April 10, 2016 - 12:25pm
Newby question on Artisan bread crust.
Hi everyone,
I'm a newby here, and also brand new to baking bread. Grandma, and mom used to make their own bread, and my mother in-law still does. I'm looking to go back to the days of being self sufficient, and I'm loving the homemade stuff, like canning, got my garden growing, now i'm trying bread baking, LOVE IT !!! just finished my second loaf's of Artisan no-knead bread, weather was rainy, so didn't get a great rise, but it taste awesome. so now to my question, I like the crunch of the crust, but my crust seems too thick, ie; TOO CRUNCHY, almost hurts to eat, how do I get a slightly thinner less dense crust ?
Thanks for any help,
Jerry, the Patio Planter
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My crusts were coming out like concrete. Make sure you're not overkneading the dough.
We have to know what your recipe is and under what baking conditions before prescribing corrective actions for your breads crust. Remember, everything counts...,
Wild-Yeast
A hard crust is a dry crust. If you will let it stale a little (like 24 hrs sitting on the counter under a cloth) the crust will absorb enough moisture from the air and the starch will begin to crystallize enough that you can cut it /chew it just fine. Many breads benefit from a little aging - especially breads made with a high proportion of whole grain flour (most especially 100% rye). Other things you can do include brushing the crust with butter (or any oil), putting some fat into the dough, and baking at a lower temperature and for a shorter time. Check the crumb temperature when it comes out of the oven and make sure it is around 190°-195°F. Then adjust time and temperature to get to that end point.
I don't think there is such a thing as bad fresh bread, but the real test of flavor comes after the 24 hr point. The volatile aromatics of the yeast have dissipated and you are left with the grain and the less volatile LAB/yeast metabolic byproducts. The texture is not the same as fresh, and neither is the flavor.
Here are options you may not have considered. As a newbie you're in a unique position. Knowing so little is a benefit. You can start to learn about bread baking from the ground up using a time-honored technique which really works. Though it will take some time, for some, it will be a fantastic experience. Hire an expert to teach you at home! By this I mean buy a textbook of bread making and work your way through it chapter by chapter, building your knowledge base slowly and steadily taking a path that's worked for the expert author who has taught a course in a school enough to know that, at least in his opinion, it works for the majority of his students. This path will lead you down paths you didn't even know existed but by the end of the experience you'll know something that you may not have realized yet, namely that you're not ready yet to know whose answers to your questions on this website are more right than others. (Note: I absolutely love TFL and appreciate all that I learn from it, but boy do I wish I hadn't taken literally decades to realize that a textbook would've been the way to go when I started. I've wasted so much time!)
Here are two textbooks: DiMuzio's Bread Baking and Hamelman's Bread. Both are available reasonably inexpensively at Alibris or Powell's Books on line. It's not so important to buy the latest edition.
Remember that textbooks are NOT bread cookbooks. Even though there are many great bread cookbooks that teach lots of great stuff, see The Bread Baker's Apprentice, for example, none of them are written in a way and with an order that would be needed for a course in a school.
By the time you finish working your way through either of those books you'll have no trouble answering your crust question and many others.