• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

If you are looking at your bread with an eye to lowering fat content, we suggest you take a canny look at just how much you spread on the slice. It is very easy to put a full tablespoon of butter on a piece of toast, and building the habit of using less takes a continuing, conscious effort. If you are reducing the fat in your diet even more drastically and have given up fatty spreads on your bread altogether, why not try the European custom of breaking fresh bread rather than slicing it? The exposed crumb is then much softer and more appetizing. On this score, too, hearth breads and sourdoughs, rolls, and bread-sticks, are good eating without the butter.

Grease

Nearly everything you bake on or bake in has to be greased to prevent sticking. In our experience, vegetable oil does not work reliably for this job unless it is hydrogenated—the solid white stuff sold as vegetable shortening. We kept a can of this around with a small cloth napkin inside—using it only for greasing—until our friend and baking wizard Manuel Freedman suggested this alternative, which works beautifully.

Buy some lecithin, either the granule or liquid form, at the supermarket or any natural food store. Mix ½ cup lecithin and 1 cup liquid vegetable oil, blending smooth in the blender. Keep it in the refrigerator. Use this for greasing anything—it works like magic. For best results, apply a very thin coat only, being careful to cover the entire surface. “It’s the best release product in the business,” says Manuel, and he knows whereof he speaks.

*Corliss A. Bachman, Home Food Systems (Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press, 1981)

Timing

If you’re a canny baker, you can manipulate the quantity of yeast and the temperature of the dough so that its rising times suit your convenience, and so that you produce the bread you like.

As you’ve seen, most of the recipes in this book make yeasted dough that is ready for the oven in three or four hours, but if you want to let the dough rise longer nearly any recipe can be adapted to accomplish this. Similarly, you can reduce the preparation time so that your fast dough is in the oven in 2 ½ hours.

There are other reasons to vary the timing of your bread. More yeast and warmer dough make a higher loaf. Cool dough and a longer rising time produce a slightly smaller bread, but one that is flavorful, keeps well, and is very nutritious.

There are some tricks to making good bread on your own schedule. Some of them are obvious, others are not. In this section we try to explain the possibilities, but if you are a beginner, we would urge you most earnestly to set aside time to make A Loaf for Learning at a leisurely pace once or twice before you try changing timings. When you get fancy it helps to know what you’re about.

When you vary timings, it’s particularly important to keep alert to what is happening to the dough; that is your tipoff to how well you are adjusting the amount of yeast and the temperature of the dough. After each rise, look really carefully at your half-inch finger-poke. Does the dough come back a little, shrinking the hole? For the next rising, you will want to give the dough a bit more warmth so it can ferment adequately in the amount of time you have allotted. If the dough not only doesn’t fill in the hole but sighs profoundly with alcohol on its breath, next time keep it cooler, for you are courting a gray, yeasty-tasting loaf. The final rise, or proof, is the most important to time closely. Especially if you’re new at this, try to arrange to work nearby so that you can keep an eye on the loaf.

Bakers call doughs that rise slowly “long” and those that rise quickly “fast” It isn’t strictly grammatical, but it is a convention, and we’ve followed it in this book.

Timings for Straight Doughs

A straight dough is one that has been mixed using all its ingredients from the beginning. Most of our recipes follow this model. In the next pages we present the four basic straight dough timing patterns. Most of the breads in this book can be made following any one