To an untrained eye, your bread looks the same every time you bake it, but if you’re just starting out, that loaf of bread can seem like a different thing every time you pull it from the oven. One day it’ll be soft and light, the next it’ll be sticky and gummy, and another time it could come out hard despite following the same recipe. It might seem like you just can’t get the recipe right, but the issue is more likely that your technique was inconsistent. Bread is affected by its temperature, when it was left to rise, how you handled it, and how much water you added. When you start making bread you tend to change all of these elements constantly without realizing it. The best way to get a better at bread baking is to notice where the changes were occurring so you can bake it in a more structured way and learn what each baking process teaches you.
Look at three main factors in a recipe: what the dough feels like when you finish mixing it, how it changes after you leave it to rest for a while, and how the dough handles itself when you begin to form the loaf. These aspects are much more important than worrying about how high the dough rises in the oven right away. Make a simple loaf of bread and wait 10 seconds before adding any more flour to the mixture. Use your fingers to touch it; if it clings to the bowl like paste, it may simply need a few minutes of resting before you judge it. If it feels rough and tears apart quickly, it may need more water or more mixing. A lot of bakers make the mistake of keeping flouring the dough immediately instead of waiting for it to settle and then assessing what is wrong with it. If you overflour your bread, you will end up with a bread that has too much density and is very dry. Let your bread rest for a few moments before you decide if it needs more flour.
It is also common to see beginners kneading the dough too hard. They want the process to be efficient and knead the dough vigorously. However, kneading usually doesn’t require much force. Try kneading a bread and knead gently for thirty seconds, stop, and notice whether the surface looks smoother than before. Then repeat. This exercise will teach your hand how to identify if the dough is ready or needs to be kneaded some more. You should try to avoid adding too much flour because that only complicates it; instead, if the dough is sticky, use the palm of your hand to rub it to see if the texture is better. When dough feels less like you want it to break apart and more like it can be stretched, you’re on the right track. The dough is forming a structure, which is a positive sign. You won’t learn this simply by timing how long you’ve kneaded the dough; you’ll only learn this through careful observation.
You may find you are consistently stuck in the proofing stage; this could be because you’re relying solely on how much it has expanded instead of assessing its appearance. When bread proofes, it should rise, but it shouldn’t just puff up or it will collapse. One easy way to test bread is to press on it; if it quickly returns to its original position, the bread probably needs more time to proof, but if your bread sinks in immediately, it has been overproofed. It is easy for bakers who don’t proof the bread correctly to become overconfident and let their dough rest for too long, especially if they are baking in a warm environment. If this is the case, make it a goal to spend an entire baking session only proofing. Bake the same batch, use the same bowl in the same spot in your kitchen. Track the amount of time the dough took to rise, the temperature of your kitchen, and what the bread felt like when you poked it. Even keeping a record of one loaf is enough to help you improve your proofing technique and save many failed bread-making sessions.
One way to become a better baker is by making time each day to do specific baking drills rather than just trying to perfect your baking skills. Make a commitment to spend fifteen minutes practicing one thing each day rather than trying to master every aspect of the bread-making process. You can try mixing the bread and changing the water amount to observe hydration. Try to knead the bread and stop once the dough begins to feel softer and smoother. Another day, try to make two small loaves out of the same dough and observe how each behaves while forming the dough. This sort of practice will help you develop your skills as a baker and will allow you to catch problems with your baking techniques more easily, like if you need to let the dough rest longer because it feels too tight or your bread spreads too much because you don’t have enough tension. These sorts of small comparisons are much easier to master than experimenting with every type of bread.
The best way for a new baker to develop their technique is to keep track of how you bake bread so that you can make changes accordingly when baking. Once you are finished baking the bread and cutting the slices, compare your bread to see how it feels and tastes to what the bread should have been like at that stage. If the center of your bread is dense, perhaps your bread wasn’t allowed to proof long enough or the kneading wasn’t enough time. Large uneven holes may suggest shaping problems rather than a failure in mixing. If you see browning on the top of your bread before you think your bread needs to be done, the oven might have run hot too quickly, or perhaps you placed the bread too close to the top of the oven where the oven’s heat is highest. Keep baking bread and learn from each loaf as a guide rather than the final word. Your bread baking journey will become more consistent once you know how your dough will react to every step of the process.