Home Bread Baking Using a Pre-ferment
How to Bake Chewy and Crusty Bread at Home with a Bread Machine
Oct 18, 2009
The popularity of bread machines has revived interest in home baking. But it has also led to disappointment. Visions of warm bread with just the right crust and a chewy center are often quickly dashed as the reality sets in: while the bread may be warm, it isn't always the same as that of the local artisan bakery.
Some Reasons for Lower Quality
There are several reasons an inexperienced home bread baker may get disappointing results. Ingredients are important: artisan bakeries use unbleached flour and spring water, rather than regular white flour and tap water that originates from a water treatment facility somewhere. Another reason is the cooking method: it's hard to get good results from a bread machine because of the shape of the pan and the pre-programmed cycles. Still another reason is the recipes that are generally printed in bread machine manuals and many bread machine cookbooks.
How to Get Better Results
These reasons are not justification for taking the bread machine to the store, but instead they should send the determined home baker on a search for ingredients, methods and recipes that will work with the machine. It's either that or learning how to make bread by hand.
Advantages of a Bread Machine
Unless a person has grown up in a home where bread was baked by hand, kneading and baking completely from scratch is mostly a forgotten art. The machine gives the home bread baker the ability to mix and knead the ingredients into a perfect ball of dough. Excellent results can be achieved by stopping the machine after the dough is formed and baking the bread in the oven instead.
Recipe Problems
The other key difference between home baking and dough created in bakeries is often the recipe. Many bakers that bake crusty artisan bread use a pre-ferment as part of their recipe. Variously known as a pate fermente or a biga, or even sometimes a sponge or a starter, a pre-ferment is part of the dough that is made ahead. This allows the yeast to ferment and add flavor and texture to the dough. The benefits of this pre-fermentation spread throughout the whole lump of dough when it is added in with the other ingredients.
Finding Recipes
Recipes using this method of baking can be found in books such as The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart and Rustic European Breads from Your Bread Machine by Linda West Eckhardt and Diana Collingwood Butts. A simple pre-ferment can be made by mixing three-fourths of a cup of water with two and a half cups unbleached bread flour and one teaspoon instant yeast and allowing the bread machine to form the dough. If bread will be made within 12 to 18 hours, the pre-ferment can remain right in the bread machine pan until it is time to make the rest of the dough. It should be removed from the pan and broken into several pieces and added to a recipe that calls for approximately two cups of flour. Less yeast should be used than the recipe calls for since the pre-ferment already has yeast in it.
Shaping the Loaf
Bread machines have a "dough" cycle that kneads the dough and punches it down once. Once this is finished and the dough has risen somewhat, the machine beeps. At this point, the dough can be removed from the machine, shaped into a loaf shape, covered loosely with a towel and allowed to rise again. Then it is ready to be baked in an oven.
