Simply enjoy food

Pita bread is usually made with a dough that contains a bit of sugar and oil. But I have had good results using a lean dough (french bread dough - a dough made of four ingredients - flour, water, salt and yeast). This is convenient since I often have lean dough hanging around a container in my fridge. See Baguettes for dummies for a simple recipe for lean dough.

Separate the dough into small balls. Round them out and let them sit on the table for 45 minutes. Use this time to preheat the oven - set the temperature as high as it will go.

When you are ready to bake, sprinkle a bit of flour on the dough and on your work surface. Use a rolling pin to flatten the dough completely. Roll it out until it is as thick as a quarter.

Carefully unstick the dough from your work surface and throw it onto the hot pizza stone in the oven. Watch with amazement as they puff up. Let it bake for about three minutes or until is starts to char. Flip it over and bake for another minute or two. Repeat with the remaining pieces of dough.

Let the pita cool for a few minutes and then store them in a plastic container or bag so that they stay soft.

They should stay soft for up to four days if kept in a sealed container. If you have not let your dough preferment for a long time, their freshness will be considerably shorter.

Tahini is crushed sesame seeds. Like peanut butter made from sesame seeds.

I never liked it because it has a sticky, lumpy texture. Until recently I only ever used it as an ingredient in chickpea hummus. Nobody ever told me how to prepare it to serve it on it's own until I read a vague description of how to prepare it on a bottle of Tahini I recently purchased. I don't make chickpea hummus anymore - this is a lot better.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup tahini
1/8 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar (optional)

Mix all the ingredients together. The tahini will separate and then form an emulsion with the water. You will end up with a fluffy, white paste with a soft mouth feel.

After many many tries, I finally found the secret to making perfect falafels. The trick is to use dry chickpeas and soak them overnight - Do not cook them! By only soaking them, they are too crunchy to eat by themselves, but when blended with the other ingredients and then fried, you end up with the perfect texture.

Falafels are an excellent vegan dish. Very high in protein and fiber, if cooked in hot oil, they don't contain a lot of fat.

Here's how I make them.

Ingredients:

1 cup chickpeas
2.5 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt

Soak chickpeas in salted water overnight. I put them in the refrigerator right away in case I don'T feel like making them the next day...

1 clove garlic
1/8 cup parsley or half cilantro, half parsley
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cumin
half of a small onion
1 tablespoon flour

Drain and rinse the chickpeas. Put all the ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth. The texture will be somewhat crumbly, but if you shape the falafels into balls, they should hold their shape well.

Heat 1 cup of oil in a frying pan. Shape the falafel mixture into 12 to 15 balls. I use a 1/8th cup measure to scoop them out. I quickly roll them into flat balls and put them on a plate.

Place a paper towel on another plate, ready to receive the fried falafels. Have a salt shaker handy too, since you want to salt them just as they come from the oil.

Test the oil temperature by dropping a pinch of the mixture into it. If it sizzles, you are ready to go. Place half of the shaped balls into the oil. Fry them on one side until they are golden brown, about four minutes. Turn them over and fry for another three or four minutes until they are golden brown. Remove from the oil and place on the paper towel. Sprinkle salt on them immediately. Fry the remaining falafels.

Serve hot with Tahini and Homemade Pita bread.

Peh - Roh - Heh (The "R" in "Roh" is hard - like a "D"). That's how you pronounce Pyrohy. At least, that's how I was brought up.

My mom makes the best pyrohy. While there are many things you can stuff them with such as cottage cheese, cabbage and onion and even squash, the only ones we ever made were with potato. This seems to have been so with most of the Montreal Ukrainians that I know. Must be a Montreal thing.

I tried the cottage cheese ones once when I was a child. I can see why we never made them. Not at all the same. Funny texture. The plain ones (potato) are so smooth and creamy. They just go down your esophagus as though they are riding on a buttery magic carpet.

They are actually coated in salty butter. Mmmmm.

Anyway, here's how they are made.

Boil five medium-to-large potatoes. Once they are soft, drain the water and add about 1/4 cup of butter, a teaspoon of salt and about 150 grams (one cup) of shredded cheddar cheese. Mash.

Set aside to cool. This is important because trying to stuff the pyrohy with hot mashed potato is very difficult. As the mashed potatoes cool, they will harden a bit and be more easy to handle.

Prepare the dough.

Ingredients:

one egg
2 cups all-purpose (five roses) flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water (maybe a little more)
1 teaspoon salad oil

Mix all the ingredients together and knead for a moment until everything comes together.

Cut off one third of the dough and set it on a floured surface. Using a rolling pin, roll it out very thin. About the thickness of a quarter is great.

Dip the rim of a drinking glass in a little flour and use it to cut out circular pieces of the dough. Put the leftover bits of dough together and roll them out at the end.

Place a ball of the cooled potato on the counter and stretch the dough in your hands. Drape the ball of potato with the dough and flip it around. This picture is just for getting the idea of how much potato you need for each piece of dough - it's pretty hard to get the job done like the picture shows...

Pinch together the edges of the dough. Make sure that each side of the dough comes into direct contact with the other side without any potato getting in the way.

Pinch both side together to form a complete seal.

Now that you are done, repeat about 50 more times. Place the uncooked pyrohy on a floured towel so that they don't stick to each other or anything else.

When you are just about to go insane because of how much work this is, start a pot of salted water to boil. Once it has reached a rolling boil, drop in about ten pyhohy at a time.

They don't need a long time to cook. Maybe two minutes? Overcooking will lead to them falling apart. As soon as they start to float around, gather them with a slotted spoon and put them into a dish with a generous amount of butter.

With each batch you add to the dish, slosh them around so that they get coated with butter. They won't stick that way. Of course there are other ways to prevent things from sticking, but just use a truckload of butter. My Dad would use two containers and transfer them back and forth between the two to get the pyrohy all coated with butter.

Don't forget to salt them, too. Don't feel bad about being generous with salt. Really. You won't eat this every day. Serve with sour cream.

I figure they are about 50 calories each, including all the butter.

Wanna make challah in a hurry? From scratch? This is the method for you. In 100 minutes from NOW, you can be pulling a freshly baked challah from your oven and filling your home with the wonderful aroma of freshly baked bread.

How can this be? Is there a trick? Not really. A bit of technique, a little compromise, some science and a leap of faith is all you need. Well, you will also need the following ingredients. And a bowl.

1/2 cup warm water
3/4 teaspoon yeast
2 eggs (one for the dough and another for the egg wash)
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 cup sugar
1/8 cup salad oil
2 cups unbleached flour
sesame seeds (optional)

START THE CLOCK!

Minute 1:
Add the warm water to a bowl. Put the yeast in. Stir for a moment. Let it sit while you fetch the rest of the ingredients. This is important since yeast activity can be maximized by proper hydration/activation. So do this step first.

If you only have "Instant" yeast that says on the package you don't need to hydrate it, do it anyway. Doing so won't harm it and will improve performance slightly.

Minute 2 to 10:
Turn your oven on to 200 degrees to warm it up. We are making a warm spot for your dough to rise quickly.

Assemble the remaining ingredients and put them into the bowl. Remember that you are only using one egg. Stir with a spoon until all the flour has been in contact with the liquid.

Turn the oven off. Turn on the oven light - this should provide enough heat to keep the inside of the oven warm enough from now on - leaving the oven on would be too hot!

Cover the bowl and put it in the warm (not hot) oven. Set a timer for 14 minutes.

Minute 25:
The timer just rang! Take the dough from the oven and stretch and fold it. Put if back into the oven and set the timer for another 14 minutes.

Minute 40:
Repeat the stretch and fold and set your timer for 9 minutes. Put the dough back into the oven.

Minute 49:

Clear off the some counter space and drop about two tablespoons of flour in one spot. Drop a teaspoon of salad oil in another spot. Make sure you have enough room to roll out the dough.

Minute 50 to 60:

Take the dough out of the oven and drop it on top of the oil. The dough should be puffy and light. Roll the dough around and coat in in the oil.

Cut it into six even pieces.

Roll out each piece into a long cigar shape. Roll it on the counter. Don't overdo it. It shouldn't be overly rounded. Just roll it out two or three times back and forth. You will adjust the shape when you braid it. If you fuss too much at this point, your braids will end up uneven once they start to bake.

Drop the rolls into the flour to coat them.

Line up the six strands and pinch the tops together. Cross the two outermost strands on top.

You will braid the strands by bringing one of the top strands down into the middle of the four bottom strands, and then replacing the missing strand on top with the second-from-the-top strand from the bottom strands.

It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.

Place the top strand in the middle, between the four lower pieces. Now replace the missing strand on top with the second strand from the top.

Bring the other top strand down into the middle.

And replace it with the second strand from the top.

Keep going.

If one strand seems to be too short, pull it a little more tightly as you braid it so that its end is as long as the other strands.  When you reach the point where the strands are too short to braid, just pinch them together and tuck them underneath the bread.

I figure this can take about 10 minutes. If it takes a little longer, don't worry.

Minute 60 (more or less...) to 70:

Turn the oven on to 350 degrees to preheat it. Cover the bread and let it rise.

Minute 70-75:

Beat the remaining egg. Brush the dough with the egg. You may add a tablespoon of water to the egg mixture if you like.

If you like sesame seeds, grab a handful and wet one finger with the egg solution.

Dab your finger into the sesame seeds and lightly poke a round part of your challah. This will deposit some sesame seeds. Dip your finger into the seeds in your hand again to pick some more up and continue sticking some sesame seeds to the curves of your bread.

Minute 75 to 90:

Put it in the oven and bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

This is what it looks like at 80 minutes (5 minutes of baking):

Minute 90 to 100:

Open the oven door and rotate the bread 180 degrees so that it cooks evenly. Close the door and bake for another 10 minutes.

Minute 100:

It's done! Take it out of the oven and put it on a cooling rack.

Put the bread knife down, please! The bread really needs to cool a bit before you can eat it. It's done baking but there are still some chemical changes that need to take place while it's cooling before you can eat it. You are warned! If you try to eat it now, you will be disappointed - it's not turned into bread yet.

Wait about 20 minutes before eating it.

So what's the secret? As I said, compromise, science and faith.

The compromise:

Good bread takes time to make. There's no way around that. I usually recommend using a preferment or letting the dough rise slowly (such as in the fridge for 24 hours) to develop flavour. But, in a recipe like this one, there are other sources of flavour. The sugar, the oil and the egg add flavour to the dough so that the end result is fine without a preferment. That's one compromise.

You can always preferment this recipe if you like. Just add less yeast, and follow the same instructions. Before cutting the dough into six pieces, though, cover it and put it in the fridge until the next day before resuming the recipe. Your bread will taste even better!

We also rushed through developing the gluten in the dough. Fortunately, challah contains a lot of oil which alters the texture of the dough. It also contains egg which provides albumin, another kind of protein. The albumin will quickly develop the dough and provide an acceptable result.

To do a better job, stretch and fold three times (instead of two), and use a longer interval of time between S&Fs. You will notice an improved crumb structure in the final product.

The Science:

Yeast produces carbon dioxide when it eats sugar. Yeast also acts faster at higher temperatures. If you add a lot of yeast, you will produce more CO2. If you keep the dough in a warm spot, it will rise faster. We do both here and end up with a nice round bread.

The leap of faith:

There is something to be said about underproofing. That is, baking your bread before the dough has risen fully. In a braided bread, it's essential for the strands to remain distinct so that the final bread can have the correct shape. If the dough is too wet or has risen too much, the strands will melt into each other and you end up with a soccer-ball-looking challah.

Since we have packed the dough with yeast and have kept it warm for an hour before we bake it we have lots of yeast activity in the dough; we just don't see the proof yet! Underproofing requires faith.

You may be looking at the dough and think to yourself "this doesn't look right - this will never rise!" Have faith. If you have noticed a little rise during the process so far, you will see the bread rise in the oven. Close your eyes and take a leap!

For more bread ideas, visit Yeastspotting at imafoodblog.com

In my last blog entry, I posted an easy way to make baguettes.

But there is more than one way to skin a cat. Here is a slight variation you can apply to the last recipe which may help you get a more intense flavor in a shorter period of time:

Instead of putting the dough in the fridge, let it sit on the counter at room temperature for up to 24 hours. The dough will be slightly more challenging to handle in comparison to the cold dough out of the fridge.

The secret is to not stretch and fold the dough until you are ready to bake. Mix all the ingredients with a spoon. Cover it and let it sit at room temperature for at least 8 hours. For example, if you are planning a special evening meal, you can mix up your baguette dough in the morning.

Two hours before you plan to serve the baguettes, perform the three S&Fs on the dough at 15 minute intervals. Shape the dough into baguettes as usual and final proof for only 20 minutes. Since I preheat my oven for 20 minutes, the timing of that last step works out nicely. Bake and cool as usual.

Baguettes can be difficult to make.

Although they are an sometimes an afterthought, often made from leftover dough, it's difficult to create one from scratch that has the right appearance and flavor.

Here's a recipe and method for making them that I think you will come back to. Yes, there are better ways of doing this, but this method is a neat compromise between the everyday home baker and the bread snob.

It works perfectly well for those who don't own or use a baking scale. To be honest, whether the hydration ends up being in the sixties or seventies (or even higher), great baguettes will be made and eaten. If you want to improve your baking, please use a scale. If you just want to see if you can do this, go ahead with confidence - you don't need a laboratory to bake great bread.

I was inspired to write this after participating in this thread on TheFreshLoaf.com.

Equipment:

Large bowl
Measuring cup
Baking stone
Tin foil roasting pan
Parchment paper
Razor blade or tomato (serrated) knife

Ingredients:
- Two cups (about 300 grams) White flour - use unbleached. You can use all-purpose or bread flour.
- One cup Water (about 216 grams - yes, one cup doesn't yield exactly 240ml unless you spill water all over the kitchen)
- One teaspoon Salt (any kind) (6 grams)
- 1/8th teaspoon Yeast (any kind) (1 gram)

Method:

Put exactly two cups of flour into a large bowl. Create a well in the center of the flour and drop in the salt, yeast and then pour the water into the well. Mix up the yeast with the water for a moment. Let it sit for two minutes or so to hydrate and dissolve the yeast.

Mix the water into the flour with a spoon. This should take a minute, maybe two. Don't worry about lumps, just try to involve all the dry flour into the dough.

Cover the bowl and let it sit for 20 minutes.

Stretch and fold the dough:
Using very wet hands, scrape the dough off the surface of the bowl and turn it upside down in the bowl. Flatten it out and pull the top third over the middle.

Pull the bottom third over the middle.

Do the same with both sides.

Flip the dough upside down and cover the bowl. Let it sit for another 20 minutes. Repeat the Stretch and Fold process two more times at 20 minute intervals. But don't worry about the timing that much. Just as long as you get the three S&Fs done within one to three hours, you will be fine. So, if you forget your dough and only get to the last S&F two hours later, it will still work fine. But the process should take one hour at a minimum, so that the yeast has time to get going before you move on to the next step.

Once the dough has been worked, cover it and put it into the fridge for use the next day. You can bake it after it has been sitting in the fridge for at least 8 hours. Its flavor will improve some more over the next few days. Use it within five days or the enzymes will start to break down the strength of the dough and your bread's quality will start to decline.

Take your dough from the refrigerator and uncover it. It should have risen overnight.

Dust the counter and the surface of the dough with a little flour so that it doesn't stick to your hands and scrape it from the bowl without degassing it too much. Drop it on the counter and cut the dough in half.

Gently flatten each piece into a rectangle shape without popping the gas bubbles. Use a little flour so that the dough doesn't stick to your fingers. Roll up or fold the dough onto itself to form a thick cylinder. This is called preshaping. Cover it so that it doesn't dry out and let it sit for 60 minutes. I cover it with the tin foil pan that I will be using to create steam in the oven.

After the 60 minute rest, gently unstick the dough from the counter and lay the smoothest surface down on top of a little flour. Flatten the dough and tuck the bottom part into the middle while stretching the smooth surface of the dough. Roll and tuck it up tight. Tuck the tips in before you close up the seam.

Gently rock and roll the dough to create a longer shape. Even out the width of the dough by rolling some spots more than others. Place the dough seam side down on a piece of parchment paper. Shape and place the other piece of dough next to it.

Cover and let it rise for another 40 minutes. During the last 20 minutes of rise, preheat the over and pizza stone to the highest temperature.

Just before putting the dough in the oven, slash each baguette a few times. Try to make long slashes so that you can overlap them to create a nicer effect when it bakes.

Transfer the parchment paper onto the pizza stone. Wet the inside of the tin foil pan with about a tablespoon of water and swish it around so that it sticks to the surface and doesn't immediately roll off. Cover the dough in the oven with the wet tin foil pan and close the oven door. Let it sit there at maximum temperature for 5 to 10 minutes.

Remove the tin foil pan with an oven mitt (I also use a fork to pick it up) and place it on the top of the oven. Shut the oven door and lower the temperature to 400 degrees F. Let the bread bake for four minutes.

On a side note, the tin foil pan will take two minutes to cool, after which you can put it away (Only two minutes, really! - It takes less time to warm up, too, so there is no need to preheat it and waste energy like you would do with a Dutch Oven!)

After four minutes at 400 degrees, rotate the bread 180 degrees so that it cooks evenly. It should be done in four more minutes. Bake a little more or less to taste - some people like a very dark crust while others prefer it light and soft.

Place the bread on a wire rack to cool for about 20 minutes before slicing and serving. Don't say I didn't warn you - your baguettes will have a gummy texture and will lack flavor until cooled down.

For more bread ideas, visit Yeastspotting at Wild Yeast Blog

Scoring means cutting the outer skin of the dough just before you put it in the oven to control the spread of the dough and improve the final shape.

You usually use a sharp blade, like that of a razor or a serrated tomato knife. Unless specified, cut about a half centimeter (1/4 inch) deep. Wet your blade and cut in one swift motion. Don't fuss.

To score baguettes, make several cuts almost parallel to the length of the dough. Allow your cuts to overlap a lot.

If you can't make a proper cut, it's probably because your dough has not been shaped tightly enough. Overproofing is another culprit.

Here are ten things that can help you make awesome artisan bread. They are in no particular order.

1. Use unbleached flour.
Bleaching white flour is harmful to the environment. It's also unfriendly to the taste of the flour. Unbleached flour simply tastes better than bleached flour and it may even be healthier for you. Try it and you will never want to go back to bleached flour again. You won't even notice a difference in color.

---

2. Use a preferment.
Yeast does a lot more than just make the dough rise. It's the primary source of flavor. The way to tap into that potential is to use long fermentation times. If you whip up a batch of dough at 4PM and bake it at 6 PM, don't expect it to taste like bread. Your bread will taste like flour and yeast.

You can make awesome tasting bread from just four ingredients (flour, water, salt and yeast). You just need to give the dough some time to ferment. Can you get the best of both worlds? Can you use a portion of older dough mixed in with freshly made dough to end up with bread that is made fast, but has the flavor of a long fermentation? Yes! This is what a preferment is.

A preferment can be called many things. Poolish, Sponge, Biga, Starter, Levain... They are all pretty much the same thing. They are flour, water and yeast mixed together and left for a long period of time to develop flavor.

Use at least 30 percent of the weight of your dough as a preferment and you will notice an improvement in your bread.

Example: Mix your sponge at 8 in the morning and then let it sit on the counter all day. Make your dough at 3 PM using the sponge and then bake it at 5 PM. Winner!

---

3.  Use lots of water.
Most cookbooks written more than ten years ago print bread recipes that describe very stiff doughs. A stiff dough is much easier to work with when you are kneading my hand. But the end result is a dense, crumbly bread. Chewy, light breads with large, uneven holes are beautiful and delicious. You can make them by using wetter doughs.

70 to 80 per cent hydration is what you are looking for. (i.e. 500 grams of flour with 350 to 400 grams of water).

Since wet doughs are more difficult to handle, you shouldn't knead the dough. You can stretch-and-fold it. Alternatively (but with less appealing results) you can use a stand-mixer to do the work since the wetter dough will stick to your hands.

---

4. Never punch down.
Again, most general-purpose cookbooks recommend you let your dough rise and then punch it down. This is senseless! We want to have large and small bubbles spread out randomly in our bread. Punching down the dough will just create a dense bread. Leave it alone!

You will need to manipulate your dough, but when doing so, try to minimize degassing. Enough degassing will occur just by shaping it into the final loaf. So don't worry.

---

5. Retard. (Put your dough in the fridge)
Try this. Whip up a batch of dough, let it start to rise for about an hour and then put it into the fridge overnight (or for several days). This is the same thing as a preferment, but better. Your whole dough is prefermented, so you don't have to mess around with making dough on the day you want bread. Just take it out of the fridge, cut off a piece, shape it, let it rise and bake it.

Slowing down the fermentation changes the character of the flavor that the yeast will contribute. It also allows chemical reactions to happen over the long period of time in the fridge that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Cold dough is also easier to handle!

---

6. Use less yeast.
Most recipes call for too much yeast. The yeast companies want you to think that you need to make your dough rise as fast as possible because Bigger is Better and Faster is too!.

If you give your dough enough time (like four hours at room temperature), the yeast will multiply by themselves. If you start with the bare minimum, after a few hours on the counter the yeast population will have increased to levels that are more than enough to raise your bread. If you overpopulate your dough right from the start, the yeast will run out of food before all the wonderful bread flavors are developed. You end up with yeasty tasting bread.

As a rule of thumb, I use about 0.5 per cent yeast by weight of flour. So that's about 1/4 teaspoon of yeast per 4 cups of flour. You will need more yeast for sweet doughs since high levels of sugar make the yeast slow down (they get swollen with water, actually), but try using as little as you need to get the job done.

---

7. Fold.
As your dough bakes, it expands. As the heat penetrates the dough, it solidifies the starches and proteins. This process happens from outside in, which is why bread has crust. If you plan ahead, you can make this process work to your advantage and make the dough expand into an appealing shape.

Flatten our your dough with your fingertips and fold the edges over each other to tighten the outer skin. Curl them up into the middle of the bread. This will cause the expansion of the dough to make your bread have a round shape rather than be a flattened out pancake.

---

8. Use high temperature.
When you pop the dough into the oven, the high temperature will cause the gas inside the dough to expand and make the bread puff up (this is called oven spring). If the difference in temperature between the dough and the oven is not high enough, the heat will not reach the inside of the dough in time and your bread will be dense.

Turn your oven up to maximum. Also, use an oven stone (pizza stone). The stone will absorb a lot of heat and will allow the dough to pick up the heat quickly. The stone will also conduct heat away from the bread once it has reached the same temperature as the oven. The end result is that the bottom of your bread will not burn as quickly.

After the first five or six minutes at maximum, turn your oven down for the remainder of the cooking time, so as not to burn the crust. I turn the temperature down to 450 degrees for baguettes, 400 degrees for thick breads such as boules and loaves, and 350 for sweet doughs which contain sugar and will cause the crust to burn.

---

9. Underproof.
Try baking your dough a little early. You get the best oven spring by baking your bread when it is a little bit underproofed. This is because a dough that is fully proofed will be too light to properly hold it's shape.

If you visit a bakery and find their baguettes are really round, it's because they were just right (not overproofed). If you find baguettes that are flat instead of perfectly round, they waited too long before baking them. The bread still tastes good, and it's nice and light. It just doesn't have a perfectly round shape.

---

10. Use Steam
Steam transfers much more heat than dry air. Steam also prevents the outside of the crust from drying out too much in the oven.

You can create steam in you oven during the first few minutes of baking by putting a cast iron pan on the bottom shelf of the oven. Preheat the oven to the highest temperature to which it will go for 45 minutes. After you put your dough in the oven, you dump a cup of hot water into the steam pan and quickly shut the door. Be sure to wear an oven mitt since the steam will scald your hand. Also, cover the inside of the oven window with a towel to catch any droplets that may cause the glass to shatter due to thermal shock.

The water will evaporate over the next five minutes or so and create the steam you need to make great bread.

The steam inside your oven is at such a high temperature that you can't see it, but you can be sure that it's there. You'll see the water disappear from the bottom pan.

But...

A better way to create steam is by using an aluminum foil roasting pan to cover your bread for the first five or six minutes of baking:

This traps the humidity inside the aluminum pan and has the same effect as steaming the inside of your oven. You can wet the inside of the aluminum pan, too, to increase the amount of steam you get.

This also has the same effect as an old-world stone oven or a dutch oven. It's superior to those since it also reflects the heat back onto the bread, reducing the time you need to preheat your oven and reducing your overall oven time - that saves energy and costs less. Using this method, I find I only need to preheat the oven for 20 minutes. The aluminum pan does not need to be preheated at all.

The aluminum pan is also a lot easier to handle and cools off quickly. You can put it away 90 seconds after you take it out of the piping hot oven (really!).

There are many ways to turn dough into nicely shaped breads. Here are the steps I follow that seem to work for me.

First, I start with the right portion of dough.

Then I flatten it out a little, without degassing it too much.

To make baguettes or baguette-type breads, I roll it up. I make sure to tighten the skin so that the bread will become round when it bakes.

Then I will rock and roll the dough to stretch it out into the final shape. I lay them on parchment paper.

I let it proof for the required time. Usually 30 minutes for room-temperature dough and about 60 minutes for dough that has come out of the refrigerator.

Then I score the dough or otherwise shape it. Here I am cutting it with scissors to make an épi shape.

Into the oven they go at high heat with steam.

Final result: