Selecting the Right Ingredients for Bread Baking

Baking bread is most successfully completed with the freshest, highest quality ingredients available.

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The basis of most bread recipes is a mixture of flour, water, yeast, and salt. Everything else enhances the flavor and differentiates between one delectable loaf and another. When baking a loaf of bread, every ingredient is important. You must always be aware of the quality of each ingredient and how it will affect your recipe.

Flour:

Flour is the basis of bread. There are breads without yeast, sugar, and even salt, but there is not bread without flour. Flour is any milled cereal grain (or occasionally ground nut meal), but the most common flour used in bread baking is wheat flour. Wheat flour comes in many different varieties such as all-purpose flour, bread flour, and whole wheat flour.

Always use the type of flour that the recipe calls for. Every type of flour behaves differently when combined with different ingredients and under different circumstances. Do not pack the flour into the measuring cup. Spoon the flour into the cup and scrape the top with a butter knife or spatula to level the flour. If you use the cup as a scoop it will pack the flour causing you to use more flour than the recipe intended. Too much flour creates hard, dense cookies.

All-Purpose Flour:

All-purpose flour is a finely milled flour made from the internal part of the kernel which contains neither the bran nor the germ. It is a blend of high-gluten hard wheat and lowgluten soft wheat. All-purpose flour is the most common flour used in bread baking. It is easily manipulated and incorporated. It comes in two varieties: bleached ad unbleached. The choice to use one or the other is generally up to the personal preference of the baker as they tend to act the same in recipes. Flour can be bleached naturally over time or chemically.

Bread Flour: