Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Breads
For perfect bread, try turning your oven into a proofer
Sep 29th
Making bread seems daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the steps with which you may be least familiar if you don’t make a lot of yeast products is proofing.
Proofing is simply putting the yeast dough in an environment to keep the yeast happy and alive. There are two main factors in this: heat and humidity.
In well-equipped professional kitchens (unlike the one I work in) there is usually a proofer. This is basically a metal box with a heating element and some sort of steam source (I’ve seen them as simple as a metal bowl sitting on the heating element). These fancy things have both adjustable heat and humidity settings and in a professional setting are very useful. However, let’s face it – they take up a lot of space and only do one thing, so most places go without.
The simplest way to proof unshaped dough is to place it in a greased bowl and cover with a moist towel. This will work perfectly fine, but depending on the ambient temperature could take a while. It also doesn’t work too well for shaped doughs such as loaves and baguettes. The best solution I’ve found for the final proof of the shaped dough is to turn your oven into a proofer.
Keeping in mind that yeast dies at 140ºF, turn your oven onto the lowest setting it can be on. This is often even before the numbers on the dial start showing anything – 100ºF works just fine. Place a bowl (preferably metal) of warm water (not boiling) on the oven floor, and place the bread, on the tray you want to bake it on, above the bowl of water, allowing enough room for the steam to circulate. Keep in mind that by the time it’s ready to bake the dough will have doubled in size, so don’t put the loaves too close together. If your oven has a dodgy thermostat, as many do, check to make sure it isn’t too hot with an oven thermometer.
To test if it’s fully proofed, when the dough is roughly doubled, press your finger ever so gently onto it. If it springs back, it still needs more time. If it slowly springs back but leaves a bit of a dent, it’s ready to go. Remove both the bread and the bowl from the oven, turn the temperature back up and bake away.
Refreshing crusty bread
Jul 6th
Crusty bread, whether it’s bought or homemade has a tendency to stale faster than regular loaves. To refresh the bread if it’s a day or two old, simply place it in a 300 degree oven with a shallow pan or oven-safe pot of water (a brownie pan works well) of hot water for 5-10 minutes until the bread is soft and too hot to touch. If you get warm bread at a restaurant, chances are this is how it was done.
For better cheese bread use cubes
Jun 2nd
Cheesy quick breads and yeast breads can be awesome. What’s better than a spicy cheese corn bread, or a tasty crusty cheese loaf? But, they can also be lacking in cheese flavour.
Many recipes I’ve seen call for grated cheese. Grated cheese is a great addition to lots of things(pizzas, chilli, pastas etc), however it is not a good addition to breads and muffins. You can use twice or even 3 times as much as the recipe calls for and still not give you a good, cheesy taste, increasing the cost and calories of an otherwise nice item.
The trick to deliciously cheesy baked goods is to cut the cheese into roughly 1-2 cm cubes, and add these as called for in the recipe. They will stay relatively whole during baking, and will leave melted cheese nuggets in your final product.