03/20/10 - At Home - The Perfect Loaf

As is obvious, I don't post about the baking I do at home anymore. Not that I don't bake, far from it. However most of the stuff I bake is old news, recipes I've been doing for a while. Most have been covered at some point or another, either in my "at home" posts or from class, so there is no point in mentioning that I made cornbread for the 20th time.

However one thing that has been evolving has been my bread baking. I have found that I really love baking bread, perhaps more than any other thing. It it's core, bread is three (four) simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and usually salt. That such simplicity can create such delicious offerings in countless varieties is astounding, perhaps one of the reasons why I like baking bread so much.

Since I learned to bake bread back at the beginning of my Intro to Baking class, I have always baked my own. And since I have a sandwich for lunch every day, that's a decent amount. My bread baking has evolved over time. I began with book recipes for regular yeast white bread. I soon made my sourdough starter and went to the sourdough recipes. Those eventually evolved into whole-wheat recipes, subbing half the bread flour for whole-wheat. Finally, I began making "100%" whole-wheat bread (not really 100%, my starter uses AP). However, this evolution brought some problems. Whole-wheat bread is denser, chewier, and doesn't rise like white bread does. Seeing as how I use my bread for sandwiches, that led to a bit of a problem. My 100% whole-wheat bread had great flavor, but was dense, and squat. Baking in a bread pan didn't even help that much and being so dense it could be even hard to eat if your throat was dry.

After a good amount of research I found a number of potential variables to improve my bread. I know that technically and professionally speaking, one should only change one variable at a time so as to observe the changes before going onto another variable, but I'm impatient and only bake bread about every 2 weeks so in my last batch I made a lot of changes to my recipe.

I'm still going 100% whole-wheat flour. However this time I added three new ingredients. First is dry milk powder. I've used this in the past, but not always. It doesn't have a big effect on the rise but it has some, as well as some flavor. Next is a bit of olive oil. I am not crazy about the idea of adding fat to my bread, since that's making it an enriched dough, but it is supposed to help rise a little and make it softer. Finally, I began using vital wheat gluten. I have been apprehensive to use it since it's kinda expensive, but I decided to finally give it a go. The results are a pretty fine loaf.


It may not be as light and airy as Wonder Bread, but I can't really call that bread anyway but rather a blob of chemicals. For whole-wheat bread however I think it got pretty good rise. It is still a little squat but I think it'll make a good sandwich.

I'm still gonna tinker with it a little bit. I'm going to see if taking out the olive oil will make any significant changes-it's not an ingredient I want in there, so if I can drop it and maintain good results I will. I also might add a touch more vital wheat gluten, but I don't want to overdo it or it could make it too rubbery, both in taste and texture, so it'll only be a little if at all. I am however satisfied and feel that I've made some good progress-not just in the bread, but in the fact that I am able to tinker with recipes to produce better results by knowing the effects of ingredients, their quantities, and stuff like that.