5 ms·

The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision

38 points by infinitewalk 3mo ago

Insanity 3mo ago
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. :(
- cogman10 3mo ago
  The american pallet is simply different and all our breads tend to be sweeter. The other part of this is that amercian breads tend to only use 1 grain, wheat. And they tend to either use whole wheat or bleached wheat. Even when something is a "9 grain" bread, usually what that actually means is it's wheat bread with other grains in the crust. Very hard to find a rye bread in the US.
- throwaway219450 3mo ago
  I’ve always found King Arthur to be reliable? Their recipes are good and include metric, you can get the flour anywhere and they’re very proactive with support if you have questions about tweaking. Also good books. Good bread exists, it’s just not cheap like it is in Europe.
  - nkrisc 3mo ago
    King Arthur recipes are good in my limited home baking experience. As long as you remain somewhat near to it, you’ll get something edible. I’ve found though for things like hydration or proofing times your environment is going to have a noticeable impact on that. King Arthur recipes are written with their products in mind, so if you’re using other flour make sure to check the protein content and that it matches! I’ve made that mistake before when I had consistently bad results and realized the flour I had was quite a bit lower in protein content despite having the same general “all purpose” moniker.
    - dredmorbius 3mo ago
      KA do make specific bread flours (high-gluten / high-protein), so that if you're used to those a GP or pastry flour will yield far less gluten development. That said, I've used a cheap bleached white AP flour when that's all that's available and had ... quite good results. My preference is bread flours, and generally at least some whole wheat in the mix.
  - mauvehaus 3mo ago
    King Arthur has classes in Norwich, VT! Come and take some! My partner got me a pretzel making class a couple years ago, and it has made baking soft pretzels a treat. Boston Logan is probably your closest truly useful airport, and the Dartmouth Coach goes direct from there to Hanover.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 3mo ago
  I think you'll find two things are true about American bulk baked goods: - The quality is highly uniform. - The quality is highly bland. As with any mass-produced food, the goals are typically quantity and low cost, though often with a putative appearance of quality or artisanal character. The compromises are largely against a high-quality product, though there are places where this may be found, albeit at far higher prices. Of you may bake your own.
- doublepg23 3mo ago
  I enjoy a local Pittsburgh bakery Mancini's. That's my benchmark for "good bread", I've never been to Europe though.
- socalgal2 3mo ago
  not disagreeing, the US certainly doesn't have the variety of France/Belgium/Germany, and the average is certainly much worse. But, there are local bakeries here and there and many of them seem to make pretty good breads? Maybe I don't know what you're specifically looking for though. I'm in LA at the moment and I can be both frustrated with the average but still find some good stuff.
  - SubmarineClub 3mo ago
    > I’m in LA Oh gee, who’d imagine you’d be able to find a decent baker in in LA? Always hilarious how people in LA/NYC assume that obviously the experience of living in one of the largest cities in the country applies to the whole of the country.
- wiredfool 3mo ago
  Eh, I found the Seattle artisanal bakeries (Fremont, Grand Central) to be better than all but the best I’ve found in Europe.
  - derbOac 3mo ago
    Yeah there are a lot of great bakeries in the US; you just need to know where they are.
    - wiredfool 3mo ago
      And there are a lot of middling bakeries in Europe. Haven't spent much time in Belgium, but I was disappointed in the average quality of the bread in small bakeries in France. There was one awesome organic bakery in Paris near the catacombs tour, and one hypermarche (forget where) that somehow had an absolutely incredible rustic baguette. But the little shops in towns, eh. And most of the hypermarches. Germany is also kind of average, the Reve bakeries are reliably on the good side of middling, but nothing that I'd consider incredible.
cogman10 3mo ago
> 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.
- dredmorbius 3mo ago
  Reproducibility requires more than just measuring ingredients, however, as other characteristics can greatly change results. Leaven viability, flour moisture content, relative humidity, ambient temperature, and accidents of a home-baker's process (did you get interrupted by a child / work / partner / household exigency during your dough prep or bake) all have pretty sharp impacts on results. Precise reproducibility requires not just monitoring ingredients, but overall environment, dough response, and more. Or ... you can roll with it as an amateur (both in the "nonprofessional" and "for the love of it" senses), recognise that every bake is its own experiment, measure what you can, but allow for variation. I've been baking bread for about six years now. Results vary, many look great, and all but a very few taste amazing, even where I go far out of nominal parameters. Biggest goof to date was omitting salt from a batch. (Salting the finished product ... recovered mostly.) Otherwise I've survived odd assortments of flours, accelerated or extended prooving cycles, high- or low-temperature ovens, different cookware, and more. Bread is just really freaking resilient stuff, and so long as you're not planning on hitting the same spot every time, have fun with it, and learn, in the spirit of TFA.
Animats 3mo ago
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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfnFpOEEvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfnFpOEEvU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xVNK_XRkxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xVNK_XRkxM
dvh 3mo ago
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?
- IAmBroom 3mo ago
  What??? Can someone translate this?
  - dvh 3mo ago
    I drawn simple diagram. On the left side are top views of the bread, right side are front cut side. A is half of entire bread, like half eaten. Let's say I want half loaf, I cut half of the bread width and then one short perpendicular cut to separate half loaf. That is C view. Now if someone goes after me and they want half loaf, no problem, in E they make red cut and they have they half loaf. But if they want full loaf, they still have to cut half loaf first and then they make green cut to get their full loaf. This annoys them because they use wedge cut F. If you want half you make blue cut, if you want full loaf you make purple cut. Face of the bread is always flat so you can always make half bread or full bread with single cut. https://files.catbox.moe/qj3upl.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/qj3upl.jpg
    - nkurz 3mo ago
      Yes, the diagrams help. The issue is that you aren't using standard English terminology. Typically, a "loaf" is the whole piece of bread as baked, although it's still called a loaf even after you start cutting pieces off. Let's say it's 10 cm x 10 cm x 20 cm long. What you are calling a loaf is actually a "slice". You might cut a loaf into 10 slices, each 10 cm x 10 cm x 2 cm thick. So you the question you are asking is how different people cut a "half slice" of 10 cm x 5 cm x 2 cm. I've never considered cutting a half slice the way you do it. Personally, if I want a half slice, I would cut it the way you do for a full slice, and then afterward cut it in half while it is laying flat on the cutting board. Then I'd just leave the half slice sitting next to the uncut portion of the loaf. I'd never cut a half slice the way you show in F, because I almost always want my slices to be the same thickness rather than tapering in thickness from one side to the other. While I wouldn't have cut it the way you do, I prefer your final result.
hackingonempty 3mo ago
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!
Cider9986 3mo ago
Related: The Bread Code https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework 3.6k stars 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.
FinnLobsien 3mo ago
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.
BiraIgnacio 3mo ago
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 :)
ojkelly 3mo ago
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.
heisenbit 3mo ago
Reproducibly through measurements has a lot of value if you do not have a coach like the author for his mother. Yes a lot of recipes can be handed down but the space of recipes is so much larger. We don‘t need books as we can tell stories and this bring out the feel so much better is true but where would we be without the encyclopedia.
garrickvanburen 3mo ago
“In the end, if I’m successful, I’ll have this one bread recipe adapted/developed, and if written out comprehensively for someone else (even future me), it will likely be >4 pages.” https://garrickvanburen.com/only-finding-the-non-obvious-matters/ https://garrickvanburen.com/only-finding-the-non-obvious-mat...

38 points by infinitewalk 3mo ago

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. :(

cogman10 3mo ago
The american pallet is simply different and all our breads tend to be sweeter. The other part of this is that amercian breads tend to only use 1 grain, wheat. And they tend to either use whole wheat or bleached wheat. Even when something is a "9 grain" bread, usually what that actually means is it's wheat bread with other grains in the crust. Very hard to find a rye bread in the US.
throwaway219450 3mo ago
I’ve always found King Arthur to be reliable? Their recipes are good and include metric, you can get the flour anywhere and they’re very proactive with support if you have questions about tweaking. Also good books. Good bread exists, it’s just not cheap like it is in Europe.
- nkrisc 3mo ago
  King Arthur recipes are good in my limited home baking experience. As long as you remain somewhat near to it, you’ll get something edible. I’ve found though for things like hydration or proofing times your environment is going to have a noticeable impact on that. King Arthur recipes are written with their products in mind, so if you’re using other flour make sure to check the protein content and that it matches! I’ve made that mistake before when I had consistently bad results and realized the flour I had was quite a bit lower in protein content despite having the same general “all purpose” moniker.
  - dredmorbius 3mo ago
    KA do make specific bread flours (high-gluten / high-protein), so that if you're used to those a GP or pastry flour will yield far less gluten development. That said, I've used a cheap bleached white AP flour when that's all that's available and had ... quite good results. My preference is bread flours, and generally at least some whole wheat in the mix.
- mauvehaus 3mo ago
  King Arthur has classes in Norwich, VT! Come and take some! My partner got me a pretzel making class a couple years ago, and it has made baking soft pretzels a treat. Boston Logan is probably your closest truly useful airport, and the Dartmouth Coach goes direct from there to Hanover.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 3mo ago
I think you'll find two things are true about American bulk baked goods: - The quality is highly uniform. - The quality is highly bland. As with any mass-produced food, the goals are typically quantity and low cost, though often with a putative appearance of quality or artisanal character. The compromises are largely against a high-quality product, though there are places where this may be found, albeit at far higher prices. Of you may bake your own.
doublepg23 3mo ago
I enjoy a local Pittsburgh bakery Mancini's. That's my benchmark for "good bread", I've never been to Europe though.
socalgal2 3mo ago
not disagreeing, the US certainly doesn't have the variety of France/Belgium/Germany, and the average is certainly much worse. But, there are local bakeries here and there and many of them seem to make pretty good breads? Maybe I don't know what you're specifically looking for though. I'm in LA at the moment and I can be both frustrated with the average but still find some good stuff.
- SubmarineClub 3mo ago
  > I’m in LA Oh gee, who’d imagine you’d be able to find a decent baker in in LA? Always hilarious how people in LA/NYC assume that obviously the experience of living in one of the largest cities in the country applies to the whole of the country.
wiredfool 3mo ago
Eh, I found the Seattle artisanal bakeries (Fremont, Grand Central) to be better than all but the best I’ve found in Europe.
- derbOac 3mo ago
  Yeah there are a lot of great bakeries in the US; you just need to know where they are.
  - wiredfool 3mo ago
    And there are a lot of middling bakeries in Europe. Haven't spent much time in Belgium, but I was disappointed in the average quality of the bread in small bakeries in France. There was one awesome organic bakery in Paris near the catacombs tour, and one hypermarche (forget where) that somehow had an absolutely incredible rustic baguette. But the little shops in towns, eh. And most of the hypermarches. Germany is also kind of average, the Reve bakeries are reliably on the good side of middling, but nothing that I'd consider incredible.

cogman10 3mo ago

> 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.

dredmorbius 3mo ago
Reproducibility requires more than just measuring ingredients, however, as other characteristics can greatly change results. Leaven viability, flour moisture content, relative humidity, ambient temperature, and accidents of a home-baker's process (did you get interrupted by a child / work / partner / household exigency during your dough prep or bake) all have pretty sharp impacts on results. Precise reproducibility requires not just monitoring ingredients, but overall environment, dough response, and more. Or ... you can roll with it as an amateur (both in the "nonprofessional" and "for the love of it" senses), recognise that every bake is its own experiment, measure what you can, but allow for variation. I've been baking bread for about six years now. Results vary, many look great, and all but a very few taste amazing, even where I go far out of nominal parameters. Biggest goof to date was omitting salt from a batch. (Salting the finished product ... recovered mostly.) Otherwise I've survived odd assortments of flours, accelerated or extended prooving cycles, high- or low-temperature ovens, different cookware, and more. Bread is just really freaking resilient stuff, and so long as you're not planning on hitting the same spot every time, have fun with it, and learn, in the spirit of TFA.

Animats 3mo ago

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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfnFpOEEvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfnFpOEEvU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xVNK_XRkxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xVNK_XRkxM

dvh 3mo ago

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?

IAmBroom 3mo ago
What??? Can someone translate this?
- dvh 3mo ago
  I drawn simple diagram. On the left side are top views of the bread, right side are front cut side. A is half of entire bread, like half eaten. Let's say I want half loaf, I cut half of the bread width and then one short perpendicular cut to separate half loaf. That is C view. Now if someone goes after me and they want half loaf, no problem, in E they make red cut and they have they half loaf. But if they want full loaf, they still have to cut half loaf first and then they make green cut to get their full loaf. This annoys them because they use wedge cut F. If you want half you make blue cut, if you want full loaf you make purple cut. Face of the bread is always flat so you can always make half bread or full bread with single cut. https://files.catbox.moe/qj3upl.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/qj3upl.jpg
  - nkurz 3mo ago
    Yes, the diagrams help. The issue is that you aren't using standard English terminology. Typically, a "loaf" is the whole piece of bread as baked, although it's still called a loaf even after you start cutting pieces off. Let's say it's 10 cm x 10 cm x 20 cm long. What you are calling a loaf is actually a "slice". You might cut a loaf into 10 slices, each 10 cm x 10 cm x 2 cm thick. So you the question you are asking is how different people cut a "half slice" of 10 cm x 5 cm x 2 cm. I've never considered cutting a half slice the way you do it. Personally, if I want a half slice, I would cut it the way you do for a full slice, and then afterward cut it in half while it is laying flat on the cutting board. Then I'd just leave the half slice sitting next to the uncut portion of the loaf. I'd never cut a half slice the way you show in F, because I almost always want my slices to be the same thickness rather than tapering in thickness from one side to the other. While I wouldn't have cut it the way you do, I prefer your final result.

hackingonempty 3mo ago

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!

Cider9986 3mo ago

Related: The Bread Code https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework 3.6k stars 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.

FinnLobsien 3mo ago

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.

BiraIgnacio 3mo ago

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 :)

ojkelly 3mo ago

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.

heisenbit 3mo ago

Reproducibly through measurements has a lot of value if you do not have a coach like the author for his mother. Yes a lot of recipes can be handed down but the space of recipes is so much larger. We don‘t need books as we can tell stories and this bring out the feel so much better is true but where would we be without the encyclopedia.

garrickvanburen 3mo ago

“In the end, if I’m successful, I’ll have this one bread recipe adapted/developed, and if written out comprehensively for someone else (even future me), it will likely be >4 pages.” https://garrickvanburen.com/only-finding-the-non-obvious-matters/ https://garrickvanburen.com/only-finding-the-non-obvious-mat...