Some bread recipes ask you to autolyse. Others mention fermentolyse. Some tell you to mix flour and water only, while others include the starter or yeast as well. It can all sound rather more complicated than it needs to be.
The useful idea is simple: sometimes dough benefits from a rest before you start mixing, kneading or folding it properly.
That short rest gives the flour time to absorb ... Read more
If your dough sometimes feels lively and eager, and other times sits stubbornly on the worktop doing very little, temperature may be the hidden difference.
Desired Dough Temperature, often shortened to DDT, sounds like something from a professional bakery manual, but the idea is very simple. It is the temperature you would like your dough to be after mixing.
That is all.
It is not a test ... Read more
Yeast should make your dough rise, not raise your blood pressure.
One of the most common questions home bakers ask is: “My recipe says fresh yeast, but I’ve got dried yeast, can I still use it?” Or: “The packet says instant yeast, but the recipe tells me to dissolve it in warm sugar water first, what should I do?”
The good news is that most baking yeasts can be swapped, provided ... Read more
One of the questions we are asked most often about home flour mills is also one of the most sensible: can I mill this?
Once you have a domestic stone mill on the worktop, it is tempting to look at every jar in the cupboard as a possible flour. Wheat, rye and spelt are obvious. But what about dried maize? Chickpeas? Buckwheat? Linseed? Coffee beans?
The good news is that home milling gives you ... Read more
We're sometimes asked questions about rye flour, for example "what's the difference between dark rye and light rye?", and "is all rye flour wholemeal?". Hopefully we can quickly clear up any confusion you might have about rye flour and how it's sometimes labelled. Thanks to Andrew Wilkinson of Gilchester, and baking guru Dan Lepard for their input.
Like wheat flours, rye can be classified by how ... Read more
You'll find a number of different yeasts available at BakeryBits. Which one should you choose, how are they different from each other, and how should they be used?
Some yeasts are general purpose, while others are selected and cultivated for a particular job - raising an enriched dough such as hot cross bun, panettone, for example, or to allow an industrial bakery to introduce yeast at a specific ... Read more
Emmer (Triticum dicoccum) is an 'ancient grain', native to parts of the Near East, where it formed part of the diet of hunter-gatherers before becoming domesticated by 7000BCE. It arose as a hybrid between a wild variety of einkorn and an annual goatgrass. It was cultivated in Britain by around 2000BCE, but almost universally it was eventually replaced by higher-yielding grain varieties, though it ... Read more
A Guide To Our Specialist Sugars
Using specialist ingredients can set your bakes apart and make your job easier. Knowing exactly which specific ingredient you want is something we want to help you with, so we have compiled a list of our specialist sugars together their uses, to help you choose the right sized sugar that you need. You can also find related recipes below and in each product listing ... Read more
What Size Proofing Basket or Banneton Do I Need?
Short answer: the proofing basket or banneton weight is the dough weight - all the ingredients including the flour and the water added together.
We show all our proofing baskets or bannetons with a weight in the name, for example, our popular 1kg / 2.2lb Round Cane Banneton or Proofing Basket. What does this weight mean?
It gives ... Read more
We are often asked whether a particular flour that we stock is bleached or unbleached. Bleaching is a chemical process to make what might be off-white flours whiter, for aesthetic reasons and also for some performance benefits. All European/UK flour is unbleached by law even though some might be labelled unbleached actually all of it is. Some countries (including US) do bleach flour but we will ... Read more
