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🍞 How to taste bread, summer ciabatta, and more!
Published 10 days ago • 3 min read
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How to taste bread, summer ciabatta, and more
Hello, bread baker! Oh, how I have a packed newsletter for you this week.
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First, we'll explore an important topic—ironically, a topic often overlooked in today's visual-heavy environment—how to taste bread.
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Sometimes, I'll get an email from a new baker that goes like this:
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I just baked my first sourdough loaf, and it looks amazing! But I'm not sure if how it tastes is how it's supposed to taste.
Often, we see amazing bread, but while it may look like the part, the flavor side of things might not have. Or, we're not even sure how to evaluate what good bread is from the get-go (I was guilty of this when I started baking)!
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Every baking class I've ever attended had times when we stopped to taste the bread we had just made. We did this to discuss its characteristics and evaluate what we were tasting, from crust to crumb to aroma to texture.
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Because, if we constantly focus on aesthetics—which are important, don't get me wrong—we overlook the most essential characteristic of bread: how it tastes.
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We are baking bread to eat it, after all.
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In the latest essay at The Perfect Loaf, we turn our baker's lens toward tasting and how to become better bakers we must become better tasters.
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And also!
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A complete revamp to my sourdough ciabatta, the time for zucchini bread is now, and my newly updated water temperature calculator.
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Read on!
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In this week's newsletter:
Essay: How to bake better bread (by tasting it correctly)
In this guest post, Graison Gill delves into the right way to taste bread. He guides us in engaging our senses, eating the right parts of the loaf at the right time, and correctly evaluating our sensations to become better bakers.
I recently did an overhaul to my sourdough ciabatta recipe that's been out for over 6 years now. The original made great bread (and it's available to download in the post), but this version has several improvements:
Easier dough to handle
Flour flexibility (I used Khorasan, but whole hard red wheat works well, too)
Same-day formula
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Now is the perfect time to make this bread, especially if your garden is throwing out lots of sandwich ingredients (🍅!).
You all probably know by now how vital temperature is when making bread. (Right!?)
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I talk about temperature at length in my cookbook, and I recently updated my water temperature calculator to make it easier to find and use.
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You can quickly input the temperatures for your kitchen, flour, preference, and the desired dough temp for any recipe (always listed on my recipes!), and it'll automatically calculate what you need to heat or cool your mixing water.
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Super easy! Bookmark this page for easy access and nail that final dough temp every time.
Join the community at The Perfect Loaf and get my baking tools and spreadsheets, discounts, a vast recipe archive (with scalable and adaptable recipes), chatting in real-time with other bakers and me in the community, and viewing the website completely ad-free.
I always have a food-safe spray bottle of water nearby in the kitchen. When I have an issue mixing the dough and need to add very small amounts of water (not a bassinage) I spritz the dough using that sprayer. It's a super easy way of getting just a touch more water in the dough without the risk of going overboard.
I loved this email from Mary because it highlighted something I also have in my kitchen: a water spray bottle! It seems simple, but after reading her comments, I realized how often I use my spray bottle. Not only is it useful when mixing, as she says, but I also use mine to: ​
Add steam into the oven when baking
Lightly spritz the top of the resting preshaped dough before rolling in oats, seeds, or other toppings (so they stick)
The Insane Pizza Cone Craze Now Extends to Eastern Avenue in Southeast Las Vegas. (Eater) I recently stumbled on the "pizza cone" craze, and I'm unsure if I should cry tears of joy or sadness. What about you? (LINK)​
Want to make bakery-quality sourdough bread from home? Subscribe for the best sourdough guides and recipes to take your bread from ordinary to incredible.
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