10 Things to Help You Bake Instagram-Worthy Bread
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Over the past few weeks of social distancing, I’ve lost a lot of motivation to do, well, most things. It feels like I’m barely functioning and just trying to make it through the day. I wake up to articles with distressing headlines and see the same content recirculated on Instagram, but in bigger fonts. The one bright light in the flood of well-meaning—but ultimately not helpful—re-posts on Instagram, is that everybody on my feed appears to have found community in the same very simple things: water, salt, yeast, and flour. It seems like literally everyone has taken to stress-baking bread in this pandemic.
Even as someone who considers himself a proficient baker and home cook, my breadmaking journey only started when the coronavirus hit New York City and I found myself in the kitchen a lot more. “I would never make bread…who has the TIME?!” I shrieked dramatically at my boyfriend in January when he asked if I would consider making my own boule. Now I’m full speed ahead on the sourdough-starter train. Baking bread can be a long project, for sure, and you should expect to spend about a day and a half working with your dough. But that’s time that I’m starting to look forward to. Breadmaking is the one thing that helps me cope with my anxiety because it forces me to step away from my phone and lose myself in tending to the dough.
It makes total sense why other newbies in my feed are #stressbaking too, because the ingredients are super accessible. Besides water and salt (which you probably already have), yeast and flour are fairly easy to get at your local grocery store—though it seems certain places are seeing shortages as everyone retreats into the kitchen these days.
As for the tools you need to turn your ingredients into dough and eventually a gorgeous loaf, they’re also pretty accessible! Don’t let anyone convince you that you need a $250 stand mixer or special dough-hook attachments to make bread. Mixing, kneading, and folding dough can all be done with your hands—I promise it’s a sticky-but-fun mess!
Below, I’ve rounded up the gear I bought after studying up on Claire Saffitz’s sourdough guide and poring over some YouTube tutorials (because what else am I doing these days?). If I were you, I’d start digging through my cupboards—you probably already have most of the equipment. I guarantee you’ll look at 80% of this list and think, Oh! I have that! Which means you’re only 20% away from posting your own #quarantinebaking photos to the ’gram. Welcome to the club.
If you don’t already have mixing bowls of various sizes, voilà: Use the bigger ones in this set to mix and work your dough and the smaller ones as water bowls. You’ll want to wash off sticky dough that will inevitably glob onto your fingers as you “fold” the dough—stretching and folding it on top of itself to strengthen gluten and create air pockets.
I have seen the light: Baking is a science, and you do not want to screw up the proportions. If you’re a thrill seeker, go ahead and try eyeballing measurements. I’m not going to ruin your fun. I will say that most baking recipes measure ingredients by weight, so unless your sixth sense knows what 20 grams of salt looks like in a tablespoon (FYI, a tablespoon isn’t 20 grams), get a damn scale! Some Amazon reviewers complain about Ozeri’s feature where the device automatically turns off after two minutes of inactivity, but I haven’t found that to be a problem.
If you truly despise the feeling of dough between your fingers, get yourself an inexpensive plastic bowl scraper to minimize how much your hands actually touch the dough. It’s the perfect instrument to get everything inside your mixing bowl incorporated. And when it comes time to shape the dough into tight jiggly poofs (also called boules), you can use these to help. Just be sure to wet the scraper first to prevent dough from sticking to it.
TBH, mason jars aren’t essential to making bread. However, I use these 32-ounce mason jars to house my homemade sourdough starter, and they make a big difference in helping dough rise. You could buy your starter premade, but that’s nowhere near as fun as beginning from scratch and feeding your own—discarding half of it and adding equal parts water and flour, one to two times a day—like a Tamagotchi. (Remember those???). I’ve been following this beginner’s guide to making a sourdough starter, if you’re in need of guidance. FYI, it might take more than a week for your starter to be ready, and that’s okay!
If I’m being honest, I wish I had something this big to bake my bread in. My 4.5-quart Dutch oven gets the job done, but it’s such a tight squeeze loading the bread into it. As the dough expands in the oven, the edges form little indents from the folds of parchment paper that surround it. I could easily avoid this vanity issue if I nixed parchment paper from the equation, dusted the Dutch oven with flour, and placed the dough on top of it. But I don’t want to risk the dough expanding into a potentially ugly shape against my Dutch Oven; a larger version would have more than enough room. FWIW: My 29th birthday is May 14 (wink, wink).
This stainless-steel chopper is more of a “nice to have”—and I’m here to tell you that you deserve nice things! Somewhere along your breadmaking process, you’ll have to pour your dough onto a work surface and cut it in half. I’ve used plastic bowl scrapers, and they’ve worked fine. But it takes a firm hand and a few slices back and forth to really cut through the dough cleanly, whereas this metal iteration cuts into dough much more efficiently. I love that this chopper is designed with one-inch measurements so that I don’t have to whip out my tape measure to see what four inches should look like. Resist the urge to crack a cheap joke about your ex, please.
The only reason I bought this tool was so that I could slash the top of my loaves into pretty patterns before baking them. If you want to get fancy, bread artists—that’s what I call them because their skills are truly an art—refer to this step as scoring. Don’t look at my Instagram: I’m still getting there. I KNOW I suck at scoring.
The first time I tried making sourdough bread, I used an obscene amount of plastic wrap to cover bowls, uncover bowls, and re-cover bowls. I really want to cut back on my plastic use in the kitchen, so I ordered towels as a replacement (though you may already own a set that’s good to go). I’m certain you can imagine how much easier it is to cover bowls with towels than it is to finagle plastic wrap around it.
All I have to say about this cooling rack is that the 11.5" by 16.5" size fits perfectly into my 13" by 18" sheet pan, though there are a bunch of sizing options available. Also, you should let your fresh loaf hang on top of it for at least an hour before tearing into that crisp, crunchy crust.
Allowing bread to “proof,” or ferment overnight, before baking gives yeasty dough time to release carbon dioxide gas and create additional air bubbles inside. Most recipes instruct you to do this by letting your dough chill and rise in the fridge overnight (colder temperatures slow down the fermentation process).
I love these banneton baskets for proofing bread primarily because I’m a sucker for a cute basket—plus, they make adorable serving containers for bread slices. You might be thinking, Uh, can’t I just use one of those kitchen towels inside of a mixing bowl? You certainly could…but then you’re down a towel and big-ish mixing bowl that you might need for dinner later (not to mention the fridge-space dilemma). Your call.
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