10 Tips for perfect bread
Finding bread making a bit confusing? Today I share 10 tips that will make the bread process a lot easier for you - and you will have perfect bread every time!
Let’s get our hands dirty
Today we are making good, old fashioned yeast bread. Bread that doesn’t need a starter, strange techniques, or anything like that. If you just want to make your bread from scratch instead of buying it from the shops, and find the tastiest recipe that makes you feel your best, then we will definitely cover that here! I’ve got 10 tips for how to make perfect yeast bread every time, and how to make the process painless for you. All you need for this bread is flour of your choice, a pinch of salt, a small amount of dry yeast and water and a tiny bit of olive oil! So let’s get stuck in:
10 tips for perfect yeast bread every time
1. Make your life easier with gluten!
Gluten is a group of proteins found in grains. When flour mixes with water, gluten in the flour form a sticky network that has a glue-like consistency. That’s actually how it got the name GLUten! This glue-like consistency makes the dough elastic and gives bread the ability to rise during baking. It also provides a chewy, nice texture when you eat it.
Most people can tolerate gluten absolutely fine. Now, even if you don’t have a gluten intolerance, if you suspect that bread makes you feel bad in any way, it could of course be gluten that does this. But before you give up on bread, definitely make your own from scratch, because it is likely to be much better for you than store bought. Two main reasons: in store bought bread dough, they often add gluten, because it makes the process of the bread rising go much faster – and that might be too much gluten for you even if you’re not intolerant – secondly, they add preservatives, to slow down the decomposing. I don’t think preservatives are very good for us, I certainly have experienced that food with preservatives are not great for me.
So how can you make your life easier with gluten? Knowing that gluten is what helps the bread rise and get its nice texture, you can use that to your knowledge. You can mix different flours together in bread in whatever combination you want, but if you are wanting to ensure your bread rises, then try to get in a good amount of the flours with the highest gluten content in! Wheat is at the top – which is the most common flour. Plain flour, all-purpose flour… whatever you call it. You can make your bread making easier by using a bit of it. That doesn’t mean you have to make a white loaf, but if you do 1kg of flour, then maybe do half of that as wheat flour and then mix in others. I’ve played around with this a lot to minimise the amount of plain flour and find that if my bread consists of about 20% plain flour minimum, I’m usually fine!
2. Seeds and nuts go inside
Okay so we’ve talked about flour - let’s talk about seeds and nuts for a second. It’s lovely to add some to your bread, it looks and tastes delicious, and they are very healthy too. I’m sure you’ve seen lots of bread in bakeries that have seeds on top. Now, it looks great – until you touch it, move it or try to cut a slice. They just fall off! It’s much better to incorporate the seeds in to the dough itself so they don’t just fall off, that’s such a waste. Mix your seeds in with the dry ingredients at the start.
3. Don’t use TOO MUCH yeast!
Now it seems counterproductive to use less yeast as yeast helps the bread rise, but too much of it does not only compromise the taste, it can also end up collapsing on itself. That’s not what we’re after. As an example, if I am making two loaves of bread, I use about 1kg of flour, and for all that flour I only use 7 grams of yeast, which is about 2 teaspoons. When you buy packets of dry yeast, they are usually 7 grams, so that’s perfect for two loaves. If you are in a hurry and need your dough to rise super quick, then you can go for a bit more, but do keep in mind that it’s not the best for flavour – or for your stomach.
4. Use COLD water, not warm!
This might surprise you, but I actually recommend using cold water in your bread dough. You may have been told to use warm water – that is because warm water kicks that process of the gluten proteins binding together - the rising process - in gear, so it rises faster. But! When you use cold water, the gluten still does the job and the yeast will too, it just takes a bit longer. But that’s a good thing! Because if the dough has to rise for a long time, like 3 hours or so, the taste will be sooo much better! So don’t rush that process if you can avoid it. Again, if you are in a hurry and need the bread to rise in an hour, then fine, use warmer water. But keep in mind, your water can’t be TOO cold, but it can be TOO warm (meaning it can kill the yeast).
5. Kneading
Kneading is just another way of getting that rising process going, to encourage the gluten, basically. Now you can bake bread without kneading it – but then you have to allow even more time for the gluten to connect on its own. I always knead for quite some time; it also gives me an opportunity to feel how the dough is feeling and get a sense of how the bread will develop. You can knead bread by hand (which is a really good arm workout FYI!), in a food processor or with a bread machine.
By the way, wet dough is nice as it will result in a nice, crispy outside, and that is a bit messier to knead, but just accept the mess (I’m going to give you a clean-up tip at the end as well so don’t worry!)
6. Rising and proving - GIVE IT TIME!
I think I’ve made it clear by now, the best thing you can do for good bread is to give it time to rise, and then to prove. Rising is when you’ve kneaded it and put it in a bowl to rise to twice the size. Proving is when it rises for a second time (ideally to twice the size again) – when you’ve put the bread in the loaf tins – or shaped it in whatever way you want to bake it.
Think of making bread as a day-long affair. Don’t rush it. There’s not much actual work involved, so if you make it in the morning and allow it to rise and prove for a few hours, you will have exceptional bread and you can enjoy the yeasty bakery smell in your kitchen for the whole afternoon! Remember that you can freeze bread after it’s cooled down, so just make it into something you do regularly, and you don’t have to rush to make fresh bread on a day where you already needed it. That way you can plan ahead and make it when it suits you!
To avoid the dough sticking to the cling film or towel you cover it with, you can put some olive oil on top, or my favourite is putting quite a lot of flour on top of the bread. It’s a bit less messy, and it looks pretty with some flour on top anyway. Another tip is to use linen towels to cover the bread, as it doesn’t stick to the dough as easily.
7. Bake it well
Bread should be baked at quite a high temperature. Don’t be afraid! You want to get that nice crispy outside and it does take time to cook through. When you have put the bread in the oven, don’t open the door to check on it tons of times. Let it do its thing. A small loaf of bread, I cook in a fan oven at about 210ºC, for 30 minutes. When you think it’s done, check by knocking on it, both the top and the bottom. It should feel quite hard and sound hollow.
8. Let it rest
Let the bread rest on a wire cooling rack. Not on a chopping board or similar, it needs to get air flowing to every part of the bread, or it will start “sweating” and get soggy.
The toughest part – don’t slice the bread open until it’s cooled down! The moisture will escape the bread and go dry much, much quicker. So stay strong. Unless you are serving to a lot of people and the whole bread will be eaten immediately, of course. If you do want to have the opportunity to eat the bread straight out of the oven, you can make bread rolls instead! Then you will eat the whole thing so you don’t have to worry about moisture escaping, and leave the rest to cool down and put them away.
Make sure any bread you put in the freezer has cooled down completely first.
9. Clean up with cold water
Cleaning up is the least enjoyable part for me, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. But when I learned that cleaning with cold water is the way to go, it got so much easier! The reason is, that as I talked about earlier, warm water kickstarts that gluten-connection process. So, when you put warm water on the leftover bits of dough from your worktop, you’re just starting that process again.
Just try it – cold water. It’s easier the quicker you get the surfaces cleaned, but even if it’s dried out a bit, you can get all of it with a cloth and really cold water. You’re welcome!
10. A bonus tip: 3 easy yeast bread versions
Thank you for checking out these tips – I really hope they help you make the tastiest, prettiest bread! My 10th and final bonus tip is actually a recipe for the kind of bread I make: I’ve shared 3 of my favourite flour/seed combinations that are still safe bets, but super tasty on this page. These all make one large loaf or two small loaves of bread, or about 10 large bread rolls.
Have you made your own bread? How did it go? Post on Instagram and tag me @TheFromScratchBody and use the hashtag #TheFromScratchBody so I don’t miss it!
