This is a column I wrote a few years ago for a newspaper. It's intended for a home-cook audience and is obvious about that. But it has some ideas I still like and use when I'm baking at home. And teaching classes or my kids how to navigate the paths of baking.
Pastorio
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The four textures of baking Once upon a time, I went to a baking school. It was advertised as showing the classic techniques as well as more modern short cuts. We made cakes and breads from scratch; the old-fashioned way. When it came time for the "more modern" part, mostly what we did was thaw some frozen doughs. Oh sure, we cut and folded them into swell shapes and filled them with some nice fillings, but we weren't baking, we were thawing, was my thought. And I was annoyed about it because I didn't think I was learning the important parts of baking. The important parts - the feel of properly made dough; the texture, elasticity and even the temperature, the resistance of the beaters or mixer and who knows what else. Then I had a sparkling realization: there were only four main textures in baking; thin enough to flow, thick enough to pipe with a pastry bag, smooth like good leather, and soft like a baby's bottom. It didn't seem quite enough to me. Like it should be more complicated somehow. I thought about the many different kinds of baked goods we were producing, trying to picture the doughs and batters. Well, let's see. Pancakes, crepes, waffles, muffins, cakes, popovers... alright, they all come from batters that can flow. How about cream puffs, eclairs, cookies? Ok, forced through pastry bags or dropped from spoons. Then I pictured strudel, phyllo and flaky puff pastry dough and several different kinds of pie crusts. Oh well, the surfaces do feel kind of leathery when they're rolled out. Yeast breads and biscuits are the baby bottom category. Gently pinch floured bread dough and see what I mean. I thought about the last category with a smile. My earlobe, very gently squeezed, was close enough as a comparison. And it works whether you make or buy the dough. The earlobe works on them all. (And that's what I've showed in my cooking classes. It's funny to see a crowd of people with floured earlobes walking around the kitchen.) And, in some situations, it makes sense to buy doughs frozen, because the people who make the dough do it all day long, every day while you and I only make them occasionally. Who has the most experience? As long as the quality is good enough, save yourself some trouble. At the cooking school, we were playing with breads. We shaped white bread dinner rolls. One of our instructors did it while talking and looking around at the students, not his fingers. Parker House rolls, Cloverleaf rolls, knots, twists, pretzel shapes. A quick glance at the baking sheet to see where the next one went. He said, "The hands know the way. If I tried to help them by watching, it would just confuse them." One of the other people asked how long it had taken him to learn to work so quickly and without watching. "Time isn't the question, mistakes are", he answered. "You have to make enough mistakes to learn what not to do and, then, to learn how it feels when you do it right. That's really the only way to fully learn how to bake. Or do anything skillfully." He showed us some nice presentations of breads, and here are a few. Make a batch of white bread dough and another of whole wheat, rye or pumpernickel from any recipe you like. (Or, dare I say it, buy them.) After proofing, punch down the doughs and divide the batches in half and roll out to similar sized rectangles each about 1/4 inch thick. Layer them one on top of the other in alternating colors, dark, light, dark, light. Now we're ready to play.
- Striped knot rolls - cut a strip of the four-colored dough 6 or 8 inches long and 3/4 to one inch wide and the same height. Tie in a loose knot, let rise on a tray and bake.
- Striped monkey bread - Two ways. The basic technique is to cut shapes of bread, dip them into melted butter or margarine (optional), put them in a tube pan or round cake pan, let them rise and then bake. First, cut circles with biscuit cutters, dip and put in the pan you've chosen. This gives horizontal stripes. Second, cut strips about 1 1/2 inches wide and 2 inches long. Dip them and stand them on their sides in the pan. Vertical stripes. You can alternate the directions of the stripes or lay them out in a pattern.
- Striped bread sticks - reroll the four-layered dough about 1/4 inch thick and cut strips 1/4 by 1/4 by 6 or 8 or 10 or however many inches long you want and lay them out on a baking sheet so they don't touch. Or, cut strips long and thin and spell the names of dinner guests in script. Put the finished names at their place setting. Yes, hokey, but watch their faces.
- Swirls - roll up the layered dough to look like a jelly roll. Cut off two inch thick slices, lay them on their sides on a baking sheet to rise. These can be made into dessert items by combining two sweet doughs and/or putting nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, etc between the layers. Imagine sticky buns made with sweet white dough and almond flavored wheat dough sprinkled with slivered almonds. Sounds good to me.
- Layered loaves - after rolling out the doughs and layering them, form them into a loaf and put into a bread pan (or two or however many it takes) to rise and bake. Cut a long slit down the center just deep enough to show the top two layers of dough.
- Layered sub rolls - cut them about 6 inches long by two or three inches wide. Or, cut them one inch wide and put two side by side with the stripes running vertically from end to end or side to side, depending on how you cut the dough. How can you tell when bread is done? Most recipes tell you to thump on the bottom of the loaf to see if it sounds hollow. I think it's silly. Try that on pumpernickel. It's like thumping on a brick, no hollow here. Foolproof method - use a quick-read thermometer - 208 or more degrees at the center and it's done. Poke it from the bottom and get most of the probe into the loaf. That kind of thermometer takes an average reading along the probe length, so if you only put the probe in a little way, you'll get a false reading. Happy breads...