How to impove the flavor of your bread

Though it may seem a tad complicated, at 1st, it is quite easy to dramatically improve the flavor of your bread.

3 factors: TIME, TEMPERATURE, AND % of HYDRATION.

TIME: modern day yeast works very quickly BUT when it does so, it does not give the good bacteria time to ferment and bacteria is what gives bread great flavor. You can NOT rush bacteria. It will ferment/grow at its own sweet time.

TEMPERATURE: yeast works at a relative small window of temp. Depending upon what kind of bread you are making, room temp is often the best temp.

HYDRATION %: both yeast and bacteria grow at different rates based upon how wet the pre-ferment is.

What is a pre-ferment ?

A pre-ferment is merely taking a small % of your bread recipe and allowing it to ferment/grow ahead of when you make your final dough.
There are many different names for many different kinds of pre-ferments. The preferment below is called a biga

Example of my preferment for my Italian bread.

113 gram of plain water
88 gram of bread flour. UNBLEACHED !
36 gram whole wheat flour
36 gram of semolina flour
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1/4 th cup of water.
1 tsp yeast
Mix an set aside.
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Mix the water and all of the flours
stir the watered yeast and carefully spoon out ONLY 2 tsp of the yeasted water. Add it to the water/flour mix. THROW ALL OF THE REMAINING YEASTED WATER AWAY.

STIR, STIR, STIR, THE PRE-FERMENT UNTIL IT NO LONGER HAS ANY DRY FLOUR. This Biga will be very thick. COVER WITH PLASTIC WRAP AND ALLOW TO FERMENT AT ROOM TEMP FOR 13-14 HOURS.
When ready, IT SHOULD BE RISEN AT LEAST DOUBLE, have many bubbles, AND SMELL OF ALCOHOL

This pre-ferment is now added to my Italian bread formula and I treat the dough as per usual.

Re: How to impove the flavor of your bread

Useful tip, Bakerman, will give it a try! Thank you.

Re: How to impove the flavor of your bread

Even after you have added the Biga to the remainder of the formula, and kneaded the dough to your satisfaction, use the following tips.
1.) pinch off a hunk of the kneaded dough, and stretch it out. turning as you stretch. the goal here is to produce what is called the "window pane test". You should be able to have a super thin small sheet of dough that does NOT rip, and that you can see light through. This tells you that your dough has reached maximum strength and will rise to perfection.

2.) your last chance to increase the flavor, is called "the bulk ferment". What you want to do is to let the dough rise BUT to stretch out the TIME. The more time it takes to double, the better your flavor will be. However, be careful that you do not use up all the sugars or else your dough will collapse.

Once you have punched down your bulk ferment and formed your loaf, very, very little more flavor will occur.

However, properly finishing the baking is critical. you want to nearly caramelize the crust for max CRUST flavor. Note the color of the crust. YUM !