Application Guide

over again, allowing the dough to get the advantages of being kneaded and risen a sec-
ond time.
As when preparing other breads, it is important to lift the lid of the
machine and check the consistency of the dough at various points, adding flour or
water as needed. While the technique of adding a bit of water or flour in increments to
adjust a dough may seem novel to the budding bread machine baker, it has been done
for centuries by artisan bakers. French bakers use the terms bassinage to describe
adding some water during the kneading cycle and contre-frasage to describe adding
flour. But pay close attention to each recipe; often the properties of these doughs will
vary from one recipe to the next. Sometimes the doughsare meant to be moist to the
point of slackness, yet still elastic, a very desirable consistency that makes a loaf with
lots of uneven holes in it. Every type of flour will produce a different dough, even dif-
ferent white flours, whether bread flour, all-purpose, or clear flour.
Fermentation of the dough begins at the completion of the kneading
and ends when the dough is deflated for shaping. The closed environment of the bread
machine is a mockup of the proofing boxes that are so important to professional bak-
ers. The controlled temperature and humidity inside your bread machine are very im-
portant to your resting dough, and the bread machine provides this environment natu-
rally, without any effort on your part. You won’t have any sudden changes in tempera-
ture to stress your dough and damage its quality. I do not recommend the use of One
Hour, Quick Yeast Bread, or Rapid cycles for country breads; you want to use all the
rising time needed to develop your dough.
Always remove the bread from the baking pan as soon as it has com-
pleted baking. You don’t want your loaf to sit in the machine and become soggy and
lose its crisp crust. Bread machine-baked country loaves have a higher percentage of
inner crumb to outer crust, but the firm texture and feel of the bread will be compara-
ble to regular oven-baked country loaves.
Breadmaking is a fulfilling and highly creative task. No matter what
method you use, you must still use your senses to feel, smell, touch, and taste, mea-
sures that artisan bakers internalize as part of their craft. What you might not achieve
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