The Bone-Idle Bakers of Britain, the Senior Organisation, congratulate Ed
Okie a Colonial Founder Member of the US chapter on his contribution to the
art of doing bugger all, or even less, making excellent bread whilst
expending as close to zero energy as humanly possible.
I think a roundup of bread making techniques to make life easier for the
serious, or just plain lazy, baker would be appropriate at this point.
In no particular order, the labour and time (baker's time not elapsed time
saving methods in regular use in my kitchen are......
Nonexistent or very short mixing times, so far only for slack doughs,
Ciabatta, Focaccia and, of course, Pain a l'Ancienne for which I am now,
after the latest highly sucessful batches, mixing for just 30 seconds with
a chopstick or fork.
Stretch and fold, the method par excellence of developing elasticity,
should you require it, in high-hydration dough. Any dough over about 60%
hydration, apart from Ancienne, benefits from at least one stretch and fold
cycle during it's rise.
Cold start baking, on which I have been running tests, informal, for Ed and
myself for about a year and which, this summer in the UK has proved it's
worth over and over. The variation between batches baked cold and hot start
is, in my experience, less than the variations that occur between different
batches both baked in the same way. It is also MUCH easier to postion
wobbly fragile loaves, proofed to within a hair of collapse, in a cold
oven, and a LOT less hazardous to someone as badly coordinated as myself.
Multiple rest/knead cycles, referred to in the last issue of Reggie's
digest by Allen Cohn and one of the absolutely crucial techniques to
making medium hydration doughs with minimum strain on mind and muscle.
Typically, with such a bread, I will leave it in the kitchen and give the
bread a brief knead when I happen to be passing by over a space of several
hours whilst getting on with other tasks. The bread, effectively, is
simultaneously kneaded and risen.
For very firm dough, bagels for example, a pasta machine, on widest
setting, which gives you the capability of mixing superbly by repeatedly
folding the dough in half and repassing it through the rollers.
I have no leaning to use a fixed method or combination of methods for any
given dough, I mostly just wing it using whatever technique I think will
work and changing methods midstream if necessary.
All the dough handling methods referred to are in no way theoretical or
fanciful, they all work and are, for me, a standard part of the armoury of
baking skills.
I can expand on any of the techniques mentioned, on list, or privately if
anybody feels it necessary or desriable or both, as I'm sure can many of
the more experienced bakers on this list..
The message is simple, if a recipe tells you to "knead for 15 minutes, the
dough should pass the windowpane test" or "Hurl the fragile dough into the
raging oven avoiding the blasts of skin-stripping steam and cursing as
little as possible" then "it aint necessarily so". and one or several of
the methods referred to in this post could make life a lot simpler.
John "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Less" Wright.
Professor Emeritus of Idleness Studies at the University of Life.