The French have a wonderful technique for working their dough, one that produces a far superior product, light with a wonderful texture and a delightfully thin crisp crust.
French Baking first got my attention when I was back in the UK visiting my family and I learned of this fantastic method of working dough from the celebrated French Baker, Richard Bertinet, coincidentally now living in my old home town of Bath, where he operates a baking school, we were almost neighbors! Richard is one of a few pioneers of this "French Technique" of working dough in the English speaking world. If you find yourself in the UK at any time I would urge you most strongly to go check out a master at work and contact Richard Bertinet.
In these last few years since catching the bug, there's a few things that I've learned that if I'd if I'd known from the start could have saved a great deal of the error from my trial and error! You really don't need any specialist equipment, or skills that take years to master, just a couple of simple tricks and techniques that can be easily learned in just a few hours! And once you've learned these tricks you'll see that anyone can produce French bread like a master baker in a normal domestic kitchen!
5 hot tips for making perfect french bread in your own kitchen.
1. Go French and Don't Look Back. So what's so great about this whole "French-Technique" hoo-hah? It's all about the method of working (kneading) the dough which allows for a much looser, (wetter) mixture, that results in a lighter, springier, more elastic and responsive dough. This dough rises beautifully with no requirement for any improvers and produces a truly excellent texture of crumb and a light crispy crust, distinctive of French bread. These results are quite unlike those produced by other kneading techniques where recipes naturally demand a greater flour content to prevent the dough from sticking to everything as it's being kneaded. Breads produced in this manner will predictably be heavier, have a denser texture and a thicker crust.
2. Find a Baking Course. Understanding what it takes to produce superior bread is an experiential phenomenon. There's no other way to learn bake bread than to roll up your sleeves and get your hands in the dough. So first of all be ready to try and fail, and learn from your mistakes, that's the joy of learning, secondly find a baking course in your area where you can see for yourself just how to work dough and bake bread the traditional French way, get an understanding of all the techniques and a feel for how wet of sticky the dough should be Believe me it will be worth it.. A picture tells a thousand words but a demonstration tells a million.
3. Get an Understanding of Hydration. Everywhere in the world I bake I have to adjust the recipe, it's knowing the consistency that's the most important issue. Recently I moved from inner Melbourne out to the forested hills 40 minutes out to the east, immediately I noticed that I needed to reduce the amount of water I was adding to my mix by over 15% to account for the higher humidity levels!!! Practice will give you the experience to get a feel of the "right" consistence, but again, a teacher will get you there much faster.
4. Weigh ALL Your Ingredients. Especially weigh the water if you want to be able to repeat a result you must know exactly what went to produce that result, measuring by volume just isn't accurate enough.
5. Take Notes. Always work to a recipe, but know that you will almost certainly need to make an adjustment. So make sure that you take notes of exactly what you've done, and then if you make an improvement you've got a new best recipe, and you know how to reproduce it. Knowing how to make adjustments is something that only experience will show you, but taking notes will speed this process along. If you don't take notes you're flying blind.
Would you like to fast track all that trial and error to get the experience you need to bake bread with confidence and producing better results than you can even imagine?
Browse through other by James Fisher detailing all you'll need to know to get the hang of the French technique. "My goal is to contribute to you my passion for baking, A passion that when combined with knowledge, experience will leave you with confidence and needing nothing else to be a self sufficient master baker in your own kitchen." Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_DD_Fisher |
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