Use Your Loaf: Developing a bread recipe

Welcome to part 3 of the Use Your Loaf series, where we go back to basics, learn exactly what’s going on when we make bread, and create our own recipe. We now know which ingredients are important to bread, and what happens when we create our loaves.

Today, it’s time to develop our control loaf recipe.

This whole series is about learning together, and in that vein, I thought I’d share how I came to develop the control recipe. If you’d rather just jump straight to the recipe, head on over to this post.

To start, I looked at some recipes from famous food writers to see how the experts did it. A lot of writers include fats to make their dough as soft as possible which is something we may look at in the future, however, I wanted the control loaf to be as simple as possible and stick to our main four ingredients.

Bakers Percentages

I’m afraid we’re going to do some maths – I know I hate it too!

Bakers use percentages when developing a recipe to easily scale a dough up or down depending on their needs. In our case, it also makes it easier to compare different recipes at a glance, and easily alter them if needed. So how does it work? We always take the amount of flour in a recipe, usually 500g or 1kg, as 100%, and then everything after is a percentage of the flour. So if there’s 500g flour and 300ml water, that’s 60% water, or in baker’s terms, hydration. Let’s look at the table of recipes I’m working from to see it in action.

	Flour	Water	Yeast	Salt	Extra?
Paul Hollywood	500g	300ml (60%)	7g (1.4%)	7g (1.4%)	40g Butter
Nigella Lawson	500g	300ml (60%)	7g (1.4%)	1 tablespoon (approx 15g) (3%)	1 tablespoon Butter (14g)
Jamie Oliver	1kg	650ml (65%)	7.5g (1.5%)	7.5g (1.5%)	–
BBC Good Food	500g	300ml (60%)	7g (1.4%)	10g (2%)	3tbsp Oil

As you can see from the table, there isn’t much difference between the recipes. It appears there are general rules for how much yeast and salt (although Nigella’s is very salty), but the water, or the hydration, is where we see the biggest difference.

Hydration

In general, a high hydration bread will have a lot of open holes and be softer and moister. Unfortunately, it also means it becomes a lot more difficult to work with and shape. A general rule of thumb from the table is to keep the hydration for a basic loaf at an average of 65%.

The two recipes with seemingly the lowest hydration have extra fat added. This actually increases the hydration whilst making the dough a little easier to handle, making for a softer loaf I’ve however chosen not to go with adding fat to our loaves at this stage, as I want to keep the control loaf to the four basic ingredients. The recipe that stood out here for me was the Jamie Oliver one, although 1kg flour is a lot to work with, the hydration level was perfect for making a lovely soft loaf, whilst also being easy to handle. Thankfully, because of baker’s percentages, we can easily half the quantities to fit our purpose. 

Salt and Yeast

At this stage, I’m all about keeping it easy and simple, and for me, that means no extra equipment. I decided to use the standard 7g bag of instant yeast in our loaf, so we’re not trying to weigh out such a small amount. This does mean our loaf will prove quicker than the Jamie Oliver one, but it’s not going to activate too quickly that it loses structure. As for salt, the standard seems to be between 1.8% – 2%, and the sweet spot for flavour was around 10g, which is roughly 2 teaspoons worth.

Process

The big difference between these recipes is the proving time and cooking time, and this required a lot of test loaves to find the best option for our recipe. This was the greatest learning experience for me, as without seeing the difference in each of the stages, for example how the loaf reacts after a 60-minute bulk ferment compared to a 120-minute one, I didn’t fully understand the purpose – they were just arbitrary lengths of time. When baking for myself, I do use visual clues, but I appreciate time guidelines so that I’m not waiting all day watching my bread.

Table of baking times

	First proof (bulk ferment)	Second proof	Baking time
Paul Hollywood	1 hour or until double in size	1 hour or until double in size	200C fan for about 30 mins
Nigella Lawson	1 – 2 hours or until double in size	30 mins or until double in size	220C for 35 minutes
Jamie Oliver	1 hour or until double in size	30 mins – 1 hour	180C for 25-30 mins
BBC Good Food	1 hour or until double in size	1 hour	200C fan for 25 – 30 mins

There is a consensus to wait until the dough has doubled in size before continuing to the next stage in the recipes. The time the bulk ferment differed depending on the recipe and temperature of the room, so I think a time frame is more useful. During the second proof, however, 30 minutes meant the dough was a little flat and 1 hour was too much. Proofing for 45 minutes seemed to be the sweet spot for us, each time.

The baking times weren’t so different: the higher temperatures/cooking times led to a browner, crisper loaf, and the lower temperatures a softer, lighter crust. Although I think this is mainly down to personal preference, the loaves all turned out better when they baked a little longer.

So this post turned out a bit longer than expected! This was my first time developing a recipe in such a way, and several loaves were tested to try and get the perfect basic bread for our recipe. Although it’s simple, it works as a great sandwich loaf and is a perfect base for us to build on.