"The main thing is to buy strong flour, otherwise known as hard flour or bread flour.
Basically, strong flour is made from hard wheat, giving it a higher ratio of protein to starch than other flours. More protein means more gluten will be developed during kneading. Gluten is good - it makes for a lighter loaf." www.stanford.edu/~bclevin/bls00.pdf
As well as buying strong, try, if you can, to get stoneground. This traditional milling method gives a much better texture and flavour than the industrially milled stuff.

If you are in the UK, you cannot go far wrong with Doves Farm organic flour. This is pretty widely available from supermarkets. In the US, I hear that Hudson Cream Flour is the way to go, although I don’t know how widely available it is. If you are really keen, you can get really fantastic flour by mail order from small traditional milling companies - feel free to recommend your favourite miller in the comments.

Look after your yeast
Yeast is a living organism, which, with warmth and possibly some sugar or honey, multiplies within the bread dough, giving off carbon dioxide. This causes the dough to rise, and ultimately forms the bubbles within the loaf.

While you are making the dough, you have to be careful not to overheat the yeast or you will kill it before it has had a chance to create any carbon dioxide. This is where I used to go wrong until I learned that warm is good; hot is not. Once your dough is in the oven, then you do want to kill your yeast quickly to stop the bread rising any further - which is why you preheat the oven to a high temparature for baking bread.

I use fresh yeast, which you can buy in Sainsbury’s and beg, borrow or steal in Tesco. You can get dried yeast pretty much anywhere. I don’t know about yeast availability outside the UK, so feel free to share your yeast buying tips in the comments.

Further reading
The only book you will ever need on bread making is called simply The Bread Book. It’s by Linda Collister and Anthony Blake and you can buy it at Amazon UK or Amazon US. It covers the basics in greater depth and has loads of great recipes, from the most basic to the most luxurious special occasion breads.

Part 2 next week.

1 comment April 17th, 2005

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Note added at 29 mins (2006-01-21 19:43:10 GMT)
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Bocs, a weblap jelzése utáni sületlenségeket (get it? :-) nem akartam hozzá tenni. Kudoz újabban nekem teljeses zűrzavarosan működik.