Healthy food Baking bread yourself How it works

Bake bread yourself
(aid) - When the scent of freshly baked bread drifts through the house, no one can resist. Baking yourself is fun and has the great advantage that the ingredients can be selected deliberately.

Man has been baking for over 5,000 years. Originally, only grains were mixed with water and baked on hot stones. Today, the basic ingredients are flour, yeast or sourdough, water and salt. Quick breads or quark rolls can also be baked with baking soda. A recipe can be varied and adapted to the requirements in your own kitchen.

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Good bread takes time. Before starting, all baking ingredients should be at room temperature. Therefore, take them out of the fridge at least half an hour before preparation. Also bowl and stirrer should not be cold. Depending on the recipe, different flour types are used. The lower the type number, the lower the vitamin and mineral content and the higher the starch and gluten content. Wholemeal flours have no type designation because the whole grain is used.

If you want to try gluten-free flours like buckwheat flour, you can mix them with cereal flours to make a binding. Provided there is no gluten intolerance. However, if you have to or need to eat a gluten-free diet, you have to bond with mashed potatoes or grated apples, for example, otherwise the bread will break down.

If you bake with yeast or sourdough, the dough must rest in between. It should double in yeast and half in sourdough. This can take a few hours. The finger test shows if the dough has already gone enough. For this purpose, a dent is pressed into the mass, which should slowly lift again. If the volume does not increase, check the temperature. The bread dough likes no cold or drafts.
Finally, the loaf comes into the oven. Preheating is important so that the optimum baking temperature is achieved. With steam, the bread goes on without cracks and the crust becomes pretty crispy. To do this, place a refractory bowl of water in the oven for the first ten to fifteen minutes. It is often required in recipes to bake the bread in "falling heat". This means that the initial temperature is relatively high and is turned down after 10 to 20 minutes. Then the bread is crunchy on the outside and juicy on the inside.

The loaf is baked when it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. After baking, the bread is placed on a grate so that it can evaporate down. (Heike Kreutz, aid)