How to Bake Better Bread

Are they sexy? Are they strong, tall, richly bronzed, muscled? How is their posture: shy, slouched, confident? How’s the lighting in their photos: glinty and soft, or bold and bright? How are their eyes? Are they alone, or with friends? When you see them, are you hungry for them? Would you really want to take them home?

No. This isn’t about the last time you swiped right on Tinder. These questions are about bread: the loaves we buy, the loaves we mix, the loaves we bake.

We live in a two-dimensional digital world. Most of us (probably all of us) consume and are consumed by images of food on the internet, whether it’s Guy Fieri’s bleached tips tucking into a cholesterol grenade, some taverna on a remote Greek island drizzling freshly-pressed olive oil on even fresher feta, an under-employed influencer duck-lipping a cold brew at Malibu Farms, or that kind and handsome guy in Albuquerque cutting open a just-baked baguette. We consume–and are consumed–by images of food we cannot even taste.

So we find ourselves–on Tinder or Instagram (50% of its traffic is food content) or Pinterest–swiping, liking, commenting, unfollowing, following. Posing, photographing, sharing, posting. We see something good and we immediately say, I want that. This is because–no matter who we are, no matter what we cook–we like what looks good.

Why is this desire so acute with food? Why do loaves of crusty bread and juicy burgers and lentil soups with pomegranate molasses tahini stir so much inside of us? I mean, how many of us go to the movies or a concert or the museum and immediately say, “I want that!” I think we do this with food because food is the most comforting, accessible, and consistent (or, sadly, inconsistent) experience in our lives. Unlike the other things we scroll past on social media–the six pack abs, the cliff diving in Croatia, the baby goat yoga–food is something that most of us can either buy or make right away. It is this immediacy–the accessibility of cooking and eating–which is why food on social media has such mass appeal. 

I post and like photos of bread on Instagram, so I’m not innocent (though, with just over 4,000 followers, neither am I successful). I write for my blog, for this site, I consult, and I teach baking workshops whenever I can. But I don’t have a bakery or a book. So how else can I show you who I am and what I do? But every time I’m on the ‘Gram, posting photos of a baguette or a couronne or some brioche, I cringe a bit. Because it’s as if I’m knocking on the viewer’s door; only to run away before they answer. 

Bread is deeply, deeply beautiful. I’ve been in love with it since the moment I began baking fifteen years ago. I still cradle and coo over a warm loaf of bread, even after all these years. In a way, bread has become my language. Every loaf I make is an attempt to share what I’m trying to say–about myself, my values, my passion. And I love the power of bread to nourish, to restore, to please. Mostly, I love the smile on someone’s face when they inhale the aroma of a fresh loaf and taste the plush, malty flavor of a slice. Because, if they do this, if they taste and don’t just see, they’ve understood what I’m trying to say. I put my words there, in that loaf of bread, everything, all of them. When someone tastes my bread, it’s as if I’ve knocked on the door and they’ve opened it.

I “grew up” baking in the late 2000s, so my audience was never digital. I stood at farmer’s markets on rainy days for hours, gave crumbly sliced samples out at cafes, delivered bread in hand-stamped bags door to door in my pick-up. I cared what my bread looked like, sure. But what I cared about most was what people tasted: I wanted the bread to be delicious, nutritious, and soulful. And I know that this kind of baking–baking for flavor first–was my most formative experience.

I always want to be a better baker. I chase the perfect-loaf dragon each time I bake–the bien cuit baguette with huge ears, the ciabatta with more holes than a kitchen sponge, the wheat/rye miche with the most delicate crumb. For all bakers, the joy of baking is this urge to do better each time we bake. And this is why, if we want to become better bakers, we need to become better tasters. By being conscientious about our raw ingredients and by learning how to augment and alter taste, we can build better loaves: more complex, more unique, and more personal. ‘Cause in a way, isn’t it easy to make a loaf of bread beautiful? The fun–the fulfillment for me–comes in making that bread taste delicious.

What do you like to do first? Slice it warm, the cloud of steam and aromas erupting as the steel teeth of your knife saw, the nerves in your hand holding the loaf stinging with heat? Do you paste it with butter, sprinkle it with some flaked salt? Maybe drizzle it with honey, or maybe with that French hazelnut oil your cousin gave you over the holidays? 

All of those options, though fulfilling and delicious, are the wrong way to taste bread. This is why: no matter what kind of flour you use, which ancestor gave you your leaven, how pinkly Himalayan your salt is, how hot your oven is, how many folds you gave the dough, how much rice flour you dusted your banneton with, how brand new the blade on your lame, bread is always, and always will be, defined by fermentation. The results of fermentation are what we know as the taste of bread, and you can find it in the soft, fragrant crumb, not the crust, of a loaf. And we cannot taste fermentation when we douse all sorts of flavors and salts and oils on fresh slices.

So, how do we taste bread? We use all five senses to experience, enjoy, and understand what we’re eating. Remember, we use our five senses–sight, sound, smell, taste, noise– to make bread. Now, we will engage our five senses to taste bread.

Using Your Senses: How to Taste Bread

Sight

As the old saying goes, We eat with our eyes. So take a loaf, any loaf, and look. It should appeal to you: it should be dark or light (according to your preference). It should have nice, clean scores (or artistically unique and imbalanced ones). It should have a lovely, burnished sheen from the proper amount of steam. It shouldn’t be clumped with too much dusting flour. 

You should find the loaf sexy. Once your eyes know it is, move in and pretend this is a first kiss: awkwardly gaze towards it, staring uncomfortably, blushing maybe. 

Feel

Now pick it up. It should feel light–we want the right amount of water to have been baked out of it. If it’s heavy or dense, if gravity pulls on it too much, it wasn’t baked long enough. Or baked hot enough. It should float and bounce a bit in your hands as you lift it into the air. And, if the score was good, watch out because cutting yourself on an ear is proof the baker knows what they’re doing.

Sound

Thump, like you’re burping a baby. Don’t have a kid? Pretend you grew up in the ancient world when we used to knock on people’s doors when we came over. The bottom of the loaf should have a deep, hollow, almost baritone ring against your knuckles. If it sounds mushy or moist, if you hear more of a thump than a quick ringing, the loaf is underbaked. 

Smell

Start by slicing a thin piece of bread with a sharp serrated knife. Thin, like the width of a magazine’s spine. Please don’t start with the heel, and don’t slice bread that hasn’t completely cooled. (We want the starches in the bread to firmly set and settle before talking about fermentation’s flavors. This occurs, depending on the ambient air temperature, about three hours after the bake). Now, take your slice as if it’s an offering to some pagan god and put it under your nose. Then squeeze it, like you would a slice of lemon into a glass of water. 

Flavor begins in our noses. No, really. What the human brain perceives as flavor–salty, sweet, malty–actually begins when we smell. So keep squeezing and don’t stop smelling. (If you’ve ever been to a wine tasting, what we’re doing here is opening up the crumb’s bouquet just as we would by swirling the wine around in a glass.) Well, what does it smell like? Does it have a big shaggy nose? Or a drooping, lazy stench? A sharp, caustic, sourdough bite? Or is the bouquet balanced, elegant, slow to end? Remember, flavor starts here–so what you smell is what you’ll taste because what your brain is telling you is, I really like this! or No, this doesn’t seem so great.

Taste 

Now you may eat! But only by separating the crust from the crumb first. So take your thumb and middle finger, pinch the inside of your slice, pull the soft crumb away from the hard crust, and set the crust aside. We do this because the crust is created when the outside of the loaf is exposed to oven heat, resulting in the Maillard reaction. As such, it isn’t a pure expression of fermentation: it’s just a by-product, not its result. When tasting bread, the flavors and textures of the crust’s caramelization will interfere with the experience of the crumb. This is why, when tasting, we set it aside.

How is it? You should be chewing, chewing, chewing. A key element of great bread is the crumb’s texture. It’s what we in the industry call mouthfeel. So? Is the crumb yielding to your teeth? Is it soft or generous? Is it meaty or moist? Are your teeth in a battle with it? Right now, as you chew those first bites, a great crumb should have a flavor that is majestic, poised, and balanced. It should also be profound in that what you first tasted is now evolving, or gone, giving way to new flavors, aromas, maybe even textures. Finally, swallow. 

And take a breath.

One key thing all bread–even just ok bread–should do right away is make you salivate. If it doesn’t, I’d throw it out and get your money back. Because bread that is properly fermented–overnight, with yeast and/or sourdough–is a superfood. And good, healthy, clean food will–and always should–make you salivate. It’s our body’s way of saying thank you, this is great, I’m digesting all the complex nutrition in this bite.

Was that fun, strange, over too quickly? I told you it’d be like a first kiss.

From Obsessed Novice to Knowledgeable Baker in Five Acts

At some point on your baking journey, you’ll begin to understand how this bread baking thing works. It probably goes something like this:

Act 1

You stumble through the alchemy part (god this is incredible, fresh bread–it only took me 36 hours! Wait, why does the crust have the color of an ashtray? Do I have to throw out the Lodge Cooker, honey? Was 95% hydration really too much water?) After you throw out the Lodge Cooker, pawn your barbeque for the downpayment on a home oven, and finally get some sleep, you’ll begin to notice the science part. 

Act 2

You may not be ready to quit your job and open a bakery, but your passion for bread is now housebroken. You’re proud, as you should be, like the moment your high school French comes back to you at that cafe in Paris twenty years later. People come over to your house for pizza, you start giving loaves away to neighbors in the tacit hope of free lawn mowing in return. 

Act 3

Welcome to the science part. Patterns become visible, consistency becomes manageable, your hands become reliable, you drop your hydration closer to 70% and learn about bassinage. Soon, you find yourself finally agreeing about how important dough temperature is. And how unimportant the kind of salt you buy is (sorry, Himalayas). Act 3 is all about slowing down, about understanding what you felt but couldn’t articulate in Acts 1 and 2. You start keeping notes, you start becoming consistent in order to really learn about the rituals of good bread making.

Act 4

You’ve mastered some recipes, and the lawn sits unmowed as the neighbors are now expectant rather than grateful. You love baking, but you’re ready for a change. You want to start creating your own recipes, you want to start working with new types of flours and preferments and mixing techniques. But where do you start?

Act 5

By becoming a better taster, you’ll become a better baker. The more you taste bread–yours, your grandmother’s, Trader Joe’s–your mind will begin to deconstruct how it works. And how it doesn’t work. By beginning to use words to describe what you taste, see, smell, hear, and feel, you’ll move from one dimension (the practical, the real, the visible) to the creative.

Our brain uses different hemispheres to name and recognize flavor. That’s why we all find it hard to name what we smell or taste in bread–because the word part of our brain is searching for what the smelling part of our brain is experiencing. But the more you connect these synapses, the stronger your baking will become. You will begin to understand a loaf of bread like a painter understands a palette: by its primary colors. Or, in our case, its main ingredients. 

I think flavor is the most neglected ingredient in our current Bread Renaissance. Since we’re always eating with our eyes, our goal too often is to achieve a bake that’s beautiful enough to post. But the pursuit of beauty will not make you a better baker. It will not lead you to your perfect loaf.

However, you can easily change the way you bake by changing the way you experience flavor. To become a better taster, start tasting everything that goes into your loaves and understand their basic flavor profiles. Bake with different flours, or mixtures of different flours, and taste how they affect your loaves. From there, you can start building your own recipes by understanding. And since flavor is a deeply personal experience, once you understand what something tastes like, your combination of flavor will now become how you express yourself. 

So next time you post your loaf, please make it beautiful, personal, and sexy–because I want to swipe right. But please tell me how it tastes first.