For those unfamiliar with baking, the shared recipe is pretty much the standard crusty white bread recipe, and one that has a great effort/payoff ratio. One thing to note is that unlike most cooking where you can just sort of eyeball quantities and get something good, baking bread is chemistry. You really want to have an accurate kitchen scale to get the ingredient proportions correct by weight.
baking bread is chemistry. You really want to have an accurate kitchen scale to get the ingredient proportions correct by weight.
Scales are definitely a good idea, but I don’t think the general point (“don’t mess with the recipe!”) is quite as true as people make out, at least for bread baking. You can vary the yeast, salt, fat etc a fair amount and still get decent results.
Getting the hydration level right (ratio between water and flour) is the key bit. Too dry (below about 60%, meaning 60:100 water:flour) and it won’t rise. Too wet and it’ll be difficult to work (70% and up is hard) and if you don’t work it properly it’ll be too weak and again won’t rise. The whole business of folding and resting is about working with higher hydration dough.
Dough is infinitely ... transformable. Mess with the recipe and you will get something else. It will probably still be quite edible but it won't be the loaf you signed up for.
incidently i just started baking bread last week because i live in an area where people don't eat bread much, so it's not common to find.
i had a recipe that put 350ml water to 500g flour. i used whole grain weat flour and the result was a very sticky dough. i added regular flour until it stopped being sticky.
the dough rose beautifully and baked nicely. (i burned it a bit at the top, but that could be scraped off)
today i made another. this time i only used the 500g whole grain flour and didn't add any regular flour but reduced the water, adding more water until it started getting sticky.
this dough didn't rise well. and the resulting bread was denser and had a slightly stronger taste of yeast.
from other comments i see that the stickyness is to be expected and will get better after the first rise. so my second try didn't rise because i didn't use enough water.
interestingly, i just realized thst the consistency of the second attempt is very close to black bread that i got in latvia.
Wholegrain flour doesn't produce as much gluten as bread flour, so it won't trap air as well (resulting in it being flatter). I doubt it was because you didn't have enough water -- in fact if you added water until it was sticky you probably added more water than you did for white flour (wholemeal absorbs much more water).
As an aside, for anyone confused why recipes online can have 70% hydration (when 50% hydration for your dough makes it much sticker than reasonable), it's because they mix wholemeal flour with bread flour and don't mention it in the recipe. I'd suggest adding wholemeal flour (but not much more than 30% of the total flour because too much reduces the amount of gluten you get and thus the structure is noticeably more cakey) because it really improves flavour.
I make bread with 80% hydration: 500 g plain flour (11% protein) definitely no wholemeal, 400 g water, 8 g salt, 1 g dried yeast. Mix roughly leave covered for 12 hours at room temperature (that's between 15 C and 20 C at the moment), cook in a preheated pot with a lid for 30 minutes at 230 C, take off lid, cook for 15 minutes more.
well the first bread was probably ⅔ wholemeal (500g) and ⅓ white (estimated) and 350ml water. i started with wholemeal only and the result was still very sticky. but maybe i just didn't knead it long enough for the flour to absorb the water.
the second was surely less water although i didn't measure.
> but maybe i just didn't knead it long enough for the flour to absorb the water
If you let the dough mix sit for a 10 minutes or so before you start kneading, it allows the flour to hydrate and thus it'll get less sticky. This is one of the arguments for "no-knead" bread recipes.
But when kneading bread you should always knead it until you can take a piece of dough and stretch it thin enough to see light through it (this is called "the window-pane effect"). This indicates that the gluten in the dough is strong enough for a good rise and crust. Once you knead it to that point it's almost always no longer really sticky.
That's okay, you can mix it by hand and it will work without issue (it's what our ancestors did for thousands of years). But if you don't want to knead for 10-15 minutes, if you roughly mix the water and flour then wait 10 minutes and then start kneading you'll find it takes much less time and effort to get the same result.
Actually eye-balling works great, if you know what you are doing. Using recipes when flour brands and types, humidity, ovens, yeast, and ambient temperature are all over the place means that you pretty much have to adapt recipes to your context. It's not optional. Most recipes try to be idiot proof by managing risk for novice users. E.g. a 65% hydration dough is going to be easier to handle; packs of yeast come in pre-measured packs, etc. A real baker would use higher hydrations, not be using dried yeast, and generally work in large batches. Batch size matters because it's easier to nail the ratios and does not require gram level precision.
Especially proofing times in recipes are in my view complete horse shit because it depends on so many variables beyond your control that any time unit would probably have a very high margin of error. Making bread in the summer and in the winter with the same recipes is guaranteed to have very different outcomes unless you adapt. Over proofing is a thing. So, is under proofing. If you have a sourdough starter, it can be in a barely alive state or in a hyper active state. It's going to affect what it does to dough and how fast it does it. Slow is actually good because time == flavor. Put your dough in the fridge to build more flavor.
The reason scales and exact ratios are nice is that they provide repeatability of the same context; or at least some level of control over it. So if, you've baked a few breads the same way, you can start tweaking a few things. Add a bit more water. Proof a bit shorter/longer, etc. People talk a lot about hydration levels of their doughs. But if you are adding a 150 grams of some sourdough starter with unknown hydration, you are going to mess up the hydration percentage of your perfectly measured ingredients.
When you've done this a couple of times, you develop a sense of what the dough is supposed to feel like and ways to correct if it doesn't feel right. I did not actually use scales until half a year ago. I use them a lot now because it helps me nail things like hydration percentages and salt levels with less guesswork but I use measurements as a starting point and adapt by eyeballing.
I was getting fine results just eyeballing it. Shake in half a pack of flour, that would be about half a kilo. Pinch of salt (most recipes suggest 1.8% by weight), add some starter and about two thirds of a pint of water (I used an actual pint glass) and add water/flour until it feels right. Don't over think it. 60% hydration breads are going to be a bit dense but fine if you knead them well. 85% hydration levels are going to be a sticky mess and a PITA to handle. You need skills to handle that and an understanding of what you are doing. But if you do, the results can be spectacular. I rarely go over 70-75%.
Whole wheat absorbs more water. So, I'd suggest adding 5-10% more of it for 100% whole wheat. It depends on the flour type. It's going to be less fluffy. Also consider mixing your flours. Start with 20-50% whole wheat.
I did this just the other day. I left out about 20% of the normal wheat flour, and added some whole wheat flour. You can't substitute it 1:1, so experiment a little until the dough feels right.
I've made this recipe many times, but I go by another[1] method, which is less wall-of-texty, but basically the same.
A good rule of thumb is "only replace some of the standard all purpose / bread flour". Swapping a cup or two out for oat or whole wheat or rye or whatever is usually fine; replacing it all tends to be trickier.
Edit: Though if you are looking for a recipe to start with, I would recommend the Serious Eats one with quantities cut in half: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/08/simple-crusty-wh...
Spraying on water before closing the dutch oven really does improve the results.