3 Tips for baking bread
As many of you know, we bake our own bread for service every day. A staple of our menu and a great tool for sopping up the beautiful sauces on our dishes, here are some tips for your bread making at home!
It should be note that our bread, is a standard fluffy White Loaf, that pairs perfectly with whipped butter!
We serve our whipped butter with various salts and herb toppings that go with the seasons or our menu changes. It is an easy way to WOW guests.
A loaf from our restaurant.
1) Use a scale to measure your ingredients!
This may come as a no brainer to chefs or avid home bakers, but if you are just starting out or giving bread a go for the first time, its a great tip that can save you clean up and mistakes.
The reason a scale is superior to measuring cups is due to accuracy. The scales not only allow you to get your measurements accurate, but there’s something about a number not being exactly right that makes you feel obligated to be correct to the gram.
Good math’s, maketh good Bread!
2) For breads sakes, leave it to Proof!
The proving of bread. An old technique that requires time and patience!
If you want good bread, DO NOT RUSH IT. Just like you wouldn’t rush the measuring, don’t waste the resting either. Take the time to set up your dough for rising. Let it rise in a bowl, or a container with a lid.
Although dough should be able to rise at room temp, it can take some time. To speed this up, add some heat to the equation! Pop it near a warm oven or under a heat lamp - if you are in a kitchen. Be careful adding warmth to the equation, because like the dough taking forever in a cold room, the dough can go fast in a hot one.
Our dough follows a simple process, in a bowl, with clingwrap, under the heat lamp, folded after the first hour, then in increments and moved from direct heat lamp exposure, to nearby. All up our proving process can take around 1 hour and 40 minutes - 2 hours (YEP, Every day before service Darcy or Matt does this).
3) Shape the bread!
Although it’s common to shape bread in molds, it is just as beneficial to shape bread in a ball and cook it on a tray! Too often we skip the little idiosyncrasies that make a recipe great, in favour of getting to the decorating.
For your first few loaves, you should work on getting the flavour, technique and times right. This includes, the ideal ratios of ingredients, the time to proof, the time to cook and the time to rest.
After this you can work on the styling elements, such as shape, crust, scoring, flour placement.
To shape the bread, use a bread scraper, a clean bench and clean unfloured hand. Baby the bread mixture and roll the scraper off and on the bench to gently massage a ball shape. Keep up with this technique until you are happy with a shape. Our bread is so fluffy and full of air, we do not need to knead our bread.
Other odds & ends
Put your oven on steam mode (if in a kitchen) OR add a water bath to create steam for cooking. This is called water injection.
Don’t flour the bench as it makes the dough slip around and hard to work with.
We cook our bread for 28-30 mins.