The science of breadmaking
A step by step guide to baking bread with scientific comments
Breadmaking can be hard and a little non-intuitive. Especially so, if you live in India because this is not something we do in our kitchens every day. Some may call it art but it’s a very straightforward process. It’s no less than a science experiment really. You are going to grow fungus in your own kitchen after all!
In this article, we will attempt explaining the process of breadmaking from a scientific perspective so that you really understand what you’re doing. We feel understanding this process at the fundamental level makes you less prone to error and enables you to become much more experimentative, instead of following a rigid step-by-step recipe. There is no fixed “secret” recipe for making bread. Recipes must change with places and ingredients.
Despite scientifically understanding what goes on in the development, making bread by yourself at home surely requires patience and can be quite a physical challenge. The end product, however, is very rewarding — We guarantee! There’s nothing that matches the smell of fresh bread wafting through your kitchen. However, let us give you some more reasons to learn the process. Skip to Step-1 if you’re already convinced!
Why learn to make bread?
There are advantages if you know how to make bread. You can be a “bread-purist” and start baking bread at home just for the love of enjoying a fresh homemade loaf, but you should know that mastering the technique of making a basic bread can enable you to cook so many things. It opens doors to tons of dishes that you’d have never thought of making at home. Here’s a small list:
- Pizza — Need we say more? If you’ve tried making pizza at home with a store-bought base, you will never go back to it once you make the base yourself! Remember, half the taste of a good pizza is in the quality of the base. In fact, getting the right dough is the only difficult part of making a good Pizza. Rest is you going wild with the toppings. More on this later, in a dedicated pizza post.
- Tandoori Rotis, Naans — So you say have a bread dough ready? Then you can make any item from that “Indian Bread” section that you see in the restaurant menus! We will cover this in another post in detail.
- Garlic bread — This is our favorite. It is so simple to make. All it needs is butter and garlic with fresh dough.
… and many more dishes, but we hope this was enough to compel you to start. Let’s go through the basic steps of bread making. Remember, all throughout the process, patience and practice are key.
Please Note
All the steps have been divided into #ChefMode and #GeekMode for cooking instructions and scientific comments respectively
Step 1 — Growing the Yeast
#ChefMode 👨🍳
Yeast gives life to the bread — literally. This is how the bread becomes fluffy.
Start by taking a cup of lukewarm water. Remember, it should not have a burning tinge. If the water is too hot, you will kill the yeast. If its too cold, your yeast is not going to come to life. To this, add a teaspoon of sugar and dissolve it. Add 2 teaspoons of yeast to this. Now, wait for the magic.
You should see a nice layer of froth in about 5–10 min depending on how warm the weather is. It should somewhat resemble the image below.
Your basic starter is ready. We can now proceed to make the dough.
#GeekMode 👨🔬
Yeast is a Fungi, which like every microorganism, multiplies under favorable conditions. Favorable conditions for yeast include 3 things majorly — warm temperature, water, and glucose. In this step, we’ve provided all 3 to it — in the form of warm temperature of the water, the water as a medium itself and the sugar (glucose) which provides food for the yeast. The yeast starts multiplying first and then starts performing anaerobic respiration. This releases carbon dioxide — the gas that makes up the froth.
Step 2 — Kneading the dough
#ChefMode 👨🍳
This step is pure hard work. If you’re kneading for the first time, be patient with the dough initially as it’s going to stick a lot to your fingers. Get ready for 8–10 minutes of an arm workout.
Take the mixture from Step 1 and add 1 tsp of salt to it. Add 1.5–2 cups of white flour (Maida) to this mixture — little by little, not all at once. Take a spatula and start folding in the flour. Once the dough is hard enough or rather difficult to handle with a spatula, take it out of the bowl on your kitchen surface and start kneading. This kneading is no different from what we do with “atta” for Rotis in India. We are aiming for a dough that is slightly softer than roti atta dough.
Kneading is going to allow us to make our bread to develop both strength and stretchiness. Remember the more you knead, the more stretchy the bread will become. However, about 8 minutes of kneading should be enough. Believe us, it’s going to feel much longer than 8 minutes when you do it!
The following pictures should help you on how to knead the dough
The entire motion should look something like this:
We have tried to simplify the kneading technique that we do, through these pictures. However, you can check out a lot of great kneading techniques and tips on YouTube.
By the end of 8–10 min of repeating the above process, you should have a relatively less stick, bouncy and shiny dough like in the image below.
Remember, if you’re learning, it is going to take you a few more tries to develop this skill and end up with the right ratio of flour and water. Now that our foundational structure is in place, its time for the yeast to do its job.
#GeekMode 👨🔬
In reality, Gluten is two proteins instead of one — Glutenin and Gliadin. When we knead the dough, these come together to form Gluten. Gliadin has adhesive properties and Glutenin provides strength and elasticity. Together they form a network of Gluten structures that resembles a mesh or lattice. This gives us the porous structure that we see in a bread. Gluten is a strong, rubbery and elastic material. Refer to the illustration below.
There are some pockets that are formed between these structures. They are spread all across the dough more or less evenly (if you kneaded it well). These are of interest to us from the baking point of view, we’ll see why in the next step.
Step 3 — Letting the dough rise
#ChefMode 👨🍳
We are going to leave the dough to rise now for about 2 hrs OR until it doubles in size. We do not recommend you keep the bread overnight at this stage as some might suggest. Our experience with the store-bought yeast in India has not been good when kept overnight. The yeast got exhausted and there was nothing left in the dough for the final rise — needless to say, you will end up with a very heavy and doughy bread if this happens.
So stick to 1–2 hours. Here’s a before and after of our dough after a gap of 2 hours:
#GeekMode 👨🔬
Let’s talk about those pockets we mentioned in the previous step. These pockets are occupied by yeast, water, and air. As soon as yeast gets more food to feed on (flour), it starts multiplying again. At a point, however, the yeast will run out of oxygen within the pockets. At this point, it stops multiplying and starts performing anaerobic respiration. CO2, the by-product of this, starts filling up these pockets. As a result, the pocket expands. Now imagine, millions of such pockets spread out all over your dough and the same thing happening in every pocket. The dough begins to expand in size. This is exactly the reason why the dough nearly doubles in size in a matter of hours.
Step 4 — Shaping the dough and the Final Rise
#ChefMode 👨🍳
Usually, bakers at this point press the dough once again, take some of the air out (called degassing), knead for a minute or two and let it rise again. This allows for better gluten formation. From our experience, repeating this step once is enough, however, there are methods where people keep doing this multiple times until the final rise and bake.
So our method, we knead lightly for 1–2 minutes and let it rise again for a couple of hours or till we are happy with the size (1 hour in our case here). However, this time we will also shape the dough into the desired form before we leave it to rise so that it is ready to bake. We have shaped ours into baguettes but you are free to give any shape to your bread. If you’re a beginner, we suggest you use a Loaf Tin or equivalent which will make it easier for you to handle the dough.
Here’s the before and after of the French loaves we’re making.
#GeekMode 👨🔬
Here we are simply trying to improve the gluten formation by giving bread some more time. This will make our bread more stretchy. So, you can definitely go ahead and bake the bread in the previous step itself if you are purely experimenting — You will still get a decent loaf.
Step 5 — Bake
#ChefMode 👨🍳
We are at the simplest step now — baking. We will preheat the oven at about 180 Celcius. This temperature would need to be 10 Celcius higher or lower depending on your oven. You will be able to calibrate the next time you bake if it is your first attempt. If you have a fan inside your oven, we would suggest keeping the temperature 10–15 C lower. Bake for 45–60 minutes
Here are some dramatic shots of the french loaves we’ve made. Checkout that rustic crust!
How to get that shiny crust? Brush your dough with some egg wash. The egg wash helps act as a glue for any seasoning you might add say oats or sesame seed in this case, as well as give a glossy finish. For making the egg wash beat an egg with some salt and a few teaspoons of milk.
#GeekMode 👨🔬
The yeast pretty much dies instantly when subjected to such temperatures. Yet we see there is a rise in the bread again when we start baking. This is because the pockets inside the dough are filled with CO2 and moisture. These pockets, which are evenly distributed all across the bread, are now going to expand further due to heating and help cook the bread from inside evenly. The egg wash contains fats that help in browning along with a glossy finish. Salt will help spread the egg wash more easily.
~~Phew! Done!!~~
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