Straight Dough French Bread

Recently I made a very good french bread. I changed my past recipe a bit, but heres where I stood in the end:

Water: 1 pound
Yeast, active dry: 3/8 ounce or 10 grams
Bread flour: 1 pound 12 ounces
Salt: 1/2 ounce or 12 grams
Sugar: 2/3 ounce or 16 grams
Butter: 1/2 ounce

If you haven't already noticed I don't measure using tablespoons and cups. No professional bakeshops do because baking is an exact science. Using volume measures of ingredients is too unreliable to create consistent results.

When I read my initial recipe my first order of business was to get rid of the malt syrup. Malt syrup has its place and can be useful, however is more a pain than it is helpful. It can be easily replaced by sugar with very little change in the outcome. Heres the reason behind the addition of malt syrup. Wheat flour contains an enzyme called diastase. When water is added to flour the diastase breaks down the starch in the flour. Eventually the starch is broken down into simple sugars easily consumed by yeast. The more they are broken down the better food yeast has and the more carbon dioxide it can release. It is very important to control the amount of food because too little food doesnt produce enough leavening (gas in the bread which causes it to rise and gives it volume) to give a good bread. Too much food causes too much of a breakdown of the flour and the crumb (the inside of the bread when it is finished) will be sticky and taste like alcohol. The flavor is because along with CO2, yeast also produces alcohol when it eats sugar.

Diastatic malt syrup contains diastase helps control the breakdown of starch as well as a sugar that acts as a food for the yeast. When you dont have a ton of time to wait for the bread to rise, this is a great option. If you still dont have a lot of time, you can replace it with sucrose (granulated sugar). It is a combination of glucose and fructose, two simple sugars which the yeast will happily eat. Adding a bit more than the diastatic malt that was called for will make up for the fact that you arent breaking down more starch in the bread. The other type of malt, nondiastatic, is simply for food, color and flavor. This type can always be replaced by sugar, perhaps at the risk of making a bread that is not as dark in crust color, but that is certainly a reasonable concession.

This recipe is for a straight dough method. This means we arent making a sponge first (or a preferment) Another way of thinking about it is like skipping a step. Instead of spending an additional 2 hours developing flavor, we are taking the fast route and just adding all the ingredients at once.

The yeast that was used, active dry, needs to be dissolved in warm water (105-115 degrees) for 5 minutes before it can be used. Yeast are most active between 70 and 100 degrees, they are inactive at 42 degrees and killed at 140 degrees. The purpose of dissolving the yeast is to "wake it up" before giving it a big meal. If you don't have a thermometer, you can tell about 110 degrees because its about the maximum heat your hot water should be at. Some will run a bit hotter. The water in the recipe should be raised to that temperature, the yeast measured and dissolved, and in the 5 minutes you are doing that, you should mix the sugar, the salt and the flour together.

Here is a word of warning, NEVER ADD SALT DIRECTLY TO DISSOLVED YEAST. It is quite alright to add them together when they are both dry. Many recipes call for this, but both are soon to be mixed into a large amount of flour, so they wont remain together for very long. Salt inhibits yeast activity as well as giving the bread a better flavor, so it is important, unless you want to kill your yeast, that you don't throw the salt directly into the dissolved yeast. Once the 5 minutes are up and the dry ingredients are mixed, you can add the dry to the wet. If you dont use a mixer, I recommend doing this by hand with a very stiff paddle. Anything pliable like a scraper will not provide enough resistance. As for the butter, warm it up to room temperature and add it to the slightly mixed dough, just for the sake of having it easy to incorporate. At this point you want to kneed.

You will need muscles. This is a good replacement for a gym membership, and you will certainly feel it the next day. The bread should be kneaded about 10 minutes. This means 10 minutes of non-stop heavy kneading, not 1 minute kneading, 1 minute break. The kneading allows the gluten in the dough (formed when water mixes with the proteins in the bread) to form strands. I want to make this clear. IT WILL BE MESSY. You want a very sticky dough. You dont want to add so much flour that it makes it not sticky anymore. Flour has an absorption rate for water, and when flour is maximumly full of water, it is still sticky. When you are done kneading, it wont be. This is how you know you are doing well. Be sure when you are kneading also that you are kneading in all directions. If you just knead in one direction you will form and even break gluten strands in that direction. You want 3-D bread. Turn the bread as you knead.

When you are done, you should begin the ferment. You can do this at room temperature (75 degrees) and it will usually take about an hour or two. It is okay if your room runs hot or cold, really you want it to double in size. This is sort of like stretching a balloon before you blow it up. This will stretch the gluten and make it more pliable for the final rise, the proof. To ferment you want to lightly oil a bowl that is over twice the size of the current dough. You want to put in the dough, let the oil cover the dough, and put saran wrap over the bowl to retain moisture, otherwise your dough will dry.

When the dough has risen to twice its size it is time to punch it down. This is not what it sounds. You should have gotten out all violent tendencies in the kneading. The "punch down" is a light press to release the CO2 that is in the dough. You pull up all sides of the dough from the bowl, fold them over the middle and press down. Pull the dough out of the bowl and begin to scale it. This is determining how many loafs of what size you would like to make. If you plan to bake them together, make uniform sized loafs.

Now you should round the dough-- form it into spheres. The shape is less important than the formation of a "crust". You must pull the dough on the outside very taught and get a lot of tension on the gluten strands that make up the surface. This is the preliminary to making a crust. You can do this by folding the dough on the surface and sealing the excess at the bottom. If this is confusing to you don't worry, Ill be putting up videos of it soon enough.

These rounded pieces should now be rested 15 minutes to let the gluten on the outside relax a bit. It will settle into its new position and get a bit more pliable, which is good when you plan to make a shape out of the dough. I decided to make mini batards, tho they are a little fat. If you dont want your bread to be 2D and sink to the table, i recommend a bakers couche or a canvas to help shape them so that they are really round. For a batard you want to roll out the dough and stretch it out so that its long on one side. You want to then roll it back up and seal it at the bottom and the edges. This seem should always be at the bottom. You then want to put the bread somewhere warm (80 degrees) where it can proof. As for fermentation, always cover the bread while its proofing or else it will dry. A dish towel over it works well enough.

When your shaped dough has doubled in size you want to score it with a razer while the slash marks when baked look very diagonal, they run more down the length of the bread. you also dont want to cut straight down, but at an angle, about 60 degrees or so. Immediately after you have done this you want to place the bread onto a preheated baking stone in a preheated oven at 500 degrees (or as high as you can get it). If you dont have a baking stone, a sheet pan with parchment paper works just fine. When you preheat the oven you want also to put a brownie pan full of water at the bottom. This creates steam.

When the bread first goes into the oven a few things are going to happen. The yeast are not yet dead because the bread doesn't reach 140 immediately, but they are getting warm, meaning that they are getting very active. They are going to generate a lot of gas, called oven spring, which is going to make your final bread rather lofty. Additionally, the moisture in your dough is going to turn to steam (1000x the volume of water). While much of this will escape the bread, much also wont, and so the bread is going to get very large in the first 5-10 minutes of baking. The surface has to be pliable to handle this expansion, and it wont be if it is dried out from the heat of the oven. The baking pan of water is to ensure that there is enough steam in the oven to keep the water on the surface of the bread from evaporating. If there is no steam, there is a good chance the pressure from inside the loaf will split the crust. The steam also has a nice benefit of forming a very nicely colored, very crispy thin crust when finished. But the crust must form sometime and so you have to take the water out about 10 minutes in.

To tell when the bread is done many people say you can tap on the bottom and if it sounds hollow you are good, however I believe in science, and so i put in a probe that tells when the center has reached 200 degrees. When it has, you are good to take it out.

When cooling, be sure your bread has ventilation on all sides. If the bottom is on a flat surface, the condensation will make the bottom soggy, and thats just gross. If you plan to serve immediately then use it while hot, otherwise dont cut it nor store it until it is completely cool. Hot bread loses moisture and stales real fast. When storing for less than 8 hours do it just at room temperature in an open paper container. Plastic will again cause moisture to be retained and the crust to be less crusty and more soggy. If you are storing for more than 8 hours, freeze. NEVER REFRIGERATE!! Staling occurs at record speeds when at fridge temperatures. This is a recipe for disaster.