Both the equipment and the ingredients called for in this book are very straightforward. You probably already have most or all of the ingredients you need, and if you don’t, they’re easy to obtain. In terms of equipment, I do call for a few things you may not have, so let’s take a look at those first. Then, if you need to purchase any equipment, you can go ahead and get started on that.
You’ll need just a few special tools or other pieces of kitchen equipment to make the recipes in this book. You may already have some of it on hand. Any you don’t have will be readily available online or at a kitchen supply or restaurant supply store. All of the recipes in this book call for mixing the dough by hand, so you don’t need a stand mixer.
You’ll need a 12-quart round tub with a lid for mixing your dough by hand and to hold the dough as it rises. I recommend Cambro brand translucent polycarbonate tubs; the model number is RFSCW12. These tubs are available online from Amazon and at most restaurant supply stores that sell to the public.
If you choose another brand, that’s fine; just be sure it’s a food-grade container. What is important is the size; it needs to be big enough to allow you to mix and fold the dough by hand within the container and to contain the dough as it expands. The round shape makes it easy to incorporate the ingredients, whereas squared edges and corners tend to trap ingredients. A clear container is best because you can see through it to chart the progress of the rise. And of course you need a lid to keep the dough from drying out during its long rise.
The advantage to using a big, 12-quart tub is that you can do everything inside it: weighing, mixing, and folding the dough. There isn’t any need to dump the dough onto your countertop until the final stage, when you divide and shape the loaves. Using the tub streamlines the process and makes it easy. I’ve found that these 12-quart tubs have other uses too. I use mine for brining chicken or turkey, or sometimes as an ice bucket for beer or wine.
If you have something around the house that approximates the same size and shape (round, about 10 inches in diameter, and about 8 inches deep, with a lid), give it a try. Although smaller tubs are available, it’s difficult to mix the dough by hand in them, and impossible to fold the dough without removing it from the tub first.
You’ll need one or two 6-quart rounded tubs with lids for holding your levain culture and for making poolish or biga. Again, I recommend the clear Cambro tubs, which are available wherever the 12-quart tubs are sold. You will only need two of these if you plan to make a poolish or biga while you already have a levain culture going. In testing recipes for this book I only ever needed one at a time.
All of the breads in this book are baked in a 4-quart Dutch oven with a lid. Baking the bread in a preheated Dutch oven allows you to make fantastic bread at home that looks like it came from a great bakery. While most Dutch ovens are heatproof to 500°F (260°C), some brands, such as Le Creuset, have knobs that may melt at high temperatures. You can replace these knobs with either a metal Le Creuset replacement knob or an inexpensive steel cabinet pull from the hardware store.
Lodge Cast Iron and Emile Henry are two well-known, less expensive, good-quality brands, and that’s what I used to test all of the recipes in this book (and both have ovenproof knobs). If you already have a suitable Dutch oven but aren’t sure what size it is, just measure water into it in quarts to figure out its capacity. Mine are 10 inches in diameter at the top and 4 inches deep. If you have a 5-quart Dutch oven, it will also work. The dough will spread out more than in a 4-quart Dutch oven, and therefore the loaves will be a bit wider and not quite as tall as those in the photos in this book. Breads baked in a 5-quart Dutch oven may not split open on top in the same way as those baked in a 4-quart model, since there will be less vertical pressure as the loaves get their oven spring. But you’ll still get good bread, so why not take advantage of equipment you already have? By the way, all of the recipes in this book make two loaves of bread, so if you have two Dutch ovens you can bake both loaves at once. Otherwise, you’ll have to bake your bread in two stages.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of measuring bread ingredients by weight, not volume. (See Here for more on the advantages of baking by weight.) Therefore, a digital kitchen scale is essential. It should measure up to 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) and be accurate to single grams. Also take into account that you need to be able to read the display when a large, 12-quart tub is resting on top of it (this allows you to measure water and flour directly into the tub). If you can’t see the display when you put the dough tub on the scale, you can measure out the flour and water into smaller containers and pour them into your 12-quart dough bucket. A scale that measures down to tenths of a gram would be handy for accurately measuring yeast, but that feature isn’t essential, as I also provide teaspoon measures for yeast.
One brand I recommend is Oxo. They make a scale with a convenient pull-out display, and that’s what I used for testing all the recipes in this book. It is available at Amazon and kitchen supply stores. You can buy a decent scale for under $25.
An instant-read probe thermometer is essential for making sure you’re using the right temperature of water and measuring the final mix temperature, and it will come in handy in other ways too. Mine gets repeated use measuring the temperature of meat as it cooks. Taylor and CDN are two brands I can recommend. Both make models that cost less than $20.
Proofing baskets are used to hold shaped loaves as they proof, or undergo their final rise. Because all of the loaves in this book are baked in 4-quart Dutch ovens, you’ll only need one size of proofing basket: 9 inches in diameter at the top and 3½ inches deep—or whatever diameter matches the shape of your Dutch oven. If you can afford cane banneton baskets, they will last a lifetime. Linen-lined proofing baskets are also a great choice. The recipes in this book were tested with Frieling baskets. Matfer is another respected brand. You can also improvise a proofing basket using a bowl of approximately the same dimensions lined with a flour-dusted, lint-free tea towel.
You’ll obviously want a pair of oven mitts for dealing with hot Dutch ovens. Make sure the mitts you buy are safe for handling a 500°F (260°C) pot. An oven thermometer also comes in handy, since home ovens rarely deliver the exact temperature you dial in. Mine runs about 25°F cooler, so when I set it to 500°F, I actually get 475°F. Because the quantities of yeast called for in these recipes are typically quite small, it’s difficult to measure them accurately with a scale. In a few cases, you’ll get the most accurate results if you have a 1/16 teaspoon measure. These are available (including online at Amazon), so I recommend you purchase one. Finally, you’ll need something to cover the proofing baskets after you have shaped the loaves. Tea towels work fine for this, although I like to use nonperforated plastic bags, which allow you to proof the loaves overnight in the refrigerator without drying them out. I reuse clean bags I get at the produce section of the market for this purpose.
There are several ways to make great pizza at home, and I describe a few of these methods in chapter 12. A pizza stone works best; they are widely available and usually cost around $30. If you’re using a pizza stone, you’ll also want a pizza peel to help you scoot the pizza into the hot oven as quickly (and painlessly) as possible. I prefer wood peels; a 14-inch diameter should be the right size for your home oven.
If you don’t feel like investing in a pizza stone or peel but do want to try some of the pizza recipes in this book, you can make thicker-crust pizzas in a medium-sized oven-proof skillet. I’ve had great results cooking pizza in my 9-inch cast-iron skillet.
The focus of this book is making great bread and pizza dough from just four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast. There are plenty of wonderful breads that include nuts, whole grains, dried fruits, milk, butter, herbs, or cheese (I have had a great pain Gruyère at Boulangerie Onfroy, in Paris). But in my mind, the real craft of artisan bread baking lies in producing something exquisite with only the four principal ingredients. Of course, if you’re using only a few ingredients, quality is paramount, so let’s take a look at these four basic ingredients and some of the considerations in regard to each.
First, note that because temperature is such an important element of the equation when making bread, you should use flour at room temperature for all of the recipes in this book. Beyond that, my recommendations on flour come down to this: Use the best-quality flour you can find, assessing its quality by both the appearance and the taste of the bread, and seek out flour with protein in the 11 to 12 percent range. Unfortunately, protein content is rarely detailed on flour packaging, but some brands do put this information on their websites. These lower-protein flours have more in common with the flour used in French and Italian artisan bakeries, and they tolerate a long rise well and produce a crumb that is delicate and easy to digest. They also produce dough that ends up less tight and more pliable, resulting in bread with a nice open crumb and a crust that blooms nicely during baking.
Typically, flours labeled “bread flour” have a high protein content—generally about 14 percent. By contrast, flour labeled “all-purpose,” such as King Arthur Organic All-Purpose Flour, with an 11.8 percent protein content, is, in their words, “ideal for European-style hearth breads,” and I agree. At my bakery and pizzeria, we use Shepherd’s Grain Low-Gluten flour as our white flour for breads and pizza dough (see the essay for more on Shepherd’s Grain). Its protein content is about 11 percent. Try a variety of flours to see which you prefer.
From left: Whole wheat, all-purpose (white), and whole rye flours.
I also recommend using unbleached flour that has a creamy color. Bleaching is a flour treatment that removes carotenoid pigments and literally whitens the flour—removing flavor in the process. This reflects a mass market preference for whiteness over a more natural product with better flavor.
In the old days, meaning the five thousand years preceding the nineteenth century, harvested wheat was manually threshed to separate the wheat berries from the stalks and chaff, then the wheat was ground manually or stone milled. Hard work! Stone milling, whether powered by muscles, wind, or water, produced a whole grain meal. Sometimes bolting screens or sieves were used to sift out some or most of the bran. What remained was flour that had the components of white flour (the endosperm), plus the ground-up germ, and minus some or most of the bran.
I bring this up because one of my original goals as a baker was to produce a country bread that mimicked the best qualities of what Steven Kaplan referred to as pain d’autrefois, or bread made the old way, in his book The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775. This is the kind of bread Poilâne and my other baking heroes were producing in Paris, using flour from artisan mills such as the famed Decollogne-Lecocq mill in Précy-sur-Marne: stone-ground and sifted flour containing the germ in addition to the white endosperm, with a creamy caramel color. Although we don’t have mills like that in the United States, I learned from Chad Robertson to approximate the character of the old-school French country bread of my dreams by blending a small amount of whole wheat flour or ground wheat germ in with white flour and using a sweet levain and long, slow fermentation.
The main reason wheat flour produces such excellent bread is the presence of proteins that produce gluten. Other members of the wheat family, such as spelt and kamut, also contain gluten, as do rye, barley, and triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye). Wheat produces a greater amount of gluten than rye and barley, allowing it to hold more gas, and as a result, wheat produces a lighter, airier bread.
Another critical component in both wheat and rye is the enzyme amylase. When water is added to these flours, the amylase is activated and begins its work of breaking down complex sugars in the endosperm into simple sugars that yeast can feed on. The yeast multiply and eventually produce gases, and the gases are contained by the gluten network formed by the proteins, allowing the bread to rise. Without the special proteins that form gluten (glutenin and gliadin) and the enzymes present in wheat and rye, we would all be eating crackers. Although it isn’t necessary to have this information in your head when you set out to make bread, it is fascinating to know how the makeup of wheat and rye allows us to have leavened bread.
Use water that is good enough to drink. The critical factor here is water temperature, which is covered in detail throughout the book.
When baking, use either sea salt or mined salt. Kosher salt is fine, but the size of kosher salt flakes means they will take longer to dissolve than fine sea salt. Avoid iodized salt because iodine inhibits fermentation and tastes like … iodine. Since the grain size of salt varies from source to source, volume measurements tend to be inconsistent. Therefore it’s far better to weigh your salt. I recommend using fine sea salt because it will dissolve quickly in the dough. At home, sometimes I run coarse sea salt through a coffee mill before using it in a hand-mixed bread dough. If you do this, be sure to wipe all of the salt residue out of the grinder so it doesn’t corrode.
Salt slows the fermentation of bread dough. The salt-free breads of Italy are famous for their fast rise time (and their bland flavor). The standard amount of salt in recipes for French bread is 2 percent of the weight of the flour. The generally accepted range is between 1.8 and 2.2 percent. I sometimes put 2.2 percent in to get the flavors I like and for the bit of added strength salt can add to high-hydration doughs.
All of the recipes in this book call for instant dried yeast. You’re likely to find two or three kinds of yeast at the store: active dry, rapid-rise, and instant yeast. All of these yeasts are the same species: Saccharomyces cerevisiae. What differentiates them is their coating, the way the yeast is manufactured, and performance. At my bakery, we use SAF Red Instant Yeast. I recommend that you buy a 16-ounce package of this yeast, which is available from King Arthur Flour’s website or Amazon, among other sources. It will keep for six months if stored airtight in the refrigerator. Do not store it in the freezer as freezing will kill off a small percentage of the yeast.
In most of my recipes, it isn’t necessary to dissolve the dried yeast first. These doughs have a lot of water in them, so the yeast dissolves rapidly in the dough; just sprinkle it on top of the dough and incorporate it as you mix the dough. There are arguments for dissolving first, but I prefer the effect on flavor produced by dissolving the yeast within the dough. However, be aware that this doesn’t work in a stiff dough mixed by hand. My rule of thumb is to predissolve the yeast if the dough has 70 percent or less hydration. This may seem arbitrary, but it takes into account that mixing by hand is gentler and less vigorous than mixing by machine. So, for example, if you’re mixing a stiff biga, the dried yeast needs to be dissolved in water before mixing.
Professional bakers use the term commercial yeast to refer to what consumers think of as store-bought yeast. Commercial yeast is a monoculture, a single species of yeast (the aforementioned Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Levain cultures, on the other hand, are made up of a community of yeasts that occur naturally in the flour and the environment, including the air. These wild yeasts aren’t like commercial yeast; they are less vigorous, and they impart their own particular flavors to the bread. Part of the complexity of a levain bread is due to multiple strains of yeast coexisting within the culture that is leavening the dough.
Commercial yeast causes breads to rise faster and provides more lift to the dough, producing bread with a lighter texture and more volume than levain breads. The slower activity of the yeast in levain dough, on the other hand, allows time for naturally occurring bacteria to undergo their own fermentation and impart acidity, which gives the bread more complex flavor, a bit of tang, and a heartier crust. And because of this acidity, levain breads keep longer before going stale.
I often prefer to add small amounts of commercial yeast to my levain bread doughs to get the best of both worlds: bread that has winelike complexity and acidity as well as a light texture in the crumb. Where you do not want the twain to meet is in your levain culture. The more vigorous commercial yeast will ultimately crowd out the wild yeasts and take over in a survival-of-the-fittest scenario.
