And We’re Done…
This marks the last week of the CSB in its current form as we are moving from Berkeley. Appropriately today’s blog entry is about the final stage of the bread baking process – the actual baking. This is when all of the hard work and balancing, tinkering, mixing and shaping pay off. If you did most everything right what you end up with is a gorgeous, full loaf of bread with beautiful color, a slight shine on the crust, dramatic scoring and delicious flavor. This makes it all worth it.
Last week I discussed the final proof for the bread; a crucial step is ensuring a balance of flavor and a good rise on your bread. It’s a little nap for your dough before you send it into a searing hot oven where the yeast experiences the pinnacle of its productivity and then collapses.
So what happens during the bake? First, the bread warms up from the heat in the oven. Now the heat is coming from all over (or should be). That means baking on a thick baking stone so the dough gets a blast of heat from underneath in addition to the ambient heat in the oven. That gets the rise going.
Second, the bread starts to rise. This is from two reactions. The warm dough gets the yeast all excited and they start extra-producing acids and CO2. The heat also evaporates the hydrated dough, releasing steam in the bread. Between the CO2 and the steam, the bread begins to rise. The gluten network of your dough needs to be sufficiently strong to capture the CO2 and steam so they don’t just evaporate out of the bread. If your bread isn’t strong enough, you will get a very flat and sad loaf of bread. This goes back to the mixing, folding and shaping stages.
Third, the yeast begins to die off after it reaches a certain temperature and the starches in your dough begin to gelatinize. Gelatinization is the process by which wet dough firms up into what is recognizable as typical bread crumb.
Now the key is to get all these things to occur in a certain order to maximize each’s benefits for the final loaf. So while the heat activates the yeast and releases steam making the rise possible, it also has the completely opposite effect of hindering the rise by creating a crust on the outside of the dough. When the crust starts to harden, the bread can’t rise any more because the pressure from the escaping steam and CO2 isn’t strong enough to push out against the crust.
This means something needs to be done to hold off the hardening of the crust until the rise is nearly complete. And the best way to do that is to create a moist environment in the oven. This is where the very hazardous process of steam production comes into play. In a commercial deck oven used by bakeries, there is a nifty steam button that the baker pushes for 2 seconds, steam automatically releases in the oven without opening the oven and letting heat out, and all is good.
In a home oven, this is an entirely different proposition. Some fancy-shmancy home ovens come with steam injection systems. Not mine. Not most people’s. So, what’s to be done? I have gone through a couple different systems for creating a moist environment in my oven. One of the challenges is getting moistness in there without letting too much heat escape. Now an oven, while a marvel, is not very good at retaining heat if the door is open. I’ve measured it and my oven loses about 100 degrees after being open for 20 seconds. When you need a 500-degree oven to cook your bread, you can’t be losing that kind of heat.
The challenge then is to get moisture into the oven somehow without losing too much heat. One popular method that lots of baking books call for is keeping a metal baking sheet in your oven that pre-heats with your baking stone. Then when you want to bake you boil some water and pour it into the baking sheet and slide your bread into the oven. Many books call for then opening the oven at 30 second intervals to mist the inside of the oven with a spray bottle to keep the interior moist. There are some negatives to this approach: to begin with you want the baking environment to already by moist when you slide your bread in. This approach has the steam being generated simultaneously with the bread going in, so that’s not great. Second, you lost quite a bit of heat this way. With the oven being open so you can pour the water in and then turn around, grab your dough, and slide it into the oven, you’re oven has been open for at least 20 seconds. Then re-opening the door each time you need to spray the oven loses even more heat. Finally, this method creates one big blast of steam, not the steady 2-second steam that is needed so you are not even getting optimal oven moisture.
Here’s what I learned to do at the artisan bread class I took at San Francisco Baking Institute. I keep a cast iron skillet filled with nuts and bolts on the floor of the inside of my oven. This preheats along with my baking stone for over an hour before the bake. I then use a tin pie pan that I have punctured lots of holes into and fill it with ice cubes right. I very quickly open the door to the oven, slip the pie pan onto/inside of the cast iron skillet, and wait. Within 30 seconds I begin to hear the steam hissing; the ice has begun to melt and is dripping through holes and immediately turning into steam upon hitting the hot metal of the nuts and bolts. Now I have a moist oven environment to slip by bread into. So I quickly open the door, slide in the bread onto the baking stone, and quickly close the door. After I close it, the ice continues melting creating that steady steaming action that the bread responds so well to. Since I’ve adopted this method, I get much better rise on my bread.
The bread then bakes, the crust caramelizes, and the aromas start pouring out of the kitchen. When the bread is done, I pull it out and leave it to cool for at least an hour before breaking into it. The cooling off period is very important as the starches are still gelatinizing and the heat masks the true, full flavor of the bread. After that, there’s nothing left to do but enjoy all the hard work of a truly simple, yet complex and rewarding process.
Thanks everyone who’s been apart of the Berkeley CSB experience. I learned so much and feel by bread baking has improved by leaps and bounds over this last year. I couldn’t have done it without having people to bake for. Enjoy this week’s breads!!
Berkeley Sourdough with Whole Wheat
Chocolate Cranberry Bread
Dutch Crunch Rolls
