Four Basic Ingredients

At a dinner the other night a friend of mine lamented that I was stuck on baking. It does seem strange that a recipe with just FOUR basic ingredients could be so interesting and so challenging.

* Flour
* Water
* Yeast
* Salt

That's really all there is to it. Bread is about as simple as you can get, yet it's permutations are almost endless. Thinking it's simple is like comparing wine to grape juice.

Bread to me has a fascinating history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread) and has been baked by bakers for thousands of years. One of my favorite semi-historical reference is from the HBO mini-series "Rome" when one of the main characters (Titus) says "good bread this". I laughed at that moment because the bread the character was eating was essentially the same bread I was eating.

Four simple ingredients, two of which can be improvised (salt & yeast). Ten Billion combinations (ok a bit of a hyperbole there) and only a few hundred (or a few thousand) chances to try to get it right. Sounds fun to me!


-Matt the Weekend Baker



Side Note:
As proof that I am not stuck on bread, my culinary skills include (but are not limited to):
* Baked Eggs
* Omelets
* Crepes
* Eggs Benedict
* Sweet Rolls
* Dutch Babies (German Pancakes)
* Grilled Steaks
* Grilled Vegetables
* Grilled Salmon
* Cookies
* Gary's Salsa

The value of bread

An interesting thought occurred to me the other day... how much is good bread worth? We buy sandwich bread for $3.99 at the grocery store, yet here is a rough breakdown of how much home-made bread costs:

Ingredient	Measure	Purchase Weight	Purchase Cost	Cost per Gram	Per Loaf Cost
Salt	15	737	$1.00	$0.0014	$0.02
Buckwheat Flour	10	907	$3.28	$0.0036	$0.04
All-Purpose Flour	50	4536	$5.79	$0.0013	$0.06
White Whole Weat Flour	50	2268	$5.49	$0.0024	$0.12
Bread Flour	340	2268	$5.49	$0.0024	$0.82
Water	325	3780	$1.00	$0.0003	$0.09
Sourdough Flour (AP)	50	4536	$5.79	$0.0013	$0.06
Sourdough Water	50	3780	$1.00	$0.0003	$0.01
					$1.23

So the costs of the ingredients is clearly less than the store-bought bread, but what about the actual baking? My Kennmore 96413 is rated at 10 - 13.5 kW. Running at 450 degrees I'm going to assume I'm using 13 kW of juice, though the insulation on this oven is incredibly efficient so I don't think it's pulling the full load for my entire bake cycle. Power in our area goes for 7 - 9 cents per kWh, so at the worst case scenario I'm probably using $0.18 of electricty, bringing the grand total up to $1.41.

I don't drink coffee, but I'm fairly sure that's less than your average cup of joe.

-Matt the weekend baker

Measuring Ingredients

When you bake a few loaves you will start to realize the variables involved with baking. Time, temperature, humidity, weight, density, yeast concentration, water impurities, salt and water %.

One of the biggest variables in creating a good loaf is the percentage of water to flour. This percentage should be in the 65%-85% range.

As one of my favorite publications (Cooks Illustrated) published: Almost No-Knead Bread which is only the recipe, but the accompanying article described that going closer to the 65% water percentage actually helps with the no-knead recipes.

I find the best way to maintain this percentage is to weigh my ingredients vs measuring them. The best example of this is demonstrated in the picture below.



There are two cups of flour that look identical, but one is compacted and weighs 135 grams and the other weighs 180 grams. The 45 gram difference comes from the density of the flour.

I recommend weighing your ingredients for the most accurate baking results. If you don't have a scale handy, at least aerate your flour before use!

-Matt the Weekend Baker