Baking by Hand (2 page)

THE TOOLS TO TURN YOUR KITCHEN
INTO AN ARTISAN BAKESHOP

After years of working in professional kitchens, bakers begin to develop a particular sixth sense with regard to the atmosphere in which they’ll be baking. Ours can see through that heat and seek out those areas in the kitchen that might be perfect for very particular tasks. They’ll look for the corner near the window that might be 10 degrees cooler—a perfect place to store that bin of dough that came out a little warmer than expected. Through that swinging door is a spot in the hallway that’s right under the AC vent, so we’ll roll our rack of proofing Pain au Levain over there, or else it’ll need to go in the oven just as the North Shore Sourdough is proofed and ready. That’s one train wreck avoided.

The point is, great bakers know their kitchens. If they are baking in a foreign space, they’ll take the time to evaluate the hot zones, the cool spots and those places that are just perfect for developing great bread.

Your kitchen is
your
bakery, and the first thing you need to do is to get to know it if you want to make great bread. You can cook a steak when the ambient temperature is 50°F/10°C or 100°F/40°C, and it won’t make a difference in how long that steak needs to cook. If you were trying to make bread at 50°F/10°C and made no adjustments, you’d be waiting long into the night for that dough to ferment and proof. Make the same dough at 100°F/40°C, and you have yourself a fast-moving bread that may complete its life cycle in 6 hours. The atmosphere in your kitchen makes all the difference in the world, and it will be up to you to react accordingly. Great bakers are manipulators of variables first and foremost.

Being a great baker is about paying attention, and making adjustments based on your observations to produce dough that’s at a good temperature for fermentation and proofing. It’s a balancing act, and a little knowledge about the bread-making process will make a huge difference. Plus, we reveal plenty of the tricks up our sleeves that will give you a leg up on whatever your home bakery throws your way. But first, let us reintroduce you to your oven.

If you’ve got one of these, feel free to skip ahead to the recipes. For the rest of us, it takes a little more rigging of our home ovens to produce the bread we like. At the moment, we own an inherited 15-year-old wall oven whose windows are susceptible to enthusiastically shattering when you look at them wrong. The good news is that every one of these recipes was developed using that exact piece-of-junk oven, so rest assured that they will work in whatever you’ve got. Great technique and good decisions can trump any “unique” piece of equipment you own.

Even so, everyone’s oven needs a little help to turn it into an artisan bread-baking powerhouse. You need just three items:

The bigger and thicker, the better. A round pizza stone works fine for one loaf at a time, but we prefer one of the square ones that takes up an entire rack. We can fit two or three loaves on it at once, and it most closely resembles the baking surface we have at the bakery. If you’re getting one for the first time and you want to make sure it’ll last forever, we suggest the FibraMent baking stones, by AWMCO—they have sizes for all ovens and are ¾-inch/2-cm thick. That’s about as heavy as you can get them. Arrange your baking racks so that you have one as close to the bottom element as possible. If your oven doesn’t have a bottom element, drop the stone right on the floor. That’s where your baking stone is going to live. We keep ours in the oven at all times, as it moonlights as a roasted potato crisper, a piecrust setter, a thin-crust pizza stone and generally creates much more even heat throughout the oven at all times, provided you preheat your oven for the appropriate temperature at least an hour before baking. Those stones take a while to heat up, but they retain that heat longer. That’s the key.

You can find one of these heavy, thick frying pans for almost nothing at barn sales or in the back room of any antique store. Barring that, any good hardware store will carry a selection in its kitchenware section. You’ll want to dedicate this pan for steam generation, because it will tend to get rusty as time goes on; that’s why it’s nice to get an old, used one and brush it off a bit. Your steam generator (See? It’s not even a pan anymore!) will live on the top rack of your oven, far enough away from the baking stone that the dough has enough headspace to rise and color, but not so jammed up there that you can’t slide it in and out easily. Your oven’s default rack positions will dictate exactly where everything goes, but just as long as you can fit both your stone and your steam generator in, you’re good to go.

Used in conjunction with the cast-iron pan, a water mister is great for spritzing your oven just as you load in all of the bread, and then again a few minutes later. Again, this ensures that your bread is rising in a humid environment and that you’re getting the most out of your oven spring.

I used to be a terrible handyman. Pretty much everything I tried to cut, plumb, unscrew, build or assemble turned out to be an abject disaster. Basically, what I learned from many, many similar experiences (and, thankfully, no lost digits) is that it’s really important to have the correct tools for the job you’re trying to accomplish.

The same is true with baking equipment. There are certain items that will make your life a heck of a lot easier if you equip yourself with them.
We’ve tried to arrange these in order of importance, so you can have a priority list to work from.
They’re not too expensive individually, but buying them all at once might be a bit daunting. At home we keep everything in a big plastic tub with a cover in the basement, and then haul it all up on baking days.

A must-have.
Get one that measures in grams as well as pounds and ounces and that has a tare function (which allows you to subtract the weight of the container); there are many reasonably priced, good-quality scales on the market. To make great bread, you must weigh ingredients because it’s far more precise. A cup of tightly packed flour weighs a lot more than a cup of fluffed-up flour, and those ounces could make all the difference between a nice, open crumb and a tight, cottony one. Never trust a bread recipe that gives measures in volume. Ever.

Don’t trust your Spidey-sense. Correct temperatures are very, very important.

As we’ve mentioned before, one of the biggest hurdles to great home baking is that rarely do home kitchens mimic the hot and humid, yeast-friendly environment of the bakeshop. One spring we were setting up a new home for some baby chicks that would be arriving the next day. To keep them warm we set up a long-corded heat lamp that can be adjusted up or down to create the optimal temperature. The connection was pretty obvious. One extra heat lamp later, and we could raise active dough (and more chickens!) in the dead of winter. It’s a pretty simple setup. See ours below.

We know it sounds strange. At the bakery, we use commercial bus tubs to hold our dough, because they keep the dough in a nice, rectangular shape that’s easy to divide. Fish tubs are just smaller versions, perfect for the home baker, and you can flip them over and use them as makeshift proofing boxes. They’re especially useful in croissant production, where you need a nice, rectangular
dough into which to roll your butter. These things are available most easily, not coincidentally, at your local fish store. Just ask the fellow in charge if they have a few deep ones (the shallow tubs won’t work) that you can buy, and after a thorough cleaning, you’ll have yourself a stack of perfect dough bins.

Know what’s not useful for scraping bowls? Your fingertips. So, while flexible plastic bowl scrapers are not essential, they are really useful. They curve right around the inside of your bowl so you can make sure you’re combining all of those dry ingredients with the wet. They’re also very useful for cleaning your bowls out, because a starter stuck to the sides of a bowl is like glue when it dries.

For brushing flour off your work space bench and dough. Get the softest bristles you can. A clean bench is an organized bench!

We proof on 18-inch × 26-inch/45 cm × 66-cm wooden boards (sometimes called “bagel boards”). You can make a proofing board out of anything you want: the back of a sheet pan, a piece of plywood or plastic and so on. You’ll also want a piece of canvas called a
couche
(that’s French for “diaper”) if you’re planning on making baguettes or batards. They’re available at specialty baking websites (see Sources,
here
). You might even be able to find a suitable replacement at a fabric store. They should be the same width as, and about twice the length of, your proofing board.