The Enlightened Baker

I have recently been fascinated by bread. While cooking is something I enjoy and happen to feel pretty confident in, I consider it to be merely mixing up flavors and developing textures. Baking, on the other hand, is a whole different branch of chemistry. The different ingredients react together, and unless you understand what is going on, it's usually best to follow the recipe so you don't screw something up. After spending hours in the kitchen, it really is a shame to have an inedible lump to show for your work.

I have a wonderful cookbook, "The Joy of Cooking," that is full of cool recipes. What I like best about this book, though, is that at the beginning of each section, the author explains the theory behind whatever kind of food he is discussing. For example, in the section about pies, he explains that a flaky crust is formed when the gluten forms bonds in the dough and is rolled out, The layers of gluten are separated by the fat in the dough (butter, shortening, lard, etc). Thus, it is important not to overwork your pie crust, or the gluten will form throughout and you will have stiff crust. Cool, huh? You'd be surprised how much theory there actually is in the recipes you use. What I like to know is which parts of the recipe are the important ones and which ones I can play around with.

Back to bread: Let me preface this by saying that I do not drive a Prius. No offense intended to those who do, but I don't want you to think that I have any agenda in what I'm about to tell you. I don't like for there to be things in my food that I don't understand. I don't really like for there to be anything but, well, food, in my food. If you look in my grocery cart, you are going to find mostly basic whole foods like milk, cheese, vegetables, rice, fruit, and root beer - you know, things that don't have a list of ingredients because they are the ingredient. I don't want you to feel like I'm missing out on good stuff, I just make my own good stuff. And if I can't, I'll just buy it, because I'm not trying to be healthy, per se, I just think food tastes better that way.

My wife, on the other hand, is trying to be healthy, so she takes this stuff a bit more seriously than I do. Thus, she wants to be able to make her own bread. She starts with wheat. We recently got a wheat grinder so that we could make flour. The problem is that most bread recipes don't work very well with whole wheat flour. The bread comes out all dense and crumbly. In discussing this problem (yes, all our conversations are this interesting) I remarked that a whole wheat roll recipe we have turns out marvelously soft and fluffy rolls. I wondered what the difference was between the bread recipes and the roll recipe. I considered making an excel spreadsheet listing all of the ingredients of the many different recipes, normalizing around something like flour content so that I could make direct comparisons (You were wondering when I was going to do something nerdy, weren't you?). It turned out to be much easier than that. Instead of figuring out what was wrong with all of the other recipes, my wife suggested that we just use the recipe that we know works - and make bread loaves instead of rolls.

It worked, too well. The dough didn't rise - it exploded! I went outside for two seconds and my bread got a big head.

No, it isn't supposed to get that big. If it does, it usually means that there is a big air pocket in the middle of your loaf and the top can fall off when you try to tip the thing out of your pan, like this:

Topless bread is slightly less useful than it's topful counterpart. The good news? Another loaf made it out of the pan with its head intact and the bread itself is wonderfully soft and light. Yay for beating the system! Yay for whole wheat bread! Yay for slathering the previously healthy bread with artery clogging butter!