Daily Dose of English 191
Bread Making
Daily Dose of English 191
Intermediate
Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a daily dose of English. Uh, wait, what? I got too crazy there. What do I say next? Uh, this is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about bread making. If you haven't figured out by now, I always record that introduction and sometimes it gets a little bit boring and so I lose focus and I go crazy. I think in the past couple episodes, I've had a few slip ups or I forget what I'm doing or something like that because it's at the point where it's pretty much automatic that I say it, but not always. So yeah, forgive me. Anyways, bread making. Making bread, which is actually one of a hobby that I really enjoy. I don't get to do it very much anymore, which we'll talk about in this. Oh, excuse me, which we'll talk about. Oh, excuse me. Ah, stop with the burps. Okay, are we good? We're good. Bread making is not something that I get to do very often anymore, but I really enjoy it. And I think it's a very interesting craft and I have a lot of respect for bakers and bread makers specifically. Bread making is very, very old. It's something that is done all over the world. It's been done for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. I actually don't know. How long has the world been around? But it's like, okay, on here it says, around 10,000 BCE, with the dawn of the Neolithic age and the spread of agriculture, grains became the mainstay of making bread, which means that it's probably even earlier. Yeah, oh yeah, evidence from 30,000 years ago in Europe and Australia have revealed starch residue on rocks used for pounding plants. So it's possible that the starch from the roots and plants were used as some kind of flatbread, a sort of bread. It is a very, very, very old human tradition. What we sort of think of like more modern bread types are more recent, right? So going into what, maybe three, 4,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, pretty recent, you know. But It's, and it's also still just really good. Like, I don't know, we've, we've pretty much cracked the code. Bread is delicious. Bread is, um, interesting. It is varied. It's. I don't know. It's great. And the process of making bread is also pretty simple, which, but it can be so, so complex is what I wanted to say, because it, there is like the basic, you can just make something that is technically considered bread, but then you can do things that are complicated or intricate or difficult or fancy or festive. There's, there's so many different ways to make a bread. I started making bread, or actually I started to try to make bread, I guess, probably in like, I don't know, what, 2015, 2016. I was getting into baking more and I was primarily baking things like pies and cakes, but I really wanted to try bread making because one of our family friends made just fantastic bread. I could not eat enough of that bread, it was so good. And so I tried to learn to make bread. And the actual, the very first time that I tried, I went over to their house. She helped me do all this stuff. Then I went back home with the bread, because you have to like let it rise or whatever. And I was doing some of the final steps and I could not handle it. I, it was so sticky. It was so difficult to work with the dough of the bread that I, like threw it against the counter and it like exploded or something. I forget exactly what happened, but there was a mess. It was terrible. I felt awful. It was horrible. But I learned from that. You learn how to get good with bread. It is very difficult, even though it's pretty simple what you're doing, right? Okay, it's sticky dough. Sure, you just got to deal with that. It is very frustrating if you aren't experienced. But I've gotten a lot better since then. And then at some point, probably, I think a little bit before the pandemic started, I, no, yeah, about a year before the pandemic, I was still at home and I started to bake bread more often. And then the pandemic kind of came around, the COVID pandemic, which cut, everybody was inside more. And then that's when I like really got into making a lot more bread, as a lot of people did, because I had a lot more time at home. It was, I don't know, it was just a good activity to do. I started making a lot more bread. I did a loaf at least every week, but I think like twice a week I was making a big old loaf of bread. The style that I made was, I don't even know what it's called actually. There's a French term for it, but it's a pretty basic bread with a lot of sourdough and a little bit of packaged yeast. And then you follow some relatively simple steps and you get a loaf of bread. Let's talk a bit about how to make bread. I feel like I've skipped over that. If you aren't a baker, you might have never really thought about this, but there are four general ingredients that you use to make bread, flour, water, salt, and yeast. And most of the ingredients are flour and water. A very large percentage of the entire recipe is just flour, just bread flour or a special kind of flour, but just flour, right, from wheat grain. Water is the other one. Water is usually like somewhere between 20 and 20, like 50% can be water. I think a pretty normal number is like 36% or 40% water. I forget the exact numbers, but they're relatively hydrated. I think that's right. Whatever, I'll keep going. Salt, you also definitely want salt in your bread. It really does help with the taste and the flavor, but it's still only a couple of teaspoons. And then yeast is one of the most important, but the smallest amount of something or of anything in the bread, because yeast is what helps the bread rise. So yeast are little tiny organisms that live everywhere. They're all over in our lives. They're on your body right now. They're on your desk, on my microphone, everywhere. There are little yeasts and they're mostly harmless. Most yeast doesn't cause any issues and it's actually good for us. It's a healthy thing to eat. It helps us make food better and all these different things. and uh and it eats or not really eats but like it breaks down flour into other things into gases into other compounds when it's especially when combined with water And so the process of creating a sourdough is trapping yeast out in the wild in your kitchen, in your wherever, and creating a bunch of yeast together, like a really big pocket of yeast, and then using that to bake. And that's where you get that sort of sour, tangy flavor in a lot of bread that is really, really delicious. You're not going to find that in bread from the store, like sandwich bread or toast bread, but Uh, it is very good. It's very common in sourdough bread, which is why it's called sourdough. Um, when, and then you basically, you mix things together and you let it sit, you let it ferment that fermentation processes when the yeast is breaking down parts of the flour, um, and, uh, kind of converting the mass of just bread and water of flour and water into a bread. And then you usually have some development cycles of the gluten in the bread. So gluten are basically the connections between the flour, like atoms or molecules essentially, right? It's more complicated than that. But when you like lift up a wet piece of dough, and it snaps, it breaks, that's because there's not very much gluten development, right? When you develop gluten, when you knead the dough, K-N-E-A-D, when you knead the dough, it really stretches out these chains of gluten in the dough and it makes it really long and you can stretch out the dough really, really far. Gluten development is critical for getting bread that has a chewy texture or else it's going to like basically fall apart. Something like a cake does not have gluten development in it. There's no real stretchiness or chewiness to a cake because it's a cake, right? It's not a piece of bread. Going to a bread though, you'll have a lot more chew, a lot more pull, and that's what makes bread, that's that nice texture. So once you've done the fermentation and you've done the gluten development, you usually do fermentation again, right? There's a lot of different ways to go about it, the different cycles, and then you bake it, and then you have this wonderful, beautiful piece of loaf of bread. There are so many different ways to make bread. If you're interested at all, don't use my tips and advice because they're not very actionable or very good. It's a random podcast that I'm talking about bread on. Look up how to make bread. There's excellent tutorials on YouTube or actually my favorite bread making book that I use is called Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast by Ken Forkish. Excellent book with excellent recipes for lots of different kinds of bread and for pizza especially. If you like to make pizza dough or focaccia, great recipes in there. They're very easy to follow and use. I love that book a lot. I didn't get to talk about why I haven't been making bread, but mostly it's because my oven here doesn't work, which is too bad, but I really hope to start making bread again next year when it's fixed, hopefully. But yeah, anyways, that's all my ramblings about making bread. I hope that this was at least a little bit interesting. I feel like I just talked about random stuff, but I don't know. We're 191 episodes in at this point, so forgive me. Anyways, have a fantastic rest of your day. Have a delicious little bit of bread if you can. And I will see you again tomorrow for a brand new episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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