V. Pokhlebkin. Secrets of good cuisine. The basics of baking.
I bring to your attention for reading a chapter from the book.
Yes, making bread is the simplest, the very first action according to culinary logic. And from an educational pedagogical point of view, all the more the first. For no other culinary achievement convinces a person of his ability and ability to cook, does not give him such culinary confidence and skill as the ability to bake bread with his own hands. So it was from time immemorial. But this is even more true today.
For we are accustomed today to consider bread as something that is no longer under the control of home cooking, which requires some kind of complex, factory equipment and experience that we get ready, like shoes or clothes, canned food or mineral drinks.
Meanwhile, bread is the basis of life and the table. Without bread: you cannot live, without it any dinner is not dinner, any dish lacks something. But baking bread yourself seems difficult. We developed this idea from the literature of the 19th century, which described how in the early morning, almost at night, at 3-4 o'clock, while the oven that was heated in the evening did not have time to cool down, the hostess got up, began to knead the dough, and put bread in the oven. This process was inconvenient in time, laborious, but even at that time it was quite fast: already at 5-6 o'clock in the morning, that is, after one and a half to two hours, a fresh loaf, full of heat and bready spirit, ripened.
But in the help, hard-working family they baked bread almost every day - two or three times a week to always have it fresh. Nowadays, with modern home appliances - a gas or electric stove - baking bread takes no more than 15-30 minutes. Of course, we are not talking about loaves per kilogram or more in weight, or about loaves. To quickly, in 8-10 minutes, bake bread dough, you need to give it the shape of a cake or a small bun the size of a fist, the taste of the bread will not change, the baking will improve, and the baking time will be reduced to a minimum.
What should be done? What you need to have
1. Take: 35-50 grams of yeast (one third to half of the bar), 0.5 cups of water, 1-2 tablespoons of flour. Stir everything together in a cup, set aside.
2. Chop finely or mince the onion.
3. Light the stove in the kitchen (oven).
4. Pour the yeast mixture into a large bowl, add to it a glass of water or milk (which is at hand) and about a quarter to a third of a glass of sunflower oil, stir everything quickly but carefully, add chopped chopped onions, salt (pinch or two), then gradually add flour and stir all the time until a dough is formed that does not stick to your hands.
It is important not to miss this moment. The main thing is that the dough does not turn out too steep, which means that the flour must be added gradually, until it, while still very soft and tender, at the same time would completely lag behind the hands. After kneading such a dough well, make from it balls about the size of an apple or a little less and flatten each of these balls into a cake about one to one and a half centimeters thick. Put these cakes on a baking sheet or better on a sheet and, at a distance of about one and a half to two centimeters from each other, draw deep lines on these cakes with a knife, made them seem striped.
Let the bread stand for 2-3 minutes before planting in the oven, or immediately put it in the oven, because it will be hot in the kitchen by this time. Notice the time. After 10 minutes, look, pierce with a pointed match. If the cakes are browned, and there are still traces of dough on the match, let stand in the oven for another 2-3 minutes. But no more.Take out, lay out on a wooden board (plywood), cover with a towel, a piece of linen. Your bread is ready. It took no more than 20 minutes, including cutting. A delay in time can only be because the oven bakes poorly or has not been preheated well.
Try the cooked bread in 25 minutes, not earlier: only then will it acquire its real taste. How is it? Tasty? And how! And it's not difficult at all. Downright silly simple.
And why? Let's figure it out.
Firstly, in this case, you prepared the product according to the exactly specified recipe and, moreover, according to the precisely specified technology. All operations, their sequence were preliminarily thought out and tested, which often does not happen in cookbooks, where the recipe contains only an indication of what to take, how much and what products, how much to cook, fry. But how to do it, in what sequence, in what order to perform each operation, and, most importantly, what to avoid, the cookbook does not say about this. This is why not everyone and not always manage to cook from the cookbook. It can be read correctly by a person who is prepared and knows how to determine what is missing there and how to supplement these gaps in the preparation of the dish.
From this it is clear that the cooking technology is no less important than the recipe for the dish. In this case, you had both, and if you did everything accurately, then the result was good. But no less important for your success was another circumstance: when preparing a dish (product), you dealt exclusively with finished products, with manufactured goods.
What does it mean?
This means that all the components you used to prepare a new product (flour, butter, yeast, milk) were completely ready-made, made in a factory (industrial) way and had already a certain standard, quality, as a rule, of a high level. You just had to combine and mix these components.
The proportions and weight (volume) of the mixture were also given, so there could be no error. And baking does not require any special art. Its time was approximately indicated. For the rest, the oven worked, not you. Therefore, when making homemade bread, in this case, part of the success falls to the share of the industry that prepared the components, and part to the share of the stove (oven). Now, since we are talking about the stove, it's time to determine the difference between a sheet and a baking sheet.
Both of these items of kitchen, or, rather, oven equipment, entered the life of our country relatively recently (no more than 200 years ago) with the advent of a European stove with an oven. None of the furnace systems that we used - the Russian stove, the Ukrainian rough, the Caucasian and Central Asian tonir, or tandoor - were such devices required. Bread, flat cakes, pies, gingerbread - all this was either placed directly on the brick under the oven, or stuck to its clay walls (near the tandoor). Sometimes only black bread in the Russian oven was put on a cabbage leaf, and even then for taste, and not for the success of baking.
Both the sheet and the baking sheet are borrowed from French cuisine through German. The sheet, that is, a rectangular metal plate, without any welts and folded edges appeared first. This was in the second half of the 18th century. It was called in German "blatt", and at first this word was not translated into Russian, but they called it "plaque", "plaque", "tin plate", because when foreign cooks who did not know Russian spoke "blatt", then their Russian serf students repeated: "badge".
Subsequently, already at the beginning of the 19th century, due to the fact that the art of cooking began to be taught not orally, but in writing, using translations of foreign cookbooks, the word "leaf" appeared, a direct translation into Russian.
At the same time, they began to distinguish between a simple sheet (iron, tin) for baking buns, small pastries, cheesecakes, pies - all products made from yeast and puff pastry - and a cake sheet, or confectionery (copper, tinned), for baking cookies - shortbread, sugar, butter and other small confectionery products.
The difference in the material (metal) of the sheet, as well as in its thickness, was important, since different metals have different thermal conductivity, different degrees of heating. The sheet was chosen depending on the product used. This, of course, is not out of place to take into account now.
The baking sheet came to our kitchen almost at the same time as the sheet, during the period of oral training in cooking. In German, this rectangular iron frying pan was called "bratpanne", that is, a frying pan for roasting, for baking. She had rather high sides: from one inch (2.5 cm) to one and a half, and sometimes up to two. These sides could be either perpendicular to the plane of the pan, or inclined, forming an obtuse angle with it.
Initially, "bratpanne", as a difficult word to pronounce, was transformed in the oral language into "brotpan", and then acquired a completely Russian coloration, turning into a "baking sheet". In Russian cuisine, the baking sheet is widely used when baking large pieces of meat, a whole carcass of poultry in the oven, when making casseroles from noodles and porridge, and, finally, when baking pies, especially sweet ones, for which the sheet is inconvenient, since the pie comes out drier on it. harder, jam, sugar sometimes flow out of it, and puff pastry pies, as a rule, fall off after being removed from the oven, lose their splendor.
For all these products, complex in composition (with filling) and large-sized products, the baking of which lasts 20-30 minutes, or even about an hour, the baking sheet is irreplaceable. But it is contraindicated for small confectionery products, dry sweet cookies, which should be crispy, free-flowing, brittle and "sit" in the oven for no more than 5 minutes so as not to burn.
So, we know why it is better to bake bread on a sheet. Did you do it well? Of course good! But don't be in a hurry to turn up your nose. You still have a lot to learn. Making bread is the basics, the first, initial stage, like a child's game of Easter cakes or cubes. The principle here is the same: you add a finished thing from a ready-made thing, "build it yourself", but still only from a ready-made one. So far, you have not taken a single independent action on products that would dramatically improve them, and maybe even worsen them.
From a culinary learning perspective, making chips or scrambled eggs is still more difficult than making bread. For in both of these cases, you must prepare the product yourself and decide for yourself how, how to fry it. And this is where knowledge is needed, and without it, a mistake awaits you. But about everything, as we agreed, in order.
Later, we will return once again to our bread and repeat everything all over again, but not a specific recipe, but the general principles of preparing all products of this kind, so that we can cook them regardless of whether we remember this recipe or not, whether we have these products or not. ...
