Use more salt

I have had good experiences of making bread and bad ones.

Main reason for bad ones have been that I have used way too little salt, what is my palm measurement of teaspoon appears to be 0.5grams instead of 5 grams, but everywhere they tell about cutting the salt and I was fool believing and cutting even from that amount

Problem with bread is that when bread rises it needs salt to rise up, if it rises sideways there is too little salt.

Today I made some pizza dough and I tried to cut down the salt from 2% from flour weight that instructions said, I used 1.5% and sure enough, it did not work as well, but it was far better in texture than my older attempts which had been more of doughnut texture instead of pizza crust texture.

Health people will of course scream, 300 grams of pizza dough contains already 3 grams of salt and they demand one should use less than 5 grams a day!

I have baked only twice by weight now, but both times better than ever before, wonderful way, removes unskilled cook from equation

I haven't tried making home made bread or pizza dough in several years.  I usually cut the salt down in recipies; but I don't remember with the dough.  I may have stuck close to the instructions because i was afraid it wouldn't come out right.  Maybe when the weather cools off I can give it a try again.  I'm trying not to heat the kitchen up too much now.  But I've had a taste for home made calzones for a couple weeks now.  

I'm impressed with your bread making. I try to stay out of the kitchen. I never manage to make anything nice and I usually end up hurting myself.

I have to confess that I love salty food. I know it's bad for you, but it tastes so good.

Norachan said:

I'm impressed with your bread making. I try to stay out of the kitchen. I never manage to make anything nice and I usually end up hurting myself.

I have to confess that I love salty food. I know it's bad for you, but it tastes so good.

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Here is no one else to make stuff, well Tiger tries to help, but he really does not have it and I end up having cat fur on everything instead of any help

With digital scale it is very easy to be successful and of course table top mixer helps, no kneading as machine does it all.

One trick with table top mixer when modifying recipes is to look at bottom of bowl while machine is mixing, when dough sticks about 5cm diameter circle to bottom of bowl dough is about ready, good thing to wait for a moment while machine is kneading and see if that changes, sometimes it might take up to minute for change to show up.

Quite easy with those tools, cleaning the bowl of table top mixer is completely another story, bowl being metal, it seems to be easier to clean when not dry, but that has other issues then, sticky issues.

Absolutely minimum amount of salt would be 1.5% of weight of flour, so for 100g of flour you need 1.5grams of salt, for 1000g it would be 15grams which is roughly 3 teaspoons, but if you use table salt instead of fine sea salt (which I'm using) 3 teaspoons will be off by 1.8grams I believe, because teaspoon of table salt weights more than teaspoon of fine sea salt, again reason to measure it by weight instead of volume.

1.8% of weight is better though, still it is little less than 2%, but it does not affect texture and not much to taste either, even that will result much lower % of salt in finished product, for example 500g of wheat flour with 2% salt and 65% hydration will result around 700 grams of pizza crust with 1.42% of salt in it.

Of course if you eat whole 700g of crust you get that 10 grams of salt which is 2% of 500 grams, but usually that is 3 pizzas.

Bread is great way to eat salt without realizing it, also many seasonings are bit rich on salt, I have one rubbing seasoning for meat, it has 30% of salt, bad part is that to get any decent taste out of it, I need to use it quite a bit and that upsets salt balance, which is very difficult to keep around that 5 grams a day.

For meat that goes to single pizza I put 7.5 grams of seasoning and that gives 2.5 grams of salt, add salt in crust of pizza and it starts to be near limit, still cheese has salt as has tomato sauce.

To get proper dough one needs to use enough salt, but it is bit hard to stay on salt budget if using those premade seasonings.

I used not to use salt for more than 20 years, there are so many other spices to replace it in meat, black pepper, chili and so on.

We make our own bread. It's OK to decrease the amount of salt, but yeah, yeast needs to feed on salt and sugar to help the bread rise. If you decrease it too much, your bread won't do anything. That's OK for breads like naan and other flatbreads, but not for regular bread. For the most part, I don't worry too much about salt when I'm making bread. There are tons of other seasonings to use in place of salt, but sometimes, well, you just have to use it.

King Arthur's recipes are written out not only in cups and teaspoons, but also by weight. They say that's because on any given day, 1 cup of flour can change dramatically....by the humidity in the air, by warmth or coolness, or by the flour itself. So using digital scales puts you way further ahead.

I love to knead yeast dough and find it very relaxing. My MIL gave me a very old dough kneader...I'll have to take a picture of it. It kneads four pounds of dough at one time (for four 1-pound loaves of bread). She said she used to use it all the time, but I've never used it.

We try to always keep pizza dough balls on hand in the freezer. You never know when a need for pizza is going to creep up on you. 

Mooch, I love calzones! We haven't made them in ages. One of my GFs just posted on FB that she had made calzones. She posted a picture and they looked pretty good. 

Winchester said:

We make our own bread. It's OK to decrease the amount of salt, but yeah, yeast needs to feed on salt and sugar to help the bread rise. If you decrease it too much, your bread won't do anything. That's OK for breads like naan and other flatbreads, but not for regular bread. For the most part, I don't worry too much about salt when I'm making bread. There are tons of other seasonings to use in place of salt, but sometimes, well, you just have to use it.

King Arthur's recipes are written out not only in cups and teaspoons, but also by weight. They say that's because on any given day, 1 cup of flour can change dramatically....by the humidity in the air, by warmth or coolness, or by the flour itself. So using digital scales puts you way further ahead.

I love to knead yeast dough and find it very relaxing. My MIL gave me a very old dough kneader...I'll have to take a picture of it. It kneads four pounds of dough at one time (for four 1-pound loaves of bread). She said she used to use it all the time, but I've never used it.

We try to always keep pizza dough balls on hand in the freezer. You never know when a need for pizza is going to creep up on you. 

Mooch, I love calzones! We haven't made them in ages. One of my GFs just posted on FB that she had made calzones. She posted a picture and they looked pretty good. 

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Here is pizza recipe, no added sugar, that is actually very important for thin crust pizza, for New York style I believe sugar is needed to get more fluffiness?
http://www.fornobravo.com/pizza/pizza_dough.html

I add two table spoons of olive oil to that and then flour as needed (something around 1/2 cup), it is so much like in restaurant and even on regular oven, that is for thin crust pizza.

There is some description and what I have managed to make matches to that:
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2012/07/the-pizza-lab-three-doughs-to-know.html

When I get wheat flour there are two brands I can choose and usually one or another is out of stock, they are different, other is perhaps bit finer and another bit coarser even both are what it says to be half coarse as direct translation, that is general use flour. There is then cake flour and also special wheat flour, not much choices really.

There certainly are a difference in weight of cup between them and also they soak water differently.

Norachan said:

I'm impressed with your bread making. I try to stay out of the kitchen. I never manage to make anything nice and I usually end up hurting myself.

I have to confess that I love salty food. I know it's bad for you, but it tastes so good.

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I also love salt. I add it to everything or it's tasteless.

Many years ago I did a lot of bread making.  It's been so long I doubt it would turn out nice.  I don't really care for salty tasting food but if food isn't seasoned or doesn't have enough salt I notice.  It just doesn't taste right to me even though it doesn't taste salty when it does have enough in it.

JTbo said:

Here is pizza recipe, no added sugar, that is actually very important for thin crust pizza, for New York style I believe sugar is needed to get more fluffiness?
http://www.fornobravo.com/pizza/pizza_dough.html

I add two table spoons of olive oil to that and then flour as needed (something around 1/2 cup), it is so much like in restaurant and even on regular oven, that is for thin crust pizza.

There is some description and what I have managed to make matches to that:
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2012/07/the-pizza-lab-three-doughs-to-know.html

When I get wheat flour there are two brands I can choose and usually one or another is out of stock, they are different, other is perhaps bit finer and another bit coarser even both are what it says to be half coarse as direct translation, that is general use flour. There is then cake flour and also special wheat flour, not much choices really.

There certainly are a difference in weight of cup between them and also they soak water differently.

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Thanks, JTbo. I don't have 00 flour on hand right now, but I know that King Arthur sells it and I usually order it through them.

An interesting tidbit about flour. Here in the US, northern flour has a lot more protein in it than southern flour and so it has a very strong gluten. I usually use bread flour when I'm making bread, unless a recipe isn't specific about the type of flour. Southern flour (White Lily, for example) is wonderful for things like biscuits. Northern flour (your standard Gold Medal) is better for yeast breads. Whenever we go down around Virginia, I try to bring home a couple 5-pound bags of White Lily flour home because it really does make nice biscuits. I use King Arthur's regular flour for mostly everything else. But I use KA's bread flour for those recipes that specifically call for bread flour.

If you can get it, I highly recommend Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. I love Reinhart to begin with; he has such a good way of explaining techniques. And this book has some delicious recipes for whole grain breads. His book The Bread Baker's Apprentice has a wonderful recipe for a Roasted Onion and Asiago Miche. A decadent bread. It took me a while, but I worked my way through the Apprentice book and it was worth every minute of time. I learned so much about bread. He also has a book, American Pie, that is all about pizza: doughs, sauces, techniques for kneading dough, for baking, etc. It's also a good book. 

Thanks Winchester!

I have read quite a bit writings about dough making and what happens when baking in oven, writings from engineers as I have this engineer kind of brain and I have learned huge amount about it.

Also I have read about how to use table top mixer, how many add too much flour instead of waiting few minutes, which was my mistake at beginning, dough develop with it's own pace and it is needed to wait machine to turn dough over enough to really see if hydration is right.

When kneading by hand that is of course different, however machine makes dough in around 10 minutes and size does not matter much, so I no longer knead by hand.


I did learn about salt also from King Arthur's site:
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/professional/salt.html

Here is page that explains what happens when bread is baked:
http://www.classofoods.com/page2_3.html

This was interesting article about water content in bread:
http://www.vincentcorp.com/content/moisture-content-bread-water

When calculating how salty my bread will be I can now use that 38% hydration for getting real number, so I know if I get too much or too little salt. I'm afraid that my migraines are also partly because lack of salt I have had during winter times.