Saturday, January 22, 2011

Elizabeth David's Basic Loaf

Here is the first loaf of bread I ever cooked.  Elizabeth David is a hero.  Any time you buy good bread in an English speaking country you can thank her.  The appalling commercialised bread industry developed in England in the 1960s called the Chorleywood process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_process prompted her to write the best book about bread in the English language "English Bread and Yeast Cookery".  Read about the Chorleywood Process and buy this book if you want to understand mass produced supermarket bread forced on us from childhood and why we have been ripped off.


In a nutshell, yeast needs to act slowly on flour to allow flavours to develop and to allow the wheat proteins to be acted on by the yeast enzymes.  A rapid dough rise over minutes on highly processed white bread, with bran and wheat germ removed, results in white, puffed up bread that bloats you if you eat too much of it.  Your body can't digest the basically unaltered gluten.   I wonder if this also contributes to coeliac disease and irritable bowel syndrome as well?  Instead of the dough rising slowly over hours, the entire process takes minutes.  It's just not bread.

So, the basic loaf:

450g strong flour
120g wholemeal flour
1 teaspoon dried yeast
1 teaspoon salt
340ml water at blood temperature (lukewarm)

Mrs David goes into incredible detail, but this is a simplified version.  I use half the salt she recommends.  This is because she uses unsalted butter on bread, and we tend to use salted butter in Australia.  Also, she had a stroke in her late 40s and lost her ability to taste  salt, and to my taste she tends to overdo it.  Sadly, she had to make multiple versions with differing amounts of salt, and get friends and family to taste it so she could record the right amount.  Mrs David also smoked incessantly (hence the stroke) and drank Nescafe instant coffee, so I feel I can differ from her on this point about the salt.

Mix it together in a bowl and knead for 10 minutes.  Once you get the hang of it, you'll know when the dough is ready as it changes consistency and starts to feel silky and bouncy under your hands, I can't describe it any better but with practice you'll understand. Put it in an oiled bowl, not the same one as you started mixing in or you'll end up with concrete, and leave it covered with cling film somewhere warm to rise for 1.5 hours.  Punch the dough down on a floured surface, and knead for a couple of minutes into a sausage shape to fit an oiled or buttered bread tin (1kg capacity).  Put it in the tin, cover with a tea towel and leave somewhere warm for about 45 minutes until doubled in size.  Meanwhile, pre-heat the oven to 230 C.

Place the bread into the oven for 15 minutes at 230 C
Reduce the temperature to 200 C and cook for another 15 minutes
Reduce the temperature to 175 C, tip the bread out on its side into the oven rack and cook for 20 minutes

When cooked, it sounds hollow if you knock the base of it with your knuckle.  Leave to cool on a wire rack.  If the load starts to look as if it is in danger of burning, cover it with some aluminium foil.

I guarantee this will taste so much better then the sliced supermarket variety, but you will need get used to how heavy a slice of bread is meant to be.  It's not meant to be a feathery wisp of puffed up nothing that you can compress to a gooey bit of dough in your hand.

This method of a reducing oven temperature is meant to mimic the falling temperature in a woodfired oven, which is how bread was made until modern ovens were invented.  A high initial temperature, gradually falling, is a standard approach by Elizabeth David, and it's a good basic technique to become familiar with.  That's enough for now, next time I will do a variation of this loaf using rice, which makes the best toast I've ever tasted.

2 comments:

  1. I so very much wanted this to work - ED is my culinary heroine. But... 1st try admittedly... very dark crust and rise not as good as hoped for, though oven-spring was fair... still - tast test tomorrow morning and then some tweaking - we'll see where we get to...

    ReplyDelete
  2. i lost my book and looked up the recipe online, finding this. With the dough now proofing, i came back to read your surrounding text ....and noticed your comment about having halved the salt. 😦 Oh well. Next time I'll know. Thanks for transcribing it, anyway!

    ReplyDelete