30 Apr 2020
Now Everybody Is (Or Can be) A Bread Nerd!
It looks like a lot of people went from Wonder Bread to homebaked artesian bread connoisseur in a matter of seven weeks during the COVID-19 Pandemic, baking bread for the first time. If you have not yet joined the #isolationbaking or #breadnerd or #breadsnob crowd, here are some useful links to get your homebaking with either yeast or sourdough started.
King Arthur Flour not only makes quality flour, they also help us home bakers with a ton of information on their web site in the form of recipes and blog posts. Right now, they are hosting a number of different video series about baking, which you can find on their Facebook page, or their YouTube channel.
Getting good flour and/or yeast is hard right now, so use whatever you can get. Ideally it will be unbleached All Purpose (or AP) flour, but whatever you can find will work. On our last shopping trip before social distancing, it was not just the toilet paper that was gone from the grocery stores, the flour shelves were empty too – that is with the exception of a few bags of Italian ’00’ pizza flour. I assume that was left because nobody knew what to do with a package with Italian writing all over it 🙂 Just like a rose is a rose is a rose, flour is flour is four, so I bought three bags and left the other three remaining ones for somebody else.
If you have flour and yeast, you are all set. Just pick a recipe and go for it. Here is a simple four ingredient white bread dough that can be used for baguettes, loaves or rolls.
Jeffrey Hamelman is using this recipe in the first episode of King Arthur’s “Isolation Baking Show” – here is the complete list of all episodes – new ones are being broadcast live every Friday at 2PM EDT on Facebook.
If you also have some rolled oats around (in addition to the flour and yeast), try this very delicious Oatmeal Bread – you can see Martin Philip bake that in the 2nd episode of the Isolation Baking Show (see the list above).
If you have flour, but no yeast, it’s time to collect some wild yeast and create your own sourdough starter. There are many different approaches, but they all come down to the same process: Mix flour and water and wait, adding more flour and water after the first day after potentially discarding half the starter – repeat until you see some activity and then increase the feeding schedule to twice a day. After about a week or 10 days, you should have a pretty active starter. Here is one way to do this.
During the great flour shortage of ’20, it seems wasteful to throw out that much starter with each feeding, so I started mine with only 20g of flour and water instead of the 117g from the recipe. It works with any amount of flour and water, as long as the weight of the flour and water is the same. Once your starter is active enough, here is a good and easy sourdough bread recipe to start with.
That blog post was written by Martin Philip, who also has his King Arthur baking video show “Martin Bakes at Home” – and he does this with his son Arlo – in the episode “Maura’s Sourdough” he explains how to make bread using this particular process.
In the recipe, it calls for 25% whole wheat flour. If you don’t have any, just substitute with All Purpose (or AP) flour. Both Martin and Jeffrey are talking about sourdough in some of their videos. And, speaking of it being wasteful to throw out (or “discard”) starter on a regular basis, there are a number of recipes for sourdough discard – we are especially fond of the sourdough crumpets (which are also featured in one of the Isolation Baking Shows).
If you don’t have yeast and don’t have flour, not all is lost, you can still make Martin’s Flourless Fudge Cookies – the video with the same name is in the Martin Bakes at Home playlist.
You will find more inspiration for different types of baked goods by watching all the other episodes of these shows. If you are interested in baking with kids, another King Arthur project is the “Bake for Good” series.
There are also interesting videos by Jennifer Latham on the @tartinebakery Instagram channel, demonstrating how to bake a high hydration country bread – not something I would recommend to the beginner, so work you way up to that.
This short list of resources shows that there is a lot of information available for somebody who wants to get into bread baking at home. Most people have more time on their hands than flour, so spend an afternoon or two and watch some bread baking YouTube videos, and then get your hands into your bag of flour and get started.
