DIY GOURMET: D'oh! All You Knead To Know To Roll In The Dough

Flour, salt, yeast, water. That’s it. From those simple ingredients you can make delicious home-made bread. And you can even make it in under 24 hours.

I know this firsthand as a procrastinating, rather ‘meh’ chef who was given the assignment of baking my own bread.

So, I did what any modern-day lazy person would do in this case. I googled “easy artisan bread recipe” to find out what I could make with the least amount of baking equipment and ingredients. And time, of course.

Much to my surprise, this is exactly what I should be doing, says Michael Bortz, who owns City Bakery, an award-winning, wholesale artisan bakery in Denver. Bortz, who has been in the bread business for 25 years, is also a third-generation chocolatier whose family came over from Germany in 1906 and founded the Bortz Chocolate Company in Reading, Pennsylvania. So basically, he lives and breathes this stuff.

“What’s awesome is there are so many artisan bread websites that teach you about yeast and flours,” he says.

Once you find a recipe, Bortz says it’s onto making sure you use the right ingredients.

“If you don’t have right ingredients, all the technique in world won’t save you,” he says. My being a novice baker, Bortz suggested I start with an easy, baguette-style bread and any kind of active dry yeast.

He says one of the biggest things beginners need to watch for when baking bread for the first time is how much to mix the dough. Over-kneading and under-kneading bread dough both result in Frankenstein turnouts.

Under-kneaded dough doesn’t hold together well, and tears easily, resulting in poorly shaped bread that is often flat because the gluten is not elastic enough. Over-kneaded dough likewise tears and feels dense and hard to shape because the fine strands of gluten produced from mixing water with flour are too tight to fold.

Bortz says the “window-pane” method is a good way to estimate whether your dough is ready to be shaped. Bortz says to take a piece of your dough and pull it apart gently. It shouldn’t snap like gum, but instead should be able to be pulled into a thin membrane.

“You can take a one ounce piece of dough and stretch it into a 4-by-4 square,” he says of why the test has the “windowpane” moniker.

The next step is called “proofing.” This pretty much involves waiting for the bread to rise and the yeast to work its magic. It’s not an immediate process, so always give yourself some time when you’re making bread. Bortz suggests a minimum of three to four hours from mixing to baking, when all is said and done.

“What’s the most important ingredient? It’s time,” Bortz says. “The longer bread sits, the better flavor and crusts it’s going to have before you bake it.”

I ultimately decided to go with a no-knead, crusty artisan bread recipe from the blog “The Comfort of Cooking.” I liked this recipe because it didn’t seem like I could mess the dough up much with taking out the kneading conundrum, and this recipe is also perfect for a Dutch oven, which I have acquired during my time as a lazy chef.

This recipe, in fact, turned out be so easy, I didn’t even use the Kitchen-Aid mixer a co-worker lent me. I simply kneaded the dough for a few minutes by hand, let it sit out in a bowl at room temperature overnight, and 11 hours later, popped it in the oven for 40 minutes to bake.

My results: beautiful, delicious boule-style bread that looked like it came from a French bakery in Provence. Well, maybe not Provence, but from one of France’s decent bakeries, at least.