Making the case for home baking
Eating better, eating smarter in a post-pandemic, regenerative economy
Would you swap perceived convenience for something that brings joy to you and your family’s life? Hear me out.
I’m a fan of home baking, in part because it is an area of cooking where I have much to learn. In part because when done well, the results are amazing. And no, I don’t watch the Great British Bake Off, mostly because I can’t stand the presenters
A few months ago I got into making baguettes, focaccia, pizza, and loaves using pre-ferment poolishes and bigas. A full explanation of these pre-ferment methods can be found here.
I follow the methods in Ken Forkish’s excellent Flour Water. Salt, Yeast. While Forkish provides close to bullet proof recipes and methods, they can be time consuming because there are multiple steps involved, often over 16-20 hours or even several days. That’s fine for a retiree like me but for the person who has to work or care for relatives? I’m not so sure. In truth, Forkish’s approach is more appropriate for enthusiasts. What about the home cook whose time is constrained?
Home bread baking has never been a popular sport in my lifetime but I’d like to make the case.
Bread is a relatively cheap staple and in the U.K. at least, there is plenty of variety with supermarkets pushing more and more exotic types alongside the ubiquitous ‘tin’ loaf. However, I find modern supermarket bread to be both short lived and often soggy in texture with little real taste. Can the home cook do better? I think so. But it has to be economical at a time when price inflation in everything is skyrocketing.
To that end I made a fast proofing loaf, baked under a cloche which exceeded my expectations. The recipe is simple:
500g strong bread flour
10g dried yeast
10g caster sugar
10g sea salt
280g water at 30 degC.
Add the dry ingredients one at a time, mixing each separately and then one final time. Make a dough by adding the water in stages, ensuring that each addition is well incorporated. You might not need all the water or perhaps a smidge more to create a dough that you knead quickly for 2-3 minutes and then rest in a covered bowl for 20 mins.
Next, knock down the dough to get rid of the CO2, knead again to get a slightly elastic dough and then form into a ball by folding it around both hands. Maybe another 5 mins.
Flour the cloche platter, put the dough ball into the platter and then cover with the cloche. Leave somewhere warm (20-25 degC) for another 45 mins.
About 30 mins into the second rise, start your oven. This needs to run hot, around 240 degC fan.
At the 45 minute mark, brush a little milk over the loaf, dust with some more flour, slash the top on a cross shape, cover and put into the hot oven for 35 mins.
Remove the extremely hot cloche VERY carefully, preferably using good oven gloves, uncover and put the bread onto a wire rack to cool for 20 mins before trying.
This recipe produces a ‘standard’ 800g loaf that would likely cost £1.25-1.50 to buy in your average supermarket.
By my reckoning, the materials and power usage costs of making the loaf is about 65p - roughly half the cost of a shop bought alternative.
What about the cloche? Mine is an Emile Henry ceramic type that cost £70. (Check out Amazon for different types and prices.) If you make this bread regularly then by my reckoning the cloche pays back in about 6 months based on baking twice a week. You could use a Dutch oven and these can be bought for about £50, improving the payback period to about 4 months. The advantage of using a Dutch is that it can do double duty for stews and slow braising too. Like anything else, you can pay any amount. I have a large Dutch oven made from recycled train tracks that set me back £250.
What about labour cost? This is much harder to quantify because much depends on your shopping habits and how you value time spent in a kitchen. My guess is that the actual ‘work’ is no more than 25 mins, 30 of you consider hand kneading a good way to do arm and shoulder strength exercises.
Trust me, the results are an order of magnitude better than anything you can buy in a supermarket and definitely on par with artisanal alternatives that cost way more.
If you have at home children, it’s a good way to transfer cooking skills. It’s no exaggeration that the smell of freshly baked bread permeating your house is hard to beat. What value do you put on that?
With a war in Ukraine leading to likely spikes in the cost of wheat, leading to higher flour costs; add in labour and distribution cost hikes and the economic argument is compelling.
Taken together, it strikes me there is an opportunity for the home cook/baker to improve nutrition and quality of life while bearing down on at home inflation.
At a time when so much of what we take for granted is changing, is now the time to make the case for home baking? I think so.