- 52 Loaves Home
- Buy the book
- Recipes and Techniques
- A note about the recipes
- Building a levain
- Painless kneading
- Peasant bread
- Baguettes
- Leek and pancetta pizza
- Behind the scenes
- Cultivating wheat
- Building the earth oven
- Searching for the perfect loaf
- Tour Abbaye Saint-Wandrille
- Read an Excerpt
Kneading has gotten such a bad rap that you'd think it was about as enjoyable as eating a bowl of raw dough. Witness the enduring popularity of "no-knead bread," despite the fact that dealing with this sticky mess is"no-fun" bread as well (there, I said it!), so we're back to square one, and facing the question: How can you take the pain out of kneading? It took me a while, but in the course of my year of baking, I learned that the answer lay intwo French words: levain and autolyse. I'll explain why in the instructions below, buttrust me — you can make kneading by hand an enjoyable 5- to 7-minute affair. And check out the video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving picture is worth — hmm,it can't be a million — I don't know... even more. |
Using a levain (aka starter or sourdough) not only gives you far superior bread (see the instructions on building one here), but because the levainhas been sitting around in your fridge for week or years, it already has a well-developed gluten structure— that is, it's already partially pre-kneaded. Autolyse is fancy word invented by a French baking instructor and bread scientist of sorts, Raymond Calvel. It meansto let your dough rest (I give it 25-30 minutes) before kneading. This allows the flour to become thoroughlysaturated, and provides time for the gluten chains to start forming up before you even lay a hand on the dough — more pre-kneading. Following that, it's an easy 5 to 7 minutes — that's all! — of pleasant kneadingby hand, and you're done. No mixers or food processors to clean up, you've gotten a little mild exercise, worked outsome frustrations, and made some pretty good bread. So, let's assume you've used a starter, mixed everything together, and let it sit covered forhalf an hour. Now we're ready to do some kneading. How do you go about that?
|