How do bakeries make bread

The principles of baking bread have been established for thousands of years. The basic ingredients are flour, yeast, salt and water. BFP is a traditional method. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits.

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From the time we set our loaves for their final proof they should have increased in volume by at least half. If your loaves have doubled or more, this might mean we're approaching overproofing. Since judging the volume of our loaves can be tricky, I recommend using the same proofing baskets each time you bake until you begin to get a feel for this process.

This will allow you to better gauge what changes in volume may signify in terms of dough progression. At the Cleveland, I almost always bake gram loaves of the workhorse recipe, and I proof them in the same bannetons each day. This means that I can see day in, day out, that when my dough begins to rise above the lip of my baskets, we're nearing baking time.

From the moment we finished mixing, our dough has been inflating with gas. As we folded and shaped our dough, we organized our gluten so it would better hold gas, and maintain its shape during baking.

When we bake, we want our dough to be fully inflated—all the way to the center of our loaves—but for our gluten to still be in charge of the situation. In my experience, the best way to judge this is to press on the center of the loaves with a lightly floured hand.

Push firmly but not aggressively. If we've shaped our loaves properly, they should be able to handle this. As the center of the dough is pressed, the edges should billow outwards, like a water-balloon or over-stuffed pillow. Pay careful attention to how much your dough resists your hand. The exterior of the dough will always feel soft, even when underproofed. To get the most lift during baking, we need to make sure that the center of the loaf feels aerated as well.

If, when pressed, the dough feels significantly denser in the middle, then it isn't time to bake. But if the dough offers no resistance whatsoever, then you might be overproofing them, and should bake immediately. This is what it sounds like. Poke your loaf. Your finger should leave an imprint, but that imprint should gently bounce back and mostly disappear in a few seconds. If your finger leaves no impression, then the gluten is still very taught from shaping, and your dough needs more time.

If your finger leaves an imprint indefinitely, bake immediately. If you've performed these tests, and your loaves are fully risen, pillowy but secure, and can handle being poked around a little, then it's time to get baking. There are many ways a home baker can set up their oven for bread, and some are more effective than others.

In preparation for today's bake, place one of your oven racks as close to the bottom of the oven as it will go, and, if you have a baking stone or Baking Steel , put it on that bottom rack. Note: In these photos, I'm using a cast iron combo cooker—a skillet and saucier set that locks together—with the skillet half on the bottom and the saucier used as a cover. A regular cast iron, stainless steel, or enameled Dutch oven will work just as well.

Check out our review of the best Dutch ovens for recommendations. Bread ovens are great at two things that home ovens aren't: creating ambient heat, and retaining steam. Baking our bread inside preheated Dutch ovens helps us as home bakers to address these concerns and create more delicious bread at home.

We'll be doing a full oven-setup tutorial in a future post. I promise. If you have spare cast iron lying around, I like to place that in the oven as well. The more heavy, heat-conductive things we place in our ovens during our preheat, the more heat our oven will retain during loading.

This will help our loaves rise big and tall. Baking is all about heat. Let's make it happen. With our ovens preheating, full of heavy stuff, and our yeast pre-gaming for their last hurrah, let's take a quick moment to assemble our bread-loading equipment and prepare ourselves to work fast.

Need a quick equipment refresher? Read my previous article in which I discuss essential bread equipment. What will we need? These will help keep us from burning ourselves. I recommend using a combination of the mitts and towels if you don't have high-heat gloves. Next, fill your spray bottle with water and set it on your counter. We'll be using this to create steam inside our Dutch ovens.

This will help our loaves rise and form thick, crunchy crusts. Last, choose your weapon. In order to score your loaves—meaning slice open the tops before baking—you'll be wanting something very sharp, and preferably very thin as well.

The industry standard is to use razor blades and a lame pronounced "laahm" , a double-sided blade designed specifically for the purpose of scoring bread. Alternatively, a box cutter with a fresh blade or a sharp paring knife will do the job. In a pinch, a serrated knife will work, but won't offer as clean a line as a thin, straight blade will.

Find our recommendations for both paring knives and serrated knives in our paring-knife review and bread-knife review. With your oven nice and hot, remove one of your loaves from the fridge and bring it to your loading area. Speed matters here. Salt has many chemical interactions with flour and yeast. European bread tends to have quite a bit of salt, often between two and three percent Baker's percent. This gives the bread flavor but gives the EU cause for concern. For health reasons, they would like to limit salt to under two percent.

The baker's guilds in Europe have been fighting against the EU changing their traditional recipes and keeping salt content off the labels of fresh bakery bread. You may try and decrease the salt in any given recipe, but make sure you have noted it in the book so you can compare results in taste and texture.

Develop your own bread specialty. Practice makes perfect. Use a recipe that you like over and over. Make it your own. Your family and friends will start to request it, look forward to it. Because you practice it often, you will get very good and very streamlined in making it. Use a baking stone for a great crust and oven spring. They are heavy and take a long time to heat up but baking stones help create a brick oven atmosphere for the bread. The crust does not crack on the bottom and the bread can bake through without over-browning.

Calibrate your oven. Especially if your loaves are coming out too dark or too wet or taking longer to bake than the recipe says they should. Also, bread may need lower temperatures when your baking stone is properly preheated. If you don't have an oven thermometer and want to fix an overly dark loaf today, turn your oven down by 25 F.

You may get the best results when you turn your oven to F, not F as they say in some books. Preheat the oven. While you may want to put bread into cold ovens to economize turning the oven on for this length of time costs only 15 to 30 cents extra.

You may want to have several loaves to bake in a day, which lowers the cost per loaf , as well. Know which crust you want. This is not as true for small, white flour loaves and rolls. Some of them are designed to be eaten hot-out-of-the-oven.