorful
Tomato bread with a crispy crust and aromatic fluffy pulp is easy to prepare. You just need to have time and patience in preparing the dough for proofing - an important process in bread baking.
Tomato bread
Grated kalach
Kalach is the most famous Russian bread. Unlike all other breads, rich wicker kalach is prepared exclusively from wheat flour and without the participation of sourdough.
Buttery wicker roll
Gluten window
To check if the dough is ready before baking, just “look” through the gluten window. Usually it is enough to take a piece of kneaded dough the size of a walnut. Intercepting with your fingers, twist it clockwise, stretching it to a size of approximately 10x10cm. If it doesn't break, the dough is ready to use.
Lavash in a frying pan
Lavash is perhaps the easiest bread you can bake at home. Of course, the most delicious yeast-free lavash is made in a tandoor or saj. But in a city apartment, an ordinary frying pan, well heated at maximum heat, will do.
Yeast-free lavash
The life of rye sourdough
There are three main stages of sourdough readiness: unfermented, ready, and sour. One way to determine the readiness of sourdough is to test its swimming ability. If you poured water at room temperature into a bowl or jar and dropped a piece of sourdough into it and it sank and lies at the bottom in a dense lump, then it has not yet fermented. If it stays on the surface, it means it is ready for battle. If it sank and spread along the bottom, it means it has fermented.
Rye sourdough lives in the refrigerator for more than 2 weeks. But in order to bake fragrant bread with it, the starter needs to be constantly fed. And it doesn’t matter how long it has been in your refrigerator - 3 days or a month - it still needs to be fed. Then the starter will collect the required amount of yeast and lactic acid bacteria. The more you refresh (fed) it, the more flavorful the bread will be. I feed my starter in a cut glass and do this: take the starter out of the refrigerator, let it warm up for at least an hour at room temperature. I take 5–10 g of starter and throw away the rest. Separately, I mix a thick mass of sourdough, 30 ml of water and 30 g of flour. I leave it for 6-8 hours to rise and repeat the previous steps 1-2 times. I put the dough on the refreshed sourdough. We have before us the guarantee of delicious and healthy bread!
But where do you put the leftover leaven that happens during feeding? Store them in the refrigerator so you can add them to pancake, waffle, or pita batter.
We brew it black. Wheat-rye bread with rye sourdough
Wheat-rye bread with rye sourdough takes quite a long time to prepare: one dough will require most of the time. But time is not a waste of time for such bread, because the main thing is a tasty result.
Wheat-rye bread with rye sourdough
It's all about her. Rye sourdough
There are many options for breeding rye starters. The recipe for this rye sourdough, in Ivan’s opinion, is convenient and simple. To prepare the starter you will need a minimum of ingredients (rye flour and water), a container with a lid (for example, a cut glass), and 5 days to get the result.
Rye sourdough from Ivan Zabavnikov
Welding
Please do not confuse it with sourdough! Increasing the sugar content in the dough, increasing fermentation activity, increasing the baking properties of flour, improving the quality of bread, slowing down the staling of the finished product, creating a unique aroma of bread - all this can be done using tea leaves. What is tea leaves and why is it needed? Infusion is flour mixed with hot water (from 68 to 100 ° C) and left for a certain time for saccharification, which occurs when malt and spices are added. Borodino bread, familiar to everyone, is made using tea leaves made with red malt and coriander. Tea leaves have many advantages, and for me the main ones are the taste and smell obtained when using it. Especially if the tea leaves are steamed. The smell is bomb!
How to make tea leaves is most often written in recipes. I will describe the standard process using Borodino bread as an example. Place a mixture of flour, malt and coriander in a thermos. Pour boiling water over it all and mix well. Pour into a thermos, close tightly and leave at room temperature for 8–12 hours. The brew is ready.
Ivan Zabavnikov @zabavnikov_ivan is a partner and head baker at the Pane bakery in St. Petersburg. He also conducts master classes on baking and actively maintains an Instagram profile, where the main character, of course, is bread. “My priority is my love for long-fermentation bread using sourdough and yeast dough. The result is delicious, aromatic and properly baked bread. I treat yeast with calm and respect. I think they have been unjustifiably slandered online. Many people need an enemy, and they have found one in yeast. Sourdough also contains yeast. Despite this, we have already become accustomed to calling sourdough bread unleavened.”
Recipe for “eternal” sourdough
- First day: you need to place 100 grams of each component in a container. Mix the mixture thoroughly until creamy. After this, cover the container with the future starter with cling film or a clean towel and put it in a warm place (avoid draft) for 24 hours until small bubbles appear (it is advisable to stir the mixture periodically).
- Second day: “feeding” the starter. Remove the container from a warm place and again add about 100 grams of the main components to the desired consistency. Next, cover with a towel and return to a warm shelter for another 24 hours.
- Third day: take out the container - now on the surface of the starter you can see a lot of bubbles that form the so-called foam cap. Add the ingredients again and return to their place, periodically observing the leaven, which has already become strong. Now it is important to catch the moment of its full maturation. Then divide into two equal parts: place the first in a jar with a nylon lid (with holes), which is set aside in a cold place, and the second is used for baking bread.
Wheat bread with rye sourdough
Just yesterday I took the starter out of the refrigerator, fed it with warm water and wheat flour, and after 4 hours the dough for wheat bread was ready. In the evening I baked a couple of buns.
Like this!
Almost the whole bun was immediately eaten with milk.
We will bake beautiful and tasty yeast-free rye bread ourselves.
I'll have to bake some more tomorrow. And your process will be fine-tuned and will happen casually, intuitively. I already do everything by eye.
Dough
Baking sourdough bread (according to the correct and complete recipe) is not a particularly labor-intensive task, but it requires certain knowledge, skills, patience and endurance.
According to the technology of making bread, it is necessary to prepare two types of dough in parallel - unleavened and directly bread dough. This is necessary so that all the necessary processes of dissolution and fermentation can take place: in sourdough, the protein component of the flour swells well, which contributes to greater development of gluten when kneading the dough. This directly affects the quality and taste of the finished bread.
It is important to note the following subtle point. When baking a product even from flour with a low protein content, following this sequence in the dough kneading technology (sourdough, general kneading) will allow you to prepare delicious bread.
And when both types of dough are ready, you can begin the stage of general kneading, kneading, with a subsequent approach (increasing in volume).
Artisan bread
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September 16, 2018
Artisan bread is a concept that sounds a little unusual now.
If we remember that craft is a small-scale manual production based on the personal skill of the worker, then it becomes clear that previously baking has always belonged to the craft category. Some time later, during the period of industrialization and industrial production of bread, this concept and taste were almost irretrievably lost. During this period, the problems of long shelf life and mass production of bread were solved, so preservatives began to be added to bread and many processes were mechanized.
In many European countries, where territories are not comparable to ours, there was no such large-scale consolidation of complex mechanized giant bakeries. It is for this reason that they were able to revive artisan bread for consumers faster.
Artisan bread first became popular in Italy, France, and later in America “Artisan Breads are hand-crafted, hearth-baked loaves” (handmade bread baked on a hearth). Then, it became popular in other countries, as people began to care more about their health.
What is artisan bread?
Artisan breads are usually made in small local bakeries. The main ingredients are water, salt, flour and natural starter cultures. Fermentation is a key part of production. All additives are used only natural. In France, there is even a law prohibiting the use of artificial additives in artisan bread. According to this law, if the sign says “artisan boulanger”, the bread must be baked locally and by hand, and no artificial additives can be used in it. In this regard, artisan bakers create professional associations of artisan bread producers in order to exchange experiences and develop standards for identifying artisan bread.
Artisan bread has become so popular in recent years that international competitions have included these healthy breads in their competition categories.
Every year, professional bakers gather at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie competition in Paris to bake the world's best artisan bread.
There are several significant factors that differentiate artisan bread from the commercially produced bread found in most grocery stores.
The first is the approach to the production process and the quality of the products. Not everyone understands that home-made artisan bread cannot be produced in large volumes. This is directly related to manual labor and an individual approach to the production process. That is why the quantity of bread produced is directly related to its quality. Artisan breads are made in small batches. Now this bread has become very popular in home baking.
Second. The key to quality is, first of all, the main raw material – flour. If the cost of flour is very low, you won’t get good bread from it. Low-cost flour is produced in large volumes at large flour mills, where very often various “improving additives” are added to the flour itself (for example: bleaches, leavening agents, etc.), and the grain itself is ground in mills with metal millstones, which, with large production volumes, leads to the destruction of protein bonds in flour when they are strongly heated. Such flour spoils faster, and so does the bread itself, not to mention the removal of fiber and grain germ from the flour, i.e. in fact, such flour is devoid of not only beneficial properties, but also taste and smell, so the bread itself will end up being the same. It is a completely different matter if the flour is ground on stone millstones, where overheating is not allowed. An important detail is that the grain must be grown without fertilizers and growth accelerators, without pesticides and herbicides. This is a special category of BIO grain. Flour in such mills is obtained whole grain (whole ground) and sifted (for example, 375 grinding, 224 grinding, 710 grinding, 450 grinding. (the number means the size of the sieve mesh through which whole grain flour is sifted, for example 375 grinding is the mesh size in sieve 0, 375 mm)) Sifted flour is often used to prepare high-quality artisan breads.
Third. An important distinguishing feature is the long process of fermentation and fermentation of future artisan bread using sourdough or fruit yeast. Essentially, artisan bread is a product of secondary processing of bacteria that process complex inhibitors, unlike classic industrial yeast, which cannot cope with this task. This is why many people, after eating factory-made yeast bread, feel heaviness during digestion. The fermentation process of natural bacteria accounts for the distinctive taste of artisan bread. Each type of artisan bread has its own special taste. Barley flour is often added to sourdough to achieve the taste of rustic bread. The dough for artisan bread is most often kneaded by hand without the use of metal containers to avoid its oxidation. Real sourdough is the most important ingredient in creating artisan bread. It consists of starter yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Starter yeast is not the yeast that we buy pressed in packets. Starter yeast allows you to make the dough fermentation process as natural as possible and fully consistent with human metabolism. This is why artisan bread is healthier and easier to digest than bread made with baker's yeast and baking powder.
Artisan bread is a product of time, care and love. Artisan bread is not made, but is born through the natural processes of leavening, fermentation and proofing. To start your morning with freshly baked bread, an artisan baker requires about 18 hours of hard work.
Fourth. The process of baking artisan bread is also significantly different from large-scale production. Initially, artisan bread was baked in stone ovens. The radiation of heat from a stone and from a metal surface is significantly different, since stone has a higher heat capacity than metal. The heat from the stone has a different effect on the dough and the formation of a crust on the bread. Artisan bread cooked in a stone oven or oven with stone surfaces inside does not go stale for a long time and has a completely different taste and aroma.
Artisan bread is more expensive than regular bread - that's a fact, but can they be compared? You can buy bread cheaper and of lower quality, but is it worth saving on your health and then buying expensive medicines to get it back? You decide. The fair price of artisan bread is calculated using a fair formula that includes the costs of raw materials, production, transportation, employee salaries and other costs, as well as a reasonable profit to allow the development and promotion of artisan bread. Nothing extra!
How to warm up
For sourdough bread (correct and complete recipe), kneading and kneading the dough can be done in several ways: manually, in a special dough mixer or in a bread machine.
This process should take about 15-20 minutes. It is very important that the mass gradually acquires an elastic consistency. Then you need to leave the dough for 30 minutes to “rest”. After which you can form a bread dough.
Just before baking, it is important to place the bun for several hours either in a mold or in a basket with a napkin previously sprinkled with flour, and then put it in a warm place for 2.5 hours. This way it will go through the proofing stage. In this case, the grain stock should increase 2-3 times. If desired, the top can be greased with milk and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
After this, the bread can be baked. An oven, bread maker, or multicooker are suitable for this.
This article will discuss several correct and complete sourdough bread recipes.
Khlebomoli ru bread recipes
We are Arthur and Elena, artisan bakers, authors of the largest bread blog in RuNet Hlebomoli.ru . We have been baking sourdough bread for more than 10 years , half of which we have been teaching this wonderful craft. We have conducted many master classes in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, Greece and other countries, we work with large and small bakeries and help to set up the baking of bread, muffins and sourdough croissants.
Thousands of people have learned how to make sourdough and bake bread thanks to our blog , and if you want to walk this path with us, learn the secrets and intricacies of bread baking, and also get a powerful boost of motivation and bread inspiration, sign up for master classes with us!
