Often we field questions about making fantastic bread. Great bread is a matter of using the right ingredients and the right techniques-there’s no single top secret that will make perfect bread. But truly fantastic bread is readily attainable. We’ve compiled our list of what goes into fantastic bread.

1. The right flour.

2. An knowing of yeast.

3. A great dough conditioner.

four. A baker’s thermometer.

Now this is not everything that goes into fantastic bread but the baker that is armed with these four tools are likely to be baking fantastic bread.

Recently we stated that if there is a top secret ingredient that bakers use it is the flour. So we put the right flour on the leading of our list.

To understand how important flour is, you require to understand just a small about gluten. Gluten strands are formed from the proteins naturally happening in wheat flour. It’s what gives bread its chewy texture. If you use a flour with a higher percentage of protein, you will have much more gluten. Most commercial bread bakers are going to use flours with 10 to 14% protein–bread flour.

Industrial bakers have access to dozens of various flours. If you want truly great bread, purchase a great high quality bread flour–even if you have to make a deal with a local baker.

If you purchase your flour at the grocery store be conscious that all flours are not equivalent. For bread you want a bread flour. Name brands are likely to do a much better career of holding to a specification and will provide much more constant outcomes. You can get an concept of the protein content from the diet label. Divide the grams of protein by the grams in the serving size to get the approximate percentage of protein in the flour (topic to rounding error). For home baking, you want at least ten percent and ideally higher.

Yeast is a residing organism. The gases expelled by the expanding yeast are what leavens the bread. The experienced baker recognizes that with the dough, he or she is culturing a residing organism and that the yeast must be expanding in the right tradition to create the gases to make light airy bread. The right tradition is mainly a function of moisture, temperature, and pH or the acidity level.

This provides us to dough conditioner. Dough conditioner alters the pH of the dough (among other things) so that it enhances the growth of the yeast and it makes the dough much more extensible. All else becoming equivalent, dough conditioner can make a great bread fantastic.

You can purchase dough conditioner (or dough enhancer as it is occasionally known as) in some grocery shops or you can get our dough conditioner. Ours is a commercial dough conditioner that we have found to be extremely great and that we use in all our breads.

And lastly, a thermometer has been known as the baker’s top secret weapon. We would not believe of making bread with out one. We use it to measure water temperature. (When we use our bread devices, we measure the water temperature to exactly 80 degrees–not one degree off. When we make bread in our stand-type mixer or by hand, we use water in between one hundred degrees and 110 degrees.) We nearly usually measure the temperature of the bread when it comes from the oven. And you can use a thermometer to measure the temperature of the dough to make sure that you have the right temperature for your yeast to thrive in. You can purchase an insta-study thermometer at most department shops but as a convenience, we offer a baker’s thermometer on our website.

If you do not have a free duplicate of Baking Ingredients and How They Function, we suggest that you get one. There is no obligation–you can download it and print it for free.

Dennis Weaver is the general supervisor at The Prepared Pantry (http://www.preparedpantry.com) with recipes, ideas, and the best selection of mixes and ingredients. Go to the free Bakers’ Library for much more articles like this, free baking guides, and examined recipes.