The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [151]
It is possible to make good bread without salt, as we describe in the section on Saltless Bread, and many people, for reasons of health and/or taste, prefer it that way. In the recipes in this book we have used what most people who are accustomed to lightly salted food find acceptable, but you will easily adjust our quantities to suit your own taste and needs.
Most salt available in retail stores contains anticaking agents, and often “free-flowing” agents as well. These additives do not affect breadbaking in any noticeable way, but if you prefer to avoid them, check to see if your natural food store sells additive-free salt. If it lumps up a little, you can usually crumble it easily, but do protect it from moisture so it won’t turn into a hard rock. When you make bread, if your salt is not finely ground, dissolve it in part of the water measure rather than stir it into the flour so that you will be sure it gets mixed evenly into the dough.
Much has been made lately of the superiority of sea salt, and you can pay an outrageous amount for it if you are willing. There are bakers who swear by the beautiful lilac-colored salt from a particular bay in South France, and others who pine for the petal-pink sea salt of Hawaii. It is true that bread dough is conditioned by many minerals, and perhaps these exotic salts contain some of them. However, even if the water you use in your bread is so soft that it is practically distilled, we question whether any minerals that might be present in these salts could be worth their exotic price.
As for normal sea salt, whether you find it on the supermarket shelf or in a specialty store, most likely it originated in the vast red salt-drying ponds that stretch along the southern part of the San Francisco Bay: it is there that the Leslie Salt Company manufactures virtually all the sea salt sold in this country. Ocean water is dried, scraped up, washed, redried, redissolved and precipitated, so that what is left is very nearly pure sodium chloride. If it were not purified in this way, there would be a substantial amount of ocean pollution along with the salt—not only bits of seaweed and fish but some toxic minerals like lead and cadmium, and residues of pesticides, as well. Leslie’s sea salt is 99.95 percent sodium chloride. To be “food grade,” salt must be very pure indeed; and this is true whether the salt was mined from the earth or evaporated from seawater, and no matter how much you pay for it.
About the Ingredients:
Sweeteners
There is a persistent myth that added sugar or honey is necessary to provide food for the yeast. Yeast does prefer added sugars and will choose them first over those from the dough itself, but truth to tell, the yeast can convert dough starches into sugars perfectly well, and these are adequate for it in all but the very longest-rising doughs. The classic daily breads of Europe contain no added sugar or fat, but Americans seem to prefer their breads a little on the sweet side, and most of our recipes do call for some sweetener.
Sugar in any form—honey, fruit, molasses, or granulated cane—not only affects the bread’s flavor but also makes the crumb tenderer; and when you slice the finished loaf and put it into the toaster, the toast browns faster. In small quantities—about 1 tablespoon per loaf or so—the type of sweetener you use will not make too much difference in taste, but when there is more, the sweetener should be considered a flavoring agent as well.
We use honey because the flavor harmonizes well with whole wheat, and for ecological and other reasons we prefer it to refined sugar. For many of us, besides, there are real advantages to keeping granulated sugar completely