Delicious bread recipes to make your mouth water (2024)

FAQs

What happens if you don't add enough water to bread? ›

Dough with not enough water will not only feel dry to the touch, but will also be difficult to stretch.

Lubricate With Oil. One of the easiest ways our bakers follow to make bread soft and fluffy is by using 1-2 tablespoons of lubricant/fats such as vegetable oil to wet the ingredients.

Things you can change a lot: The hydration is probably the major defining factor of lean bread. It affects the crumb, the shape and the way you handle the dough. Today's recipe will incorporate up to 110% hydration, which means 110g of water for every 100g of dough (very strong flour only).

Soft water has less than 50 ppm, while hard water has over 200 ppm. Generally, water of medium hardness, with about 100 to 150 ppm of minerals, is best suited to bread baking. The minerals in water provide food for the yeast, and therefore can benefit fermentation.

Remember that hydration = water / flour. So in the recipe above, if water is 750g and flour is 1,000g, the total hydration of the dough is 750 / 1,000, or 75%. Another example: If a recipe has the same weight of flour and water (let's say 750g of each), then the hydration would be 100%.

This may seem obvious, but don't just dump more water into your bread dough. To incorporate more water into the mixture, add only 1 tablespoon of additional liquid at a time, kneading the dough just until it comes together. Too much kneading and the dough might not be dry anymore, but now it's tough.

There's something magical about the bread you get at your local bakeries - they're always sooo soft and fluffy. Many of these breads, especially packaged ones, are made with a ton of chemical additives such as calcium propionate, amylase, and chlorine dioxide which help keep them soft, light, and fluffy for days.

Commercial bakeries use two types of ingredients to slow spoilage — emulsifiers and enzymes. Emulsifiers keep bread from going stale by preventing oil and water from separating. Adding emulsifiers sometimes goes by the names “crumb softening” or “dough conditioning” because it works to preserve texture.

The spongy texture and moist flavor that oil creates can be a boon to certain recipes. Not to mention oil is cheaper and easier to work with. Butter will always provide superior flavor and that melt-in-your-mouth texture. In many recipes, combining the two gives the best of both worlds.

For 4 cups of whole flour (at 130g/cup), I'd use: 350ml water. 2 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast. 1 1/2 teaspoon of table salt.

What does butter do in bread? ›

Butter, technically a dough enrichment, tenderizes bread dough and limits gluten development, yielding a softer, more tender crumb and a richer flavor. The butter in this sourdough babka dough makes the interior tender—and delicious. Photo by Maurizio Leo.

All it takes is a small amount of dough enhancer per loaf to create a much lighter and fluffier result. Using a dough enhancer like Vital Wheat Gluten works to improve the texture and elasticity of the dough and elongate the strands of gluten. Doing so allows more room for the gas in the dough to develop and rise.

A small amount of steam during the last few minutes of baking or as soon as you take your bread out of the oven can give a nice shine to the surface of bread dough. Here is where that spray bottle of water comes in handy. Spritz the bread lightly and watch the surface develop a nice sheen.

Honey adds both sweetness and moisture to breads such as challah. Be sure to use a pasteurized honey, as wild honeys contain antibacterial properties that can kill yeast. Store honey at room temperature, out of direct sunlight. Honey would makes everything better, but especially sourdough.

In those situations, the recipe has more water than flour. High ratios of water, when combined with active fermentation and good gluten development (through time, mixing, and folds), have the potential to significantly open the crumb (or the “alveolar structure”) of loaves.

In higher hydration doughs, the higher ratio of water to flour means a thinner crust and those signature huge, non-uniform holes that we love to see in our favorite artisan breads. High hydration doughs are a dream come true for many bread bakers, since they create that amazing chew that's so popular in artisan breads.

Dense sourdough is generally caused by under fermentation. It can also be caused by not adding enough water (that is too low a hydration level). Extending the bulk fermentation, boosting your starter and increasing the hydration of your sourdough bread are all possible solutions to dense sourdough bread.