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Bread is Broken

nytimes.com

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Re: Bread is Broken

#51

Post by trhway »

supermarket white bread, beside all other strange ingredients, has key technological difference from "normal" bread - the bottom-line industrial optimization favors adding more yeast and sugar for faster rise instead of longer rise with less yeast and sugar for "normal" bread, and as the result in the "normal" bread this lesser amounts are processed more completely. The longer process in the "normal" bread also allows for more carbohydrates (starch) from the flour to be converted into sugars and be processed by the yeast. (i did my one summer time at a completely manual bakery 25 year ago in USSR - it was among the best bread i ever tasted, and we did have relative shortage of yeast and sugar, so we used less of it with warmer water and let it a bit more time to rise)

On practical note - here in SV the "German/Bavarian" or "Russian" breads or the bread from Acme bakeries seem pretty ok.

Re: Bread is Broken

#52

Post by venomsnake »

fweespeech wrote: post #49
venomsnake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/06/better-no-knead-b... You can search on no knead breads. They are long recipes. But require almost no hands on time. You mix, you wait, you wait, you wait, you wait, you shape, you throw into preheated dutch oven and eat :)

I took you literally on those 5 minutes. ;) That one says 15. I was mainly hoping for the 2/3rd reduction in labor because I'm a lazy sob.

Quadruple the dough and use it on 4 consecutive days. It will average pretty close to 5 minutes then. Also cut the dough and do not tear it.

Re: Bread is Broken

#53

Post by InclinedPlane »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #28

I appreciate all the do-it-yourself fervor on this thread but baking seems like a decent application of the principle of economic specialization. I, for one, enjoy visiting my local bakery every few days, and they do a better job than I will ever do even if I quit my job and practice baking full-time, which I'm not planning to do.

That only works when the "market" has similar desires as your own. Which might be true in, say, Europe with regard to bread but in the US it's hard to find high quality bread at a typical grocery store. I've been learning how to make bread at home for some years and now I'm pretty good at it. I prefer my bread to anything I can find in a store easily and while it does take time, effort, and the initial expense of buying the necessary equipment, I work full time and making bread isn't a huge time impact on my life.

Re: Bread is Broken

#54

Post by bad_user »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #38
bad_user wrote: post #9

Ironically, sliced bread is the worst. Normal bread can get stale, dry and hard. But packaged sliced bread is much less perishable. I've seen sliced bread having the same texture and taste after a whole week of lying on a kitchen countertop. And when you read the ingredients on its packaging, you begin to understand why, as sliced bread is subject to the techniques of processed foods such as the addition of preservat…

> In addition sliced bread is subject to every health-related fad in existence. Low carb bread? Sure. How could you have "low carb bread"? Bread is a big bundle of carbohydrate. It'd be like low sugar caramel.

This is because you're thinking of actual bread and not substances that are engineered to resemble bread. Usually this is done by replacing grains in part or in whole with something else. Much like low-fat milk. Of course, a bread made of whole-wheat flour would be healthier because it contains fiber, besides some minerals that are good for us. But because we are obsessed with numbers related to specific ingredients, the food industry obliged.

Re: Bread is Broken

#55

Post by thaumasiotes »

bad_user wrote: post #54
thaumasiotes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition sliced bread is subject to every health-related fad in existence. Low carb bread? Sure. How could you have "low carb bread"? Bread is a big bundle of carbohydrate. It'd be like low sugar caramel.

This is because you're thinking of actual bread and not substances that are engineered to resemble bread. Usually this is done by replacing grains in part or in whole with something else. Much like low-fat milk. Of course, a bread made of whole-wheat flour would be healthier because it contains fiber, besides some minerals that are good for us. But because we are obsessed with numbers related to specific ingredients,…

> Usually this is done by replacing grains in part or in whole with something else. Much like low-fat milk.

Low fat milk is made by just removing fat from whole milk; the milk changes consistency and possibly color because of this. Fat is not a huge component of milk.

There are milk products that replace the fat with some fat-like substitute; for example, a store near me sells something called "fat-free half and half", when half and half should be about 10% fat. But low-fat milk just refers to milk with a large part of the fat removed.

Re: Bread is Broken

#56

Post by marcosdumay »

hugh4 wrote: post #37
jandrese wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, homemade bread ends up being a lot tastier than store bought if your only store bought options are big mass produced soft breads. The crust especially suffers on packaged breads. You don't even need fancypants flour. Just an oven and a few minutes to prepare it (plus rise time and bake time of course). I prefer to do a half and half mix of wheat and bread flour, but everybody is free to do what they lik…

How much can they really charge that makes it worth spending ten minutes kneading, ten minutes washing your hands and the next two days pulling out arm hairs with caked on dough? That's my experience with bread making anyway. No matter what bread I buy, bread isn't a major part of my weekly budget.

I've found that a 2 minutes preparation for a bread machine and a 3 minute cleaning is much cheaper than a 15 minutes walk into a bakery.

But then, I just reduce the number of walkings by buying lots of breads every time I go there, and freezing them afterwards. Still less time consuming than using the machine - but the bread tastes worse.

Re: Bread is Broken

#58

Post by rtkwe »

gahahaha wrote: post #33
Dirlewanger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, maybe modern processed bread that has sugar in it. Questionable otherwise, unless you have a source.

Agriculture was terrible for our health - even before sugar became a part of our diet. http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...

I'm happy for whatever health problems it incurred since it seems to have allowed and fostered modern civilization. I think a very important line from that article is this:

> The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity,"

Hunter-Gatherer works fine until you reach a certain population and it seems that that population/lifestyle is below the point where you start to really see civilization lifting up and starting to advance quickly.

Re: Bread is Broken

#59

Post by sampo »

fweespeech wrote: post #43
venomsnake wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an oven - making a boule is very easy and has only 5 minutes of on hand time?

Recipe? :D

No knead bread

3 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast. Mix in a bowl. Add 1.5 cups water, mix in. A wooden spoon, especially bamboo, is nice for mixing, but you can use anything, even your hand.

Cover (lid, or plastic wrap), let sit for 12 to 20 hours. Afterwards, you should see bubbles or "craters" of bubbles on top. If after 12 hours not yet much bubbles, let sit longer. If change of plans and you have no time to bake, can store the bowl in a fridge for half a day or a day, it will develop a more sour taste.

You need a dutch oven with a lid, or a pot with a lid, or something with a lid. No plastic parts, oven proof.

Put the dutch oven into oven, heat oven to 450F/250C. When the dutch oven is very hot, take it out of the oven (careful, it really is hot), sprinkle flour or something at the bottom (I use cornmeal) to prevent sticking. Pour the dough in. Try not to degas the bubbles in the dough too much, as these are what gives the bread the oven rise. Sprinkle flour (or cornmeal, or seeds, or something) on top, not necessary but makes the bread look nicer.

Bake 30 min with lid, remove the lid, bake about 20 min, or until the bread looks almost too dark.

Here I let the dutch oven to give the shape to the bread, so this works even if the dough is too wet and cannot be shaped into a loaf. You can also experiment using a tiny bit less water to get a bit more solid dough. Most other no knead recipes still make you flour a surface and shape the loaf using your hands. This leads to more cleaning afterwards, so I just left this part out.

Re: Bread is Broken

#60

Post by cafard »

rudolf0 wrote: post #50
jobu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bakery near us that makes some amazing Bavarian sunflower wheat bread. They sell it pre-sliced in a few local grocery stores as well, but it definitely doesn't keep very long. Most store-bought bread is shelf-stable for weeks, and this stuff is only a few days. We've found that freezing it and then using a toaster to thaw it works great - almost as good as fresh.

I've found great-tasting bread always goes stale within about 2 days. No way around it really. Any longer than that and it must have some preservatives, in which case taste and texture will suffer.

I won't say that all breads freeze well, but some do.
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