Contents
Foreword, by J. Lauryl Jennings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction: Pure Bread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Part One Finding Your Comfort Zone 1. Handmade Bread: It’s No Wonder . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Getting in the Zone: How to Use This Book . . . . . . . . 9 3. Flour, Salt, Yeast, Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 4. Understanding Gluten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 5. From Mixing Bowl to Bread Machine:
Use What Works for You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 6. How to Make Dough: The Gentle Craft of Fermentation . . 41 7. Shaping, Proofing, and Baking Bread . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Part Two Yeast Breads 8. Comfort Zone 1: No-knead Breads . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 9. Bagels and Other Specialty Yeast Breads . . . . . . . . . 71 10. Comfort Zone 2: Kneaded Breads . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 11. Unusual Yeast Breads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Part Three Breads Made with Pre-ferments 12. Comfort Zone 3: Sponge, Poolish, Biga . . . . . . . . . . 101 13. Pizza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 vii
viii Contents
Part Four Sourdough and Other Breads Made with a Storage Leaven 14. Levain, Desem, Barm:
Introducing Sourdough Starters . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 15. Comfort Zone 4: Making Your First Sourdough Starter . . 135 16. Making Long-fermented Sourdough Bread . . . . . . . . 145 17. Comfort Zone 5: Sourdough and Yeasted Rye Breads . . . 151
Part Five Low- and No-g luten Breads 18. Comfort Zone 6: Low- and No-gluten Breads . . . . . . . 161 19. Gluten-free Yeast Breads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 20. Gluten-free Sourdough Starters and Breads . . . . . . . . 171
Part Six The Wood-f ired Oven 21. The Homestead Hearth: Why and How I Built
My Wood-fired Oven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 22. Heating and Using Your Wood-fired Oven . . . . . . . . 193 23. Skillet Breads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 24. Naan and Pita: Two Favorite Flatbreads . . . . . . . . . . 211 25. Go to Your Kitchen and Play! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Appendix A: Converting Weights and Measures . . . . . . 225 Appendix B: Recommended Books and Other Resources . 227 Recipe Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 About New Society Publishers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Comfort Zone 1: No-knead Breads
Okay! You’re new to baking bread. You’ve read “How to use this book.” You want to jump right into baking bread without cluttering up your brain with a lot of details about grains and dough development and the perfect way to score a loaf. Probably you’ve seen articles or read a book about no-knead bread (see Appendix B), and this seems like a good place to start. That’s cool. Let’s do it! First, be assured that you can — and will — make wonderful bread without having to understand all the scintillating scientific minutiae about yeast and all that. However, I do think it’s helpful to cover a little bit of background information. It’s kind of like driving a car: You can do it without being trained as a mechanic, but knowing a few basics like why your car needs a battery and fuel tends to help. Like any other yeast bread, simple no-knead bread requires four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast. No sugar. No milk. No eggs. Just flour (in this case, wheat flour), water, salt, and yeast. We’ll get into sourdough later, when you’re ready to move to another comfort zone, but for now we’re using commercial yeast. (See Chapter 3 for recommendations.) Quick review: Yeast is a tiny living organism that eats sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide in a process called fermentation. It’s what makes bread dough rise, before and during baking. Wheat flour contains proteins that form gluten when water comes in contact with the grain. (See Sexy Science Talk on page 45 for a more detailed description of this process.) Gluten, from the Greek word for glue, is 61
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Baked sourdough loaf.
Three loaves of sourdough bread, just put in the wood-fired oven.
Seeded sourdough loaf.
Unbaked Pizza alla Marinara. Wood-fired Pizza Margherita.
Wood-fired Pizza alla Marinara.
Baked Montrealstyle bagels on cooling rack.
Mum’s coffeecake, iced, warm, and ready to eat.