Baking Bread: Common Bread-Making Questions Answered

You can bake bread at home with a minimum of supplies, but there are a few tools that you'll want to invest in.

• Proofing baskets: Cloth-lined wicker baskets (or colanders lined with clean dish towels) are essential for baking beautiful boules. Over time, your proofing cloth will build up a protective flour coating that helps breads slide in and out. Trace amounts of bacteria and yeast can also reduce proofing time by as much as 15 percent. The shape of your proofing vessel depends on the type of bread you bake. If you want to bake baguettes, you'll need a wavy proofing tray with ridges for each long, narrow stick of bread. Usually, you proof breads that you bake in pans—like focaccia or or sandwich loaves—directly in the baking sheet or loaf pan.
• Lidded Dutch oven: A lidded Dutch oven, preferably made of heat-retaining cast iron, is an essential tool for the home artisan bread baker. It helps mimic the environment of large, traditional wood-fired ovens. Modern domestic ovens don’t get as hot as those log-burners, and they have vents that allow steam to escape easily. Preheating a Dutch oven ensures that the surface of the baking vessel is extra hot when the bread goes in the oven; the lid will trap steam, helping the bread rise more quickly. Moisture is crucial here. Supple dough encourages maximum expansion during the first ten minutes of baking.
• Kitchen scale: When measuring ingredients, there are typically two avenues: volume (tablespoons, milliliters) or weight (ounces, grams). Volume measures how an ingredient fills a container—it’s good for liquids, which take the shape of the vessel in which they’re placed. But it’s not as accurate for solid ingredients, which have their own unique shapes. Also, the accuracy of a volume measurement depends entirely on the container; when it comes to home-baking tools, slight variations in measuring cups can throw a recipe into chaos. Meanwhile, weight refers to how heavy an ingredient is, regardless of the container. (Note: The metric standard is grams, while the United States relies on ounces. The former is a bit more precise, so use that whenever possible.) Unlike volume measurements, which might see an impact because the size and shape of an ingredient itself, the weight remains constant.
• Cooling rack: Your loaf of bread isn’t done baking just because you take it out of the oven. At this stage, the interior of the bread is much hotter than the exterior; cooling the bread allows the heat and moisture to be evenly distributed throughout. A wire cooling rack allows air to flow all around your bread, for the most efficient cooling.
• Stand mixer with dough hook attachment: While you can knead many breads by hand (and some "no-knead breads" require barely any kneading at all), sometimes it's better to let a stand mixer do the work. This is the case with delicate brioche, which requires prolonged gentle kneading.
• Mixing bowls: A large glass mixing bowl is the ideal vessel for combining wet and dry ingredients. Using clear glass will also allow you to watch your bread dough rise.

Many bread recipes rely on commercial yeast to get their rise. Most yeast breads are made with active dry yeast, which consists of dried granules in a protective coating. The advantage of using active dry yeast is that you can store it for a longer period of time, but that doesn’t mean it stays good forever. After a few months, dry yeast will die, just like its live brethren. Always test your yeast before using. Here's how: In a small bowl, combine the yeast with one tablespoon of warm water and whisk with a fork. Let sit until activated, about two minutes. Test for activation by briefly whisking with a fork; the mixture should foam.

Instant yeast doesn't require this blooming step. Add it directly to dry ingredients, and it will dissolve more quickly than active dry yeast. To test your instant yeast, however, you can use the same method of whisking with warm water.

A sourdough starter is an acidic community of natural yeasts and bacteria used to leaven bread and add flavor. Sourdough starter has a lot of nicknames—pre-ferment, levain, leaven, and la mère.

To make sourdough bread, begin with a sourdough starter—a mixture of flour, water, and naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria—rather than commercial yeast. The natural yeast is what makes the dough rise, while the bacteria contribute a pleasant tang. The only downside is that sourdough starters require daily maintenance. Learn how to make your own sourdough starter from scratch with tips from baker Apollonia Poilâne.

Refreshing your starter (discarding most of the starter and adding fresh flour and water) provides new food for the yeasts, increasing production and, in turn, improving its ability to leaven your bread. Additionally, stirring the starter introduces oxygen, which yeast needs to reproduce.

As you observe your starter, you'll notice that it rises and falls throughout the day. Ideally, you'll feed your starter when it first starts to fall. How often this happens and at what time of day will depend on when you last fed your starter, the temperature of the room, and the specific microorganisms inhabiting your starter, but most bakers refresh their starter once or twice a day.

If you need to pause the starter’s growth, you can refrigerate it for up to one month and halt the discard-and-feed process. Once removed from the refrigerator, resume the discard-and-feed schedule for at least three days before baking.

Whether you're baking sourdough bread for the first time or waking your mature starter up from a brief hibernation, there are three basic ways to know that your starter is ready to use. You can tell by:

• Smell: Your starter should smell pleasantly funky. If it smells bad, don’t worry. That’s just an indication that it’s time to refresh (a.k.a. feed) your starter. Give it a couple of days of regular feeding before baking bread.
• Sight: A starter that’s ready will be very bubbly. Store yours in a glass jar so you can observe changes.
• Time: Keep a starter journal. It’ll give you important insights and, ideally, reveal your starter’s unique rhythm and cadence.

Proofing is the final step in fermentation when the bread dough rises in its final baking vessel or a proofing basket. Although many bread recipes provide a timeframe for proofing, volume is the clearest indication that fermentation is done. As a general rule of thumb, for most breads, fully fermented dough will have doubled in size, while air bubbles on the surface mean the dough has over-proofed. You can also poke the top of the dough with your finger: Fully fermented dough will retain an indentation. It can’t bounce back—the gluten has stretched to its limits.

Covering your proofing vessel with plastic wrap or a clear shower cap will allow you to visually monitor its progress.

The most apparent indication is visual: Fully baked breads will form a dark golden brown crust. (If you’re unsure, err on the side of a darker crust.) You can also test doneness by knocking or tapping on the bottom of the loaf. If the knock sounds clear, the bread is ready; if the knock is dull and muffled, the interior has not fully developed. And don’t discount your nose: You can smell the aroma of fresh-baked bread.

To preserve your homemade bread's freshness, store it at room temperature in a clean kitchen towel or paper bag, which will allow the bread to breathe without becoming stale. Stored this way, fresh bread will keep for up to a week.

For longer-term storage, freeze whole loaves (or quartered loaves) in zip-top freezer bags for up to several months, then defrost at room temperature.

If you’re ready to pursue bread-making, here are a few of Apollonia Poilâne’s recipes:

1. 1. Brioche: Brioche is a buttery yeast bread from France. To make Apollonia’s brioche, you need 100 percent white flour, eggs, plenty of butter, and a little sugar, creating a rich and airy bread with a tight crumb that begs to be dunked in hot chocolate. Learn how to make her brioche.
2. 2. Corn flour bread: Corn flour bread is cornbread made with corn flour instead of a mix of flour and yellow cornmeal. Third-generation baker Apollonia challenged herself to create this original, dairy-free recipe after attending several weekend roasts while at Harvard. Learn how to make Apollonia’s corn flour bread.
3. 3. Pain de mie: Typically baked in a Pullman loaf pain, pain de mie is a type of French sandwich bread. This fluffy white bread has a tight crumb and very little crust. Follow Apollonia’s recipe for pain de mie.
4. 4. Pain de siegle: Pain de seigle (which translates as “bread of rye”) was one of the original offerings sold at Poilâne when the famous French bakery opened in 1932. Although the term “pain de seigle” can refer to any type of rye bread (from pumpernickel to Jewish-style rye bread), Poilâne’s version closely resembles the bakery’s stone-ground wheat miche. Poilâne’s pain de seigle loaves are round and slightly sour. Learn how to make pain de siegle.

We’ve got you covered. All you knead (see what we did there?) is The MasterClass Annual Membership, some water, flour, salt, and yeast, and our exclusive lessons from Apollonia Poilâne—Paris’s premier bread maker and one of the earliest architects of the artisanal bread movement. Roll up your sleeves and get baking.