Hi Bold Bakers, I heard from a lot of you that you want to do more bread baking in 2020
like sourdoughs, more no-knead doughs and just other basic bread recipes.
Now I am all about this because I love bread making, but I thought it’s really important
before we get stuck into it that we cover some of the 7 most common bread making mistakes
so you don’t make them in the future.
So let’s get started with number one.
Weighing your ingredients accurately, now this is really important because when it comes
to bread making you want precision.
You’ll know from my recipes I do cups, grams and ounces because I come from Europe and
we use grams and ounces.
The thing about grams and ounces is they’re way more precise, so get yourself an inexpensive
weighing scale so you always have it for bread making.
When measuring with cups your volume can vary and with bread making we want to be like really
precise.
So tip number two, I say this often, don’t let salt and yeast come in direct contact
with each other.
When you’re putting your ingredients in the bowl put salt on one side of the bowl
and yeast on the other side.
You can mix them in with the flour and then you can mix them together.
Just make sure that they don’t go in one on top of the other because the salt will
kill the yeast.
Tip number three, inaccurately adding too much water.
Now this is a common mistake and I’ll tell you how to avoid it.
When you’re mixing up your liquid, only add in enough liquid so that your dough forms
and cleans the bottom of the bowl.
So at the end you’ve got a clean bowl and a ball of dough, you don’t want it to be
too soggy then your dough will be really difficult to work with.
Tip number four, not covering your dough at all stages now this is really important.
If you didn’t know, dough and air are actually not best friends, you want to keep it covered
with cling wrap or some kind of cling film and then put a tea towel over it, you don’t
want your dough to ever be exposed to just like the air because your dough can form a
skin.
If your dough forms a skin it can be really difficult to proof and it can ruin your bread
dough.
So from the moment you make your dough until you’re shaping it at the very end I always
want you to keep it covered.
Tip number 5 inadequately proofing your dough, now some people get a little worried of proofing,
they don’t know what to look for and I’m gonna tell you.
So what you do is you push your dough, and if it bounces back kind of slowly then it’s
proofed and it’s ready to go into the oven.
If you proof your dough for too long and you don’t have time to get it into the oven,
the end result is that your dough will be really flat so you just want to be sure that
you don’t over proof it.
Another sign of over proofed dough is that if you peel the cling wrap and the dough sticks
to the cling wrap, that is over proofed.
Tip number 6 failure to create steam in an oven now bread loves steam and I’ll tell
you why.
It gives it a lovely shiny crust for one and it makes it really chewy so for the first
20 minutes or so of baking you want a lot of steam in there, so there are two ways you
can do it.
You can put a baking tray in the bottom and pour hot water into it and that will create
steam as your bread bakes, or you can get a spray bottle that’s just for water and
you can spray the dough and spray the oven then shut it really fast and that will also
create steam.
So those are two really good options.
Tip number 7 do not let the heat escape during baking, now I can’t stress how important
this is because bread loves a hot oven.
So my rule of thumb is for the first 20 minutes, stay away from that door, don’t open it,
just peek through the window and let the bread do it’s thing.
In the first few minutes that your bread goes into the oven it creates this thing called
oven spring and it makes your bread pop and rise really nicely and if you open that door,
it ain’t gonna happen so just leave it be.
Also if you open the door too often you’ll end up with a soft crust and you don’t want
that.
Now that you know the 7 most common bread making mistakes go forward and make killer
bread.
Thank you so much for watching I hope you thought this was useful and stay tuned for
more bread recipes to come.
I’ll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.