alt Hacker NewsThe anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision
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I bake all my own bread, mostly due to food allergies but also because there is nothing better than a fresh loaf of bread just out of the oven.
My experience and conclusion was largely the same as the author. I found the brevity of many recipes frustrating, which led me to study the details of bread making.
The type of four, how much yeast, salt and water. How the water amount varies for so many reasons in a home kitchen.
Making 4 loafs a fortnight gives plenty of opportunity for iteration and learning. And over time I was able to develop a good understanding of dough hydration and how that affects the end product, and how it can make kneading and handling the dough easier or harder. There is a sweet spot.
This also led me to adding oil to a dough. Which acts to keep the gluten chains from getting too long and chewy, thus making the dough short.
It’s also how you make a great pizza dough.
From there I started experimenting with different flours, because I had to if I wanted bread. Running low on bread flour I added semolina, and also made a pure semolina loaf.
The main thing I’ve learned is there is a lot of leeway in the recipes that still produces tasty food. I’ve made some incredible and some woeful loafs that all taste great.
I still prefer specific recipes in metric, but I find more and more I’m reading into what the ratio of ingredients is doing and why.
> Viewed through this lens, the modern illusion of control shatters, but something much more liberating takes its place. The recipe is a suggestion. The rules of baking — baker’s percentages, hydration levels, the established ratio of flour-to-water-to-fat — are the underlying framework. This is the scaffolding.
Look, the author isn't technically wrong. But also, I have to point out that the reason for all the control and preciseness is replicability.
If you measure out everything by gram, mix/kneed for the right amount of time, set the temperature the the right number, and bake for the right amount of time, you'll get the same loaf, texture, everything, every single time.
That's why we have modern store bread loafs. That's why all bakeries aren't using more "artistic" methods of intuiting the amount of ingredients.
So long as you can accept that by doing thing by feel you'll end up with loaves that are rocks, crumbs, or dough balls. That are overcooked or undercooked. Then yeah, you can intuit as much as you like. Sometimes you'll get something good. You'll even get better at it till you usually get something good.
Sure, a simple enriched bread like challah you can go by feel but you're going to have a lot more trouble succeeding with sourdough panettone without a tested recipe exactly because it is a living organism.
Of particular importance are the ratios of starter-flour-water when refreshing your culture (thrice daily! then bundling or floating for overnight storage...) It influences the ratio of Saccharomyces to Lactobacillus which has an effect on the pH of your dough after the first or second fermentation. If pH goes too low the gluten will dissolve and your dough will disintegrate when you try to knead in more ingredients.
One of the USA panettone masters, Roy Shvartzapel, insists you need a pH meter to be successful but after flailing around with one I found copying the refresh ratios of one of the Italian masters to do the trick. Unfortunately, refreshing is usually not part of published recipes!
Of course, bakery products like that are really made on production lines like this.[1] There's a whole industry for artisanal bread making machinery.
Machinery for fancy twisted form factors is available. Here's the Fritsch Multitwist.[2] That seems to be more of a European thing. Although it can be configured to make big pretzels.
I eat a lot of bread and I make a lot of bread because of that.
Precision measure and mixing and timing helped me a lot in the beginning.
Though I still do that, I find that now I can rely on feel (experience if I'm honest) to know when the dough is just right.
Like with everything, there's probably a middle ground there but I think I just like having fun pretending I'm on a chem lab :)
Related: The Bread Code
https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework
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This guy and book is great. Idk if he invented it but he might have popularized using low hydration or high hydration starter to change the flavor of your sourdough.
The idea I remember is that lower hydration starter gives you yogurty flavor and high gives you more sour.
Speaking of loafs and culinary precision, from my father's side they always used single cut even to get half of loaf, I used 2 cuts when I wanted half loaf and that annoyed them because when they wanted full loaf after me, they first had to remove my remaining half loaf. How do you cut your bread, single cut (wedge) or double cut?
If there are these places on the internet the article mentions which perfect bread ingredients “to the gram”, someone should share that with American bakeries.
It’s near impossible to find decent bread, compared to EU countries like France/Belgium/Germany. :(
I agree with this take. If we think back to the origins of cooking and food preparation, it was never about exact measures or precise ingredients.
The point of a ratatouille is not that it has precisely bell pepper, eggplant, tomato, and zucchini. It’s that it’s a stew of summer vegetables, and the point should be to figure out what the summer vegetables are for you.
We live in a world where we can buy summer vegetables in January (imported from across the world), so we don’t have to deal with those limitations.
I think it’s a fool’s errand to determine the precisely correct formula for the correct (tm) way of making x, y, or z.
This might be different if you work in a Michelin-starred restaurant or get a kick out of the scientific method.
But if you cook at home, the point is to make delicious things for the people you love.