Art of Handmade Bread: Contemporary European Recipes for the Home BakerThis is the Americanized version of a book that sells in Europe under a slightly different name. Americanized means that they use imperial units and measure flour by volume rather than weight. They probably also switched references to flour, as European flours are not quite the same. They have types we don't, and we have types they don't.
Apparently there were some mistakes in the unit conversion. The author has corrections on his website.
Unfortunately, the recipes are a bit too prosey for me. I like very specific, step-by-step, highly organized instructions. BUT, he does include two tips that make bread-making a lot easier:
he slightly oils his work surface. No big deal, because you can get bread dough off most types of countertops fairly easily.
The big deal is that he kneads for 5-10 seconds, lets it sit for 10 minutes, kneads for 5-10 seconds, lets it sit for 10 minutes, and then kneads it 5-10 seconds. That's right, about 30 seconds total, max, kneading (actually, I gave it a good 15 seconds each time when I tried it out). Although it takes more time, imagine how much easier this is. An elderly woman can easily do this without getting sore. It is really easy.
It is not surprising to me that this works, because I know that if you simply let the dough sit for 10 minutes after kneading it, it kneads in 5 minutes instead of the usual 10. The reason is because that gives the dough enough time for the gluten molecules (actually gliadin and glutenin) to hydrate and start unwinding on their own. Then they start joining end-to-end to make longer, and longer, and longer strands, which is what gives bread its characteristic spongy, springy network.
That's how "no knead" bread recipes work; they contain lots of water, and you just let the dough sit a long time.
I think learning smarter ways of kneading is one of the most important facets of making bread. Americans and Brits were taught to push the dough and to keep adding more and more flour. That will result in a fairly ugly dough the crumb of whose finished loaf isn't quite right. I don't think it will work at all for many kinds of bread, and is probably one of the major reasons that most older American recipes for fancier types of bread don't work at all. It works better if you add all the flour and water at once (yes, it's sticky, but once the gluten forms, it's quite workable), and also works better if you PULL the dough instead of pushing it.
Another mistake is to start kneading immediately, instead of letting the dough sit for a while--what the French call "autolyse" although technically that is a misnomer. Nothing is autolysing. It's just the gluten strands unwinding.
Other problems happen adding fats to fatty breads. Traditionally you work, say, butter or olive oil into a dough AFTER it has risen once, and kinda layer it instead of mixing it in completely. American recipes often add it in the beginning, the problem being that the fat gets in the way of the yeast getting to their sugar, so that it takes much longer to rise. Something similar happens with sweet breads. Yeasties like sugar, but not too much. I always think that sweet breads work better if the dough has almost no sugar in it, but instead the sugar is worked either into a swirl, or on the outside. Especially if you're going to glaze the outsize with sugar or syrup anyway--like sweet rolls--in which case sugar in the dough and outside the dough is just too sweet for me.
The breads described in the book are mostly (not entirely--there are a few French and Italian breads) from northern and eastern Europe--Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, Sweden, Russia, and the Ukraine. They are mostly complex, rustic breads of great character.
There are instructions I've never seen in other books, such as for harvesting your own yeast off of raisins (you know that sort of waxy coating on certain fruits? It's full of wild yeasts), and making your own barley malt (sprout barley, dry it, and grind it up). In Europe they can buy flour that already contains malt, but we generally can't in the USA.
Bear in mind that wild yeasts are not as vigorous as cultivated types. Beads made with wild yeast will take a while to rise. But it is worth knowing how to do it, when store-bought yeast is no longer available.
BTW, by "wild yeast", I mean literally wild yeast, NOT sourdough (some people refer to sourdough as "wild yeast"), although he does have sourdough recipes. Sourdough includes some Lactobacillis along with the yeast, and traditionally, it was actually used with soda, the soda reacting with the acid to produce carbon dioxide. A bit more like a quickbread.
Oh, he's also got instructions for creating the elastic crumb and thin shiny crust that most folks associate with rye bread, which never magically shows up on home-made. You add nearly boiling water to rye flour, which "gelatinizes" the starch, and mix some into the dough, and glaze some on the outside.
