August 1, 2012 - 10:26am
greetings from Singapore
Just wanted to say hi and thanks to everyone. Recently stared making bread and probably many of the questions I ask sound silly, but your answers help to make sense of all this.
Living in a country with a temperature that varies between 26C (78.8F) and 32C (89.6) with humidity over 80% doesnt make things easier....
Thanks.
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Never hesitate to ask a question; everyone here started baking bread with zip experience.
As to your warm kitchen, you can easily control your dough temperature by calculating the correct temperature of the water to be added to the mix.
Susan of Wild Yeast offers an excellent explanation of the process here: http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2007/07/05/water/
... every time I hear that someone's just getting into baking. It fills me with so many memories of successes and failures. I have a piece of advice which stems from my 40 years. As much as you can learn lots from this website, I recommend that you pick a text book and devote a good long time to the project of learning your way through it. Text books are not cook books. Text books are specifically designed to structure your learning from the ground up. Even though cook books may have some educative material in them, they're just not the same thing as a text book. If you're a beginner and really want to learn bread baking, get a beginner's text book (for example, DiMuzio's Bread Baking) and work your way through its exercises. While you're doing this, also continue reading this website regularly, watch all the linked videos, and tell us about your baking successes and failures. You will come to develop your own sense of things, both the intellectual content and the choreography of the dough, more quickly and with much greater assurance. Because this website is so much fun and generally a happy place doesn't mean that every one who answers your questions is equally experienced. Your text book's author presumably is an expert. A word of warning: do not work from Hamelman's Bread as a beginner because it's too detailed and may put you off. Save it for later, at which time you'll be glad you have it. [I haven't read my way through all of Floyd Mann's The Fresh Loaf Book of Bread Baking but what I have read is good. I don't recall that he has the graded exercises the DiMuzio does, but you can see it by clicking "Handbook" above on this page.]