MAKING WHOLE-GRAIN BREAD

BREAD

Breadmaking has held a special place in our lives for a long time, but it was when we took to vegetarian ways that the hearty brown stuff became the cornerstone of our diets — friendly and familiar as breakfast toast, sandwiches for lunch, after-school snack, and sometimes rolls or muffins at dinner. In some mysterious way it filled the gap that opened up when meat left the scene.

In the decade since Laurel’s Kitchen first appeared, we’ve learned quite a lot about how to make our brown Staff of Life lighter and tastier. To tell the complete story would take a book — and did: The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book (Random House, 1984) gives the full story on whole-grain breadmaking, ingredients, techniques, fancies, and all. Naturally, we recommend it with unreserved enthusiasm. In this chapter, we hope to tantalize you with some wonderful loaves; there is enough here to give you an excellent start as a breadmaker. Once you know how rewarding it is, there’ll be no stopping you.

We have talked at length elsewhere about what a splendid food whole grains are. Good wheat bread may well be the whole grain par excellence. Where fiber is concerned, the fermentation of the dough in breadmaking softens rough bran without lessening its effectiveness. Fermentation also releases minerals that otherwise can be bound up in the grain by phytic acid. All the nutrients of the whole grain are present, of course, including the two dozen that are not replaced in “enriched” white flour.

Fresh bread is so irresistible that it displaces a lot of less nourishing food, especially at snack time. Whole-grain bread is a good choice for dieters because it’s low in calories but still nourishes, fills, and satisfies. (This is true even if you butter it, though as San Francisco gourmet Harvey Steiman opined while happily munching our homemade slices, “Bread that isn’t good enough to eat without butter isn’t worth eating.”)

Besides the good food, though, something wonderful happens to your kitchen and your life when breadmaking becomes a regular activity. The fragrance and suspense of it, the sharing of its warm goodness at the end, the very fact that you care enough to take the time — all these remind us that home is a fine place to be. Though perhaps a small thing, breadmaking is one counter-weight to the forces pulling family and friends away and apart. So it has been for us, and we hope you will find it so too.

If you have children near at hand, let them take part in your baking days. It’s a great way to spend time together, and no moppet is so small that he or she doesn’t like to get fingers into dough, make a small shape to bake, and enjoy eating it, too. Bigger children can manage real jobs, beginning with greasing pans or measuring ingredients. Even before they were teenagers, some we know could handle a family baking all by themselves — a source of considerable pride.

Some Words About Ingredients

Before we get into the recipes, there are a few things to know about the ingredients. If you are going to go to the trouble to make bread, you want to be sure that your efforts are supported by the quality of your flour and yeast. Even the most skillful baker can’t get good bread from bad ingredients.

FLOUR

FRESHNESS

Unlike white flour, whole wheat flour is perishable and must be fresh to make good bread. If you buy packaged flour and can’t decipher the “pull date” on it, ask your storekeeper. Don’t try to make bread with whole-grain flour that has been on the shelf for more than two months. If you are in doubt, taste a pinch: there should be no bitterness. At home, store whole-grain flour in a cool place; if you are likely to have it around longer than a couple of weeks, keep it sealed airtight in the refrigerator. The day before you bake, take what you will need out of the refrigerator so it can come to room temperature before you use it.

FLOUR TYPE

To make a light, airy loaf, you have to have flour that is high in protein—specifically, gluten protein, because gluten is what makes a stretchy structure that lets your bread rise high. Only wheat, of all the grains, has enough gluten to make light yeasted bread; and good-quality whole wheat flour has plenty of it: you don’t have to add refined flour to get a light loaf. When you shop, look for “bread flour” milled from hard red spring wheat, hard red winter wheat, or hard white wheat. Hard red spring wheat usually makes the highest loaves. If the bag doesn’t have this information but does give a nutritional profile, the protein content should be 14 percent or more by weight. Whole wheat flours labeled “all purpose” or “pastry flour” are milled from low-protein wheat. They can make tender quick breads, muffins, and pancakes, but they do not have enough gluten protein to make light yeasted breads.

GRIND

Stone-ground flour is often considered superior for breadmaking, and indeed we prefer it. The coarser grinds especially lend a delightful texture to the bread, and the rough fiber is ideal for digestive health. But if you want a really light loaf, very finely ground flour will help you achieve it. In past years, stone grinding was preferable because faster methods of grinding produced enough heat to degrade the flour. Nowadays, careful millers air-cool both stone mills and hammer mills so that nutrients and baking quality are protected, and you can choose the grind that will suit your recipe best.

HOME MILLS

Home mills offer many advantages, especially to people who do not have a reliable source of high-quality flour near at hand. Since all whole grains properly stored will keep perfectly fresh until they are ground, having a home mill means that you can store wheat, corn, rye, and buckwheat until you need them, then grind them to order. There is a big difference in baking performance and flavor when the flour is very fresh, no matter what you are baking.

Salt

Salt strengthens the gluten and regulates the growth of the yeast, helping to make a light, even-textured loaf. If you want to cut back, we suggest first reducing the salt in whatever you put on the bread rather than in it.

If you do want to make bread without salt, though, here are some tips: Don’t omit the sweetener. Expect a much faster rise. Keep the dough a little stiff, and be sure to knead very well to compensate for the strength the salt would give the gluten. Put the bread in the oven a little early to ensure an even texture. Saltless loaves may not rise so high, but that’s all to the good because denser bread has more flavor.

Sweeteners

We usually call for honey, but nearly any non-artificial sweetener will please the yeast and sweeten your loaf. Yeast, by the way, can make its own food from natural sugars and starch in the flour, so unsweetened loaves rise perfectly well.

Oil or Butter

Oil or butter will make your loaves tender and help them stay soft longer. If you add what bakers call a “conditioning amount” — 2 tablespoons oil or 1 tablespoon butter per loaf —   the bread will rise higher for it. On the other hand, if you leave it out, few people will notice any difference. (Everyone will notice if the oil or butter was rancid, however; the bread will be horrid.)

Add oil along with the other liquids. To reap the full benefit of butter, though, add it soft but not melted, about halfway through the kneading time.

Grains Other than Wheat

As we mentioned earlier, wheat is the only grain that contains substantial amounts of the proteins that make gluten, the stretchy substance that lets your yeasted breads rise high. For quick breads, especially muffins, gluten is not essential, and other flours work well. (If no wheat flour is used, eggs help to keep the bread from being crumbly.)

Corn makes delicious quick bread and muffins. In yeasted bread, we have best success using as much as a cup of polenta (coarsely ground cornmeal), softened first in a cup of boiling water and allowed to stand until cool. Knead into two loaves’ worth of dough after the gluten is developed.

Buckwheat, millet, rice, oats, and barley, added as whole cooked grains, lend interesting texture to yeasted bread’s and help keep the loaf moist and fresh. Flours ground from these grains make heavy yeasted breads, but they shine in other places: buckwheat flour and oats make super pancakes, for example.

Rye flour has a little gluten, and a rye-wheat mix from the field was probably the rule rather than the exception in most leavened breads until the last century — hence the magnificent traditional rye breads of Eastern and Northern Europe. Rye is harder to work with than wheat, but a little bit added to wheat flour can make a satisfyingly hearty loaf even for the beginning baker.

Bean flours can be included in small quantities to increase the nutritional value of yeasted and quick breads alike, but they do not improve the flavor or texture.

Yeast

We call for active dry yeast because it is readily available and reliable, but if you like to use moist (or cake) yeast, that’s fine too — use a ½-ounce cake wherever we call for ¼ ounce of active dry.

If you buy yeast in bulk, ¼ ounce of active dry yeast is now just 2 teaspoons, though a few years ago it was a full tablespoon. The leavening power, however, is about the same. Not all active dry yeasts are alike; it’s worth shopping around for one that works best for you. The “fast-acting” yeasts, for example, have a special talent: they tolerate higher temperatures, which gives a faster rise. But if you aren’t in such a hurry, lower-temperature rising, which is slower, gives superior flavor, nutrition, and keeping quality to your loaves.

In fact, the time your dough takes to rise is up to you, and depends entirely on how much yeast you use and how warm you keep the dough.

TESTING YEAST

Whatever kind of yeast you use, be sure it is fresh. If it isn’t, it can’t raise your bread. To check its leavening power, stir the yeast into the proper temperature water. For active dry yeast, follow directions on the package; if there is no recommendation, use water at 110°F. For moist yeast, about 80°F is good. Be sure that the yeast is completely dissolved; then stir in ¼ teaspoon honey or a tablespoon of flour. If the yeast hasn’t foamed to the top within about ten minutes, it has lost its leavening power and you should throw it out. If you bake regularly and have a reliable source for your yeast, you won’t need to test it every time.

STORAGE

Store yeast airtight in the refrigerator. Active dry yeast in packets should be good until the date on the package. (Since air, light, and moisture damage yeast, bulk yeast is sometimes not such a bargain, depending on how it has been handled by the storekeeper.) Moist yeast is very perishable and will keep only about a week, even refrigerated. If you freeze it in foil-wrapped, baking-sized packets, it will be good much longer.

We used to like to bake our bread in the big juice cans — they have many advantages over loaf pans. But not long ago it was discovered that the seams of these cans can leach lead into food that is stored (and, presumably, baked) in them. Now, most of the lead-soldered cans have been replaced with leadless ones. If you bake in cans, look for smooth seams — avoid using cans with a soldered bump down the side.

MAKING WHOLE-GRAIN BREAD

The method we present here is slightly different from what you might have encountered in other books (except our Bread Book). So far as we have been able to tell, written recipes for bread-even the ones for whole wheat bread—are based on the way white flour acts. But using whole wheat in a white-flour manner often doesn’t work, and that has unfairly given whole wheat a bad name. White flour is not only milled to remove the bran and wheat germ, but blended and chemically treated to make it utterly uniform from bag to bag. Whole wheat flour can’t be blended and standardized, so each batch has its own personality.

Our method is based on a traditional one developed long before white flour came along. It accommodates whole wheat flour’s variability and makes the most of its great goodness. Beyond drawing on tradition, we have benefited a good deal from the knowledge and experience of professional bakers and bread scientists, who have helped make the whole process more understandable and controllable — especially in timing the risings and making the bread come out the way you want.

If you are a beginner, you will find the kneading easier if you make only one loaf. Divide the ingredients and the kneading time in half. Keep all the rest the same.

Some kind of a bowl, a pan, and a reasonable oven are all you really need by way of equipment. But because modern active dry yeast works best if it is dissolved in plain water at its favorite temperature, we suggest adding a thermometer to your supplies. A “chefs thermometer,” with a steel spike and a dial that registers from 0° to 212°F, is the best.

GREASE: If you want to avoid using solid shortening, make super-grease: 1 cup oil blended with ½ cup lecithin. Great anywhere you need to grease; use just a thin layer.

USEFUL EQUIPMENT

*. Non-metal cup for dissolving yeast

*. Thermometer

*. Mixing bowl (about 4 quarts)

*. Small mixing bowl

*. Measuring cups, spoons

*. Rubber spatula

*. Dough cutter or spatula

*. Comfortable kneading surface

*. Rolling pin (optional)

*. 2 greased loaf pans, 8″ × 4″

*. 2 teaspoons active dry yeast (1 packet, ¼ oz, or 7 g)

*. ½ cup warm water (about 110°F)

*. 6 cups whole wheat bread flour (2 pounds)

*. 2 ½ teaspoons salt

*. 2 ¼ cups lukewarm water

*. (2 tablespoons honey or other sweetener)

*. (2 tablespoons oil or butter)

Basic Bread Recipe

Warm your yeast-dissolving cup by rinsing it with warm tap water; then measure the ½ cup warm water into it. If there are directions on the yeast package, follow them; otherwise, the water should be 110°F, which feels just-warm to your fingers. Sprinkle yeast into water while stirring with spoon, being sure each granule is individually wetted. Be sure the yeast is completely dissolved.

To get the best from your yeast, be sure the dissolving water has no salt or sweetener in it and that the temperature is right.

Stir the flour in its container and measure 6 cups into your large bowl. (Freshly ground flour will be fluffier, so tap it down in the cup.)

Measure salt and stir it into the flour, making a well in the center. Mix oil and honey, if used, into the 2 ¼ cups water and pour it and the yeast mixture into the well you have made in the flour. Stir the liquid mixture into the flour, beginning in the center and working outward so that you first make a smooth batter, then gradually mix in the rest of the flour to make a soft dough. Squeeze with your wet fingers to make sure the dough is evenly mixed; it will be sticky.

Adjusting the Consistency

Now is the time to adjust the consistency of the dough. Because whole wheat flour varies in the amount of liquid it will absorb, the dough may be too soft or too stiff to make perfect loaves, and learning to adjust the dough at this stage makes all the difference.

Pick up the dough and squeeze it. Feel deep into the dough, not just on the surface. Just-mixed dough is sure to be sticky and wet, but is it soft or is it stiff? Does it resist your touch? Do you feel a strain in the muscles of your fingers? Then it is too stiff. Soft dough makes fighter loaves; but it can be too soft: it has to have enough flour to hold its shape. Does it feel waterlogged, sort of runny, as if the flour wasn’t contributing much substance to it? Then it is too soft.

If the dough is too soft or too stiff, put it back into the bowl and flatten it out. If it is too soft, dust with ¼ cup more flour; if too stiff, sprinkle with 2 tablespoons more water. Fold the dough over, mix it again, and re-evaluate, adjusting until it does seem right. Even perfect dough will seem sticky at this stage, so don’t try for a firm, clay-like touch or you’ll end up with a brick.

Kneading

Kneading makes the dough resilient and stretchy so that the loaves can rise high. There are many styles and methods, but the thing to aim for is a pleasant, easy rhythm that doesn’t tire you. What you are doing is knitting together the proteins from wheat that make gluten, and forming the gluten into a structure that can hold the gas released by the yeast. Depending on how much gluten protein is in the flour you use, it will take an efficient kneader about 20 to 30 minutes to knead two loaves’ worth of dough to perfection. A food processor can do it in minutes (usually in two parts, sometimes three); a mixer with a dough hook takes 8 to 15 minutes.

If you like, you can use a little flour or a little water on the kneading surface to keep the dough from sticking. If you use flour on the board, try to use the tiniest amount possible; the commonest cause of bricky loaves is simply too much flour. (The next commonest is too little kneading.) You can avoid extra flour and water and just use a dough cutter or spatula as shown to pick up the dough and turn it over as you work, until the dough loses most of its stickiness.

Kneading is a matter of pushing and turning. Handle the dough lightly at first, until it loses some of its stickiness; then you can be more vigorous. Keeping the dough as much in a ball as possible, press down on it with the heel and palm of your hands, using your whole body rather than only your arms to give power to the push. Lift, turn the dough, and repeat in a rhythm that is natural to you. If the dough becomes stiff, add a little water by wetting your hands while you work.

"It is hard to overknead by hand, but not by machine. Overkneaded dough gets gooey and can’t regain its elasticity. Dough made from flour that is low in gluten, or flour that’s not fresh, will break down after only a few minutes of kneading."

Somewhere around halfway through kneading, the dough loses its stickiness and begins to get springy and elastic, though if you try to stretch it out it still rips easily. If you look closely at the surface, especially if the flour is stone-ground, you’ll see tiny flecks of bran against a beige background. Try pulling the dough out as shown. You should see little craters all over, and it still tears easily.

If you stopped kneading now, the bread would rise, but not nearly so well as if you continue kneading until the dough is silky smooth. Then, when you pull and tug gently, it will stretch without tearing. The surface will still be sticky, but the dough will have lost its wet quality. If the flour you used was coarse, when you look closely you’ll be able to see that the dough itself is bright white, with the bran embedded in the gluten sheet like freckles on fair skin. Even with finely ground flour, the dough is bright and has a whitish cast. If you pull gently as illustrated here, the dough will make a paper-thin, translucent sheet without tearing. How satisfying!

When you have finished kneading, it’s time for you to rest while the yeast does its work. You can decide how long the rising times will be by how warm or cool you keep the dough.

Clean the bowl and shape the dough into a smooth ball, putting it in the bowl seam-side down. Cover with a platter or a plastic sheet to keep the dough from drying out, being sure that there’s plenty of room for it to double or even triple. Don’t oil or grease the bowl; unabsorbed fat can make holes in the finished loaf. Keep the bowl in a draft-free place at the temperature you need to give you the rising time you want.

Rising

When the dough has finished rising, it’s time to deflate it. How to know when it is ready? Letting it double in volume is one way, but bakers know that doughs vary in the amount they can rise, so they use another test: wet your finger and gently poke it into the dough about one knuckle deep. Look at the hole you’ve made, and the dough around it. Does the dough begin to swell to fill in the hole? Then it needs more time. Does the hole remain, and the dough sigh slightly? Ready! (If the dough sighs profoundly and collapses, with alcohol on its breath, then you know that you have let it rise too long for the temperature it was resting in, and for the second rise, keep it in a cooler place, and/or allow less than half as long as the first rise.)

Deflating the dough and letting it rise again before shaping make a big difference in the the bread’s texture, its keeping quality, and how high the final loaves will be. To deflate, wet your hand and press the dough flat; then form a ball again with the same top surface as before. Cover as before and let rise again. The second rise will take about half as long as the first at the same temperature.

At the end of the second rise, you should have what bakers call “ripe dough”—the kind that makes loaves which rise highest, taste best, and keep fresh longest. Feel the dough: it should have lost its stickiness and be pleasantly dry. When you pull on it, the strands of gluten should be thread-thin, where before they were thick and wet. Newly-kneaded dough is strong but not resilient; ripe dough is elastic. If you were to let it go even longer, the gluten would pass its prime and become brittle and “old,” making grayish bread with poor flavor.

Turn the dough out on a very lightly floured board and flatten it with your hands. If you are making two loaves, divide it in half. Shape the dough pieces into smooth rounds again and cover them up while they rest. Use the time to rinse out the bowl and grease the pans: depending on the dough, it will take about 10 minutes for the dough to “relax” and be ready to shape.

Shaping

There are many ways to shape bread. Shape the relaxed dough gently, in easy stages. Dust the board lightly with flour if the dough seems sticky at all. (Honey, milk and some other ingredients, if they were included, will keep dough sticky even if it is ripe).

Turn the rounded loaf upside down and press or roll it into a circle about an inch thick.

Fold the top of the circle down not quite in half, making a smile. Press from one side to the other, letting the gas pop when it comes out the edge.

Fold in the sides, overlapping the ends slightly, so that the dough is about two-thirds the length of your loaf pan; press again, until the dough is about the length of the loaf pan.

Pull the top of the dough toward you as if you were curling it up jellyroll fashion. Since the piece is not very long, it may not roll up but just sort of fold in half. Either way is fine so long as it is tight and there’s no air trapped in pockets.

Press the seam to seal it, and press the ends down to seal them.

Place the shaped loaf in the center of the greased pan, with the seam on the bottom, in the middle. Push the dough down with your hand to help it cover the bottom of the pan.

Perfect shaping takes practice, and if your early attempts aren’t what they might be, take heart. Some of the most bizarre-looking loaves are most delicious, because they’re so crusty.

The Last Rise, or “Proof”

Let the loaves rise as before, protected from drafts, and contrive to keep the top surface of the dough from drying out. One way to do this is to set each loaf in a plastic bag that has been rinsed with water. Puff out the bag so the loaf can rise up; then seal it and set the balloon in its draft-free spot to rise. An ice chest (without ice) or even a roasting pan with plenty of room will also work well. This may seem like fussing, but a little more care at this last, most delicate part of the job can make all the difference in how high and even-textured your loaves come out.

This last rising will take a little less time than the one before if you maintain the same temperature. Keep the proof temperature about the same as before, or only a little warmer: otherwise the loaves will rise unevenly. About halfway along, preheat the oven.

Knowing when to put the bread in the oven is a learned skill. If the loaves have risen enough to arch above the top of the pan, well and good; but to be really sure, the best test is a gentler version of the finger-poke test you used before. Wet your finger and press lightly on the dough. When it’s first shaped, it springs quickly back; as time passes, your fingerprint will fill in less quickly. The bread is ready for the oven when the dough returns slowly.

You have quite a bit of leeway here, but this is a moment for alertness because underproofed loaves won’t be as high as they should, and may split drastically along one side in the oven; overproofed loaves will be holey at the top and dense on the bottom, and may even collapse.

Baking

A well-insulated oven that recovers its heat quickly after the door has been opened is a great boon for a baker. Ovens that recover slowly may allow bread to overproof before the heat can set the loaves. If yours is like that, put the bread in a little early. Another trick is to preheat to 400°F, turning the heat down just after the bread goes in. You can improve your oven for any kind of baking by lining the bottom with quarry tiles or firebrick. A less drastic step, but useful, is to set a pizza stone in the oven when you start to preheat. For sure, adjust the oven racks and tiles or whatever before you turn on the oven.

Handle the fully-risen loaves very gently. Center them on their racks in the oven, and after half an hour take a peek. Ideally it will take an hour to bake the loaves at 350°F, but ovens vary, and some of them bake unevenly. If the bread seems to need it, you can move the loaves around at this point, or lower the temperature to 325°F if the crust seems too brown. If you think the bread may be done a little early, check again after it’s been in for 45 minutes.

Is it done? A tricky question, especially if you haven’t been baking long enough to learn the quirks of your oven. Here are some characteristics of a loaf that has baked long enough:

It slides out of the pan easily.

It has an even, golden-brown color (darker if you included milk or much sweetener).

If you tap the bottom sharply with your fingertips, the sound is hollow rather than thick.

When sliced, the crumb (all that’s not crust is crumb) springs back to the touch rather than making a wettish dent that stays there.

By Laurel Robertson in "The New Laurel's Kitchen", Crown Publishing Group, New York, 1986, excerpts pp.

Share this post