Since I’ve definitely met the goal of this project, I thought I’d make a summary of what I learned to finish it off. This is by no means the only way to bake bread, as there are a boat load of different ways to do it, but if you’re just as clueless as I was, this can be a nice starting point to help you on your bread journey. Best of luck and bon appétit!

Requirements

In terms of equipment, you’ll need the following items for this recipe:

• Mixing bowl
• Dough scraper
• Kitchen scales
• Oven that goes to 200 Celcius (at least)
• Cast iron cooking pot with lid
• Silicon lined parchment paper

After gathering the equipment, this is what you’ll need in terms of ingredients:

• Flour (at least about 500 grams, more is better)
• Yeast (I use dry yeast)
• Salt
• Water

Mixing

The first step is to mix the different ingredients into each other. Grab your mixing bowl and put in 460 grams of flour, 280 grams of water, 8 grams dried yeast and 11 grams of salt. If you’re using a mixed flour, follow the ingredients listed on the package. A rough estimate is to use about 60% of the flour weight in water, 1.5% of dried yeast and 2-2.5% of salt. All these measurements are relative to the starting flour weight.

Keep mixing the contents until it’s become one sticky mess, without too much dry stuff left in the bowl. Don’t worry too much if there’s some dry flakes stuck to the sides. If you need to add some more water during this process, that’s okay, just add it very slowly, a little bit at a time. When you’re done, let the result rest for 1 hour at room temperature, while covered with something like a kitchen towel.

Kneading

Use the dough scraper to deposit your mixed dough onto a hard work surface. Be sure to not use any additional flour at this point! Use the palm of you hand to push the dough into itself, then pull the end back over itself and repeat this until the dough is sticking to itself. This usually takes about 10-12 minutes. Use the dough scraper periodically to grab any bits sticking to the table and put it back onto the dough. If it’s still sticky at the end, don’t worry, just get it back into the mixing bowl as best you can. After this point, again let it rest for 1 hour, at room temperature while covered. The goal is to double it in size and this takes me generally about an hour. Note that this can differ for you, so just see if it noticably increased in size.

Shaping

Flour your work surface a bit and put some flour on your hands, then deposit the dough upside down onto the floured work surface. The side touching the flour is the non-sticky side, while the other should remain sticky. Keep this in mind going forward. Take one of the outside edges and pull it back onto the opposite side of the dough. Repeat this process for different edges until the bottom is starting to develop tension. This shouldn’t take too long. Deposit the result back into the mixing bowl upside down and let it rest for 10 minutes, at room temperature without anything covering the bowl.

After these 10 minutes take it out again and repeat the shaping process. At the end you can try to round it up a bit better by just using your hands to shape it more into a sort of sphere. Finally put it onto a piece of parchment paper with the non-sticky side upwards. You can use a dough scraper to push the edges under the loaf a bit more if you want to develop some more tension on the surface. Let this rest for 1 hour, at room temperature, uncovered.

Baking

During the last hour of resting, after the final shaping, pre-heat your oven to 200 degrees Celcius with the cast iron pot inside. Take a knife and make a single incision along the length of the bread. This will help during the baking to make it rise more evenly and not have it burst out at random spots. Take out the pot, put the parchment paper with the loaf inside, close the lid and put it back in the oven for 20 minutes. After that, take the lid off and put it back in the oven for another 30 minutes. When you’re done, take the bread out and let it rest until it’s completely cooled off. This should take a while. A safe bet is to wait about 2 hours before cutting into it.

My last two loaves had been made using simple supermarket flour. However since that is still rapidly selling out (thanks to Corona) and since I plan on doing this a few more times, I decided to look up an online retailer for flour. After a bit of searching I found a mill that sells online and ordered a starter pack containing 10 different 1kg bags of flour and a 5kg bag of All Purpose flour (see image below). Then last Thursday (sorry, I forgot to make an update post), I grabbed one of the flour bags and made another loaf. After some consideration I went with “Het Beste Brood” a.k.a. “The Best Bread” to see if it would live up to its name. As it turns out this flour was full of seeds and other chunky little bits that make it a more heavy bread than some others might be. Generally I’m not the biggest fan of that, but in terms of baking quality, this was my best loaf yet. It was light, fluffy, nicely air-y inside and tasted amazing.

Today I decided to bake another loaf. Trying to improve on the mistakes from last time and to also try a different mix of flour. Last time I used 460 grams of whole grain flour, but I was informed that you usually mix that kind of flour with white/all purpose flour instead. So I went with a mix of 260 grams of white flour and 200 grams of whole grain.

I struggled a bit with how sticky the dough was this time around, more so than last time. To combat this, I wetted my hands a lot during kneading. However this resulted in a dough that resembled more of a puddle and wasn’t able to hold it shape very well. Next time I will try not to worry so much about the stickyness and not use any water during kneading. Hopefully this will result in a dough that is easier to shape later on.

Nevertheless, I am really happy with how the end result turned out. I made sure to let it rest after the final shaping for an additional hour and it resulted in a much more air-y structure than last time. Which improved the texture considerably. Tomorrow I’m expecting to get a whole lot more flour and I’m excited to see what I can make with that.

I’ve done it! I’ve made my first actual loaf of bread!! The crust tasted really great, but the inside was very dense. Apparently I totally forgot to include a rising step in between my final shaping and baking. But hey, still turned out pretty tasty and I can’t wait to try it again.

For this bread, I followed these steps:

1) Mix 460g flour, 280g water (60% of flour), 8g dried yeast (1.5% of flour), 11g salt (2%-2.5% of flour). Use a butterknife. Add more water during mixing when needed
2) Let it rest for 1 hour, covered, room temp
3) Knead until the dough forms a smooth bunch (10-12 minutes), add water if necessary until it sticks to itself but not to your hands. Never add more flour though
4) Let it rest until it doubles in size, covered
5) Shape into a sphere, developing surface tension
6) Let it rest again for 10 minutes, uncovered
7) Shape some more, basically repeat step 5
8) Flour up some parchment paper and put it on there, top facing up
9) Bake in pre-heated cast-iron pot for like 20 minutes with the lid on, then another 20 without the lid

Now that I can look back on my process, I’ve identified the following mistakes:

1) When mixing, I need to clean out the bowl a bit better, making sure less dry ingredient remain on the sides.
2) During kneading, I need to be a bit less aggressive and mainly not push the dough into the work surface, instead I need to push the dough onto itself.
3) Also during kneading I need to use my dough scraper more to gather up loose bits of dough sticking to the surface.
4) During pre-shaping, I should either add some flour to my hands or sprinkle some on the work surface, so it doesn't cling as badly to it.
5) During both pre- and final shaping, I need to press the dough less into itself, so it should come out a bit more air-y.
6) When putting the dough on my baking parchment, I need to use *no* flour on the parchment. I used way too much, resulting in a very flour-y underside.
7) My BIGGEST MISTAKE was not letting the dough rest uncovered for another 60 minutes or more between final shaping and baking. This resulted in a very dense interior.
8) I also forgot to score the dough before baking, luckily I was able to catch this mistake within the first minute of baking and was able to take it out quickly and score it still.
9) Also when scoring, I should make a more even cut along the length of the dough and a little less deep than I did this time around.
10) I *might* need to leave it to cool for even longer (I waited about 75 minutes) as it was still a little bit moist on the inside. This could also have been a result of mistake 7 though.

You can watch my entire process in the video down here:

After some initial setbacks, I was able to acquire all of the necessary equipment! However, apparently I’m not the only one who has started baking during these times, because I couldn’t find instant yeast anywhere in my local grocery stores. So I at least bought some basic flour, some pre-mixed flour with instant yeast and I’ve resorted to ordering a bunch of instant yeast online. The pre-mixed stuff is probably not going to be the greatest, but I might as well give it a try. I’m still super excited to give all this a shot!

Today I spent some time doing research about what equipment I need to buy in order to get started. Credits go to TotalBreadRoll for helping me out a ton with advice and specific product recommendations. I’ll probably be quoting his name some more in the rest of this project, as I’m planning on asking for more of his advice as I go on.

The full list of items to get is as follows:

• A cast iron pot that’s safe to put in the oven
• Some good parchment paper lined with silicone
• Kitchen scales so I can properly weigh my ingredients
• A dough scraper
• A nice big mixing bowl

Most of these are pretty generic kitchen equipment, so even if I don’t end up baking a lot in the future, I’ll still be able to re-use them in general cooking recipes. In a few days I’ll be making the purchase and when I get everything I’ll be sure to post a picture of it.