Baking bread from scratch relies on hush-hush, backdoor skills that are closely guarded by experienced bakers.
These techniques are kept under wraps not in order to exclude would-be bakers, but simply because there is no consensus on the best way to teach them. The self-righteous among us have long debated the best way to teach bread making. Some argue that it should be left to the public school system, a union-rife institution that popularizes once-forbidden acts such as offering yeast a little sugar to get it to do what you want. But others feel that bread-making should be taught at home, by two-parent families who would like to make believe that bread is delivered by storks. On each child’s 21st birthday, they expose the stork as yet another Santa fabrication, explaining simply that once you are fully baked and legally wed, they will slip a little 3 x 5 card in amongst your wedding gifts, and it will explain how to encourage and/or prevent yeast reproduction. Meanwhile, hungry young men become obsessed with the length of their gluten strands, while young women fixate on the finger-poke test, all the while misinformed by rumors, innuendo, depraved and unnatural shows on Fox and Bravo, and the horrors of the internet. Some people give up in frustration, while others become master bakers who freely admit that that they learned too little, too late about how thoroughly you must knead your dough if you want to see it rise properly.
I’ve found that you can only learn so much from hearing, guessing, watching, and looking stuff up.
The best way to recognize a good dough is to know what a good dough feels like. The best homemade bread comes from dough you’ve had your hands in. If you’ve never made bread – or anything that starts with dough – by hand, get with someone who has, and do it with them. The two of you need to knead some really good white bread, or a nice batch of buns, together. If you insist on having your robot do the kneading, at least accomplish the final bit of by hand. Bread machine? Humorous. But perhaps tasty. Without machine: tastier and beautiful. Plus, doing it by hand builds artisan skills that will find their way into all the rest of your cooking.
Baking Bread from Scratch
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