Happy New Year! ? We’ll start off this year (as I have other years) by finishing up a bit of old business from last year. I had started a Bread Series at the end of 2017, covering the first part of this Cooking School set (18-1: Basic Yeast Dough I) as well as including 20-12: Basic Rolls as a good base recipe to practice with.
Here, we’ll cover 18-2: Basic Yeast Dough II, which includes the fundamentals of the process of bread-making, as well as some tips on how to tell where your bread may have gone wrong. I’ve been making bread for a while, and I still run into trouble–it’s nice to know what I might have messed up so that I can try to fix it for the future.
Bread making is not a quick process–sometimes you can be working on a bread for 24-48 hours between the blooming, kneading, rising, and proofing. When I was being trained to make bread in the restaurant I worked in a few years ago, we would start making bread at 8 AM, and barely be finished by dinner time around 5-6 PM.
That’s not including our starter which had to be fed every day, as well as making all of the other baked goods that our pastry chef made daily. It can be a LOT of work!
This is a handy reference guide to keep in mind when making bread–it can give you a lot of clues on where your bread needs improvement. I’ve probably run into each of these issues several times–it’s definitely a learning process.
Here’s a few more bread and yeast dough recipes from Simply Delicious–check out 18-1: Basic Yeast Dough I for the first part of this series, as well as 20-12: Basic Rolls for a good practice recipe.
- 17-6: Best Ever White Bread
- 11-4: Calzone with Seafood
- 17-65: Giant Caramel Rolls
- 13-5: Onion Foccacia
- 17-1: Croissants
