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The Curious Cook

Better Bread With Less Kneading

Sabra Krock for The New York Times

Wetter doughs make rustic-looking loaves.

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By HAROLD
McGEE

Published: February 23, 2010

WHEN I started making bread back in the 1970s, whether an establishment loaf
from James Beard’s “Beard on Bread” or a countercultural one from “The Tassajara
Bread Book,” it was a hands-on workout, kneading a stiff, elastic dough for what
felt like a very long 10 to 15 minutes.

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Related

Recipe:
Golden Whole Wheat Bread (February 24, 2010)

The
Minimalist: The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work (November 8,
2006)

The
Minimalist: No-Knead Bread: Not Making Itself Yet, but a Lot Quicker
(October 8, 2008)
The Minimalist: Baking No-Knead Bread

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Sabra Krock for The New York Times

Rough-hewed breads now in vogue benefit from less kneading. But
mind the moisture level of the dough.

In the 1990s, I kneaded many hours away getting the hang of the tangy, crusty
breads from the Acme Bread Company in the Bay Area, starting with the recipe
that Steve Sullivan, Acme’s founder, had supplied for “Chez Panisse
Cooking.”

Today I wonder what else I might have done with all those hours. Labor-saving
bread books are nothing new, but the current crop includes several by respected
professional bakers, and a consensus that kneading just isn’t necessary for good
homemade bread. Most proclaim the virtues of doughs that are too wet and sticky
to knead, nothing like the resilient doughs of the past. What happened to the
idea that prolonged kneading works a dough’s gluten proteins into alignment,
making it more elastic and capable of rising higher into a lighter loaf? Is it
really true that less work can make better bread?

To find out, I baked variations on the same loaves daily for a few weeks —
firm and wet, kneaded and not. Then I got a professional’s perspective from
Michel Suas, founder of the San Francisco Baking Institute, a school nearby.

Mr. Suas was a pastry chef in a restaurant with three Michelin stars when he
visited the United States in 1986, tasted the beginnings of an artisanal
approach to bread that had gone moribund in his own country, and stayed on to
work with the likes of Mr. Sullivan and Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery.

Several things became clear from my experiments. Wet, unkneaded doughs can
make very good bread. Manipulating them for 10 to 15 minutes usually didn’t
affect the results. Firm doughs do benefit from a few minutes of kneading, but
only because it helps mix the flour evenly with the smaller proportion of water.
Prolonged kneading didn’t make much difference in the finished loaves.

So why did we ever bother to knead? Mr. Suas explained that like supermarket
breads today, homemade bread in the 1970s was modeled on English pan loaves,
with a tight, even, fine-grained interior ideal for tidy sandwiches.

A firm, well-kneaded dough makes good sandwich bread, but not the open,
irregular interiors of “rustic” loaves now in vogue. These are best made, Mr.
Suas said, with a looser, wetter dough and gentler handling to preserve the
pockets of gas from the yeast fermentation. The elastic gluten network develops
slowly as the dough rises, and the baker helps out by occasionally lifting the
dough edges and folding them over.

Some wet doughs can still benefit from kneading. One is the
whole wheat dough from the latest version of “Amy’s Bread” by Amy Scherber
and Toy Kim Dupree, published this month by John Wiley & Sons.

Whole grains tend to absorb more water and produce weaker gluten networks,
and I found that kneading, as the recipe directs, gave a lighter, loftier loaf.
This book has recipes that more closely approximate the wet, gently handled
doughs Ms. Scherber uses in her bakery. When “Amy’s Bread” was first published
in 1996, Ms. Scherber deemed such recipes too challenging for the home baker.

I wasn’t happy with all the wet doughs I tried. While some held their shape
and baked into beautiful loaves, others would flatten out and turn themselves
into something like a focaccia, with a thin crust and a coarse interior that
seemed more gummy than bready.

Mr. Suas said that these disappointing recipes were too wet. “Water doesn’t
give you any flavor or structure, so enough to hold the flour together is
enough,” he told me. “Any more and you don’t get bread, you get thick blini. Or
bread pudding
without the eggs.”

He recommended choosing recipes under 75 percent hydration: a weight of water
that is 75 percent or less the weight of the flour. (A calculator is handy for
understanding baking.) His favorite hydration for a workable dough that produces
a well-aerated, crusty loaf is 68 percent. Some recipes that I tested exceeded
90 percent. James Beard’s basic loaf was 60 percent.

So doughs of a certain wetness and little or no kneading can make delicious
bread. But beware of other “revolutionary” ideas that are little more than
industrial shortcuts on a small scale. This is true above all for methods that
save time and effort with large doses of yeast. The doughs rise in a couple of
hours, but the breads are harsh and acrid with instant-yeast flavor. Whole-grain
flours or other flavorful ingredients can mask it, but only partly.

“Increasing the yeast to speed the fermentation, that’s a big no-no for
quality,” said Mr. Suas, who likened it to trying to imitate sourdough flavor by
adding vinegar or beer. “Why even bother to make bread like this? It’s bad!”

Among the recent books whose recipes I tried, Jim Lahey’s justly celebrated
“My Bread,” written with Rick Flaste, puts together a brilliant technique
trifecta: a wet dough that can be stirred together without kneading; a long,
slow fermentation with just a gram of yeast, so that its flavor doesn’t
dominate; and tipping the risen dough into a heated pot and lid, which heat the
dough quickly and trap its steam to boost its “oven spring.” “Artisan Breads
Every Day,” by the baker and teacher Peter Reinhart, is a lucid compendium of
modern approaches.

Other notes from my baking bout:

Look for recipes that give ingredient weights, and avoid measuring in cups
and spoons, which include variable amounts of empty space. This will also let
you calculate dough hydrations and avoid overly wet recipes. Just divide the
total liquid weight by the total flour weight, and if the answer is much above
0.75, expect a relatively flat loaf.

If your bread comes out bland, as a number of mine were, check the salt,
which is essential for good aroma as well as taste. Mr. Suas said wet doughs
need more salt than firm ones, around 2 percent of the flour weight. If you
measure by spoonfuls, remember that it will take more kosher salt than
granulated salt to get the same weight, because kosher salt does not pack as
densely.

It’s easier to get a good oven rise and an open, airy interior with elongated
loaves or small rolls instead of a large round loaf. These shapes also give you
more surface area for a flavorful crust.

And there’s nothing like cutting into a loaf of bread you’ve just made and
seeing the signs of its exuberant rise captured in every
slice.

More Articles in Dining
& Wine » A version of this article appeared in print on February
24, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.

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Past Coverage

RECIPES;
Pizza Dough (April 19, 2009)

Building on
Layers of Tradition (April 8, 2009)

GENERATIONS;
Nanny's Recipe, Still in Demand (March 15, 2009)

A
GOOD APPETITE; Bringing the Breadbasket Back to
Thanksgiving (November 12, 2008)

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