In ancient times, a skilled housewife was recognized by her ability to bake homemade bread and pies. Mastering this “high art” requires an understanding of different types of dough and the nuances of recipes. Here are some technological secrets from our grandmothers that can be used to create delicious baked goods.
Rising Conditions
The foundation of tasty pies is fluffy dough. To ensure it rises well, flour should be sifted beforehand: this enriches it with oxygen and removes any impurities. To speed up the rising process, it’s advisable to warm the flour in the oven for about five minutes. Salt should be added to the flour for yeast dough only after the sponge has fermented. An excess of sugar slows down the fermentation of yeast dough, resulting in less fluffy pies. Additionally, sweet dough pies tend to burn more quickly.
The yeast for the dough should have a noticeable alcoholic smell, which indicates freshness. Check the quality of the yeast in advance using a small portion of sponge dusted with flour. If cracks appear on it within half an hour, the yeast is stale.
The dough should be kneaded with ingredients at room temperature, rather than taking them straight from the fridge: chilled ingredients slow down the dough’s rise. The liquid for yeast dough should be between 30 ºC and 35 ºC; at lower or higher temperatures, the yeast in the liquid loses its activity. Knead the dough with dry hands, and work with flour and yeast in a draft-free environment; otherwise, the pie will develop a tough crust.
Some housewives claim that adding softened fats, which should be in a sour cream-like state, at the end of kneading or during the folding process improves fermentation. Others believe that it’s better to add un-melted butter to yeast or sweet dough, as melted butter can negatively affect the structure. Experts agree that more fat and less liquid in the dough are prerequisites for crumbly baked goods.
Pies made from yeast dough that hasn’t risen properly bake poorly. Before placing the dough in the oven, it must rest in a warm place. Typically, three hours is sufficient. However, neither the dough nor the sponge should be left too long, as this deteriorates their quality. If the dough rises before you’re ready to turn on the oven, cover it with a damp paper towel.
Baking Traditions
To prevent baked goods from drying out and to maintain their fluffiness, monastic recipes included semolina in the dough. Nowadays, it can be replaced with semolina. If you’re baking bread, pies, pancakes, or fritters, add 1 tablespoon of semolina for every ½ liter of liquid. This recipe is not suitable for shortcrust, puff, choux, or dumpling dough.
Pies made with milk are tastier, more aromatic, and visually appealing (golden brown with a shiny crust). For a tempting glaze on closed pies, brush them before baking with milk, butter, oil, sugar water, egg yolks, or beaten egg. For an attractive appearance, you can sprinkle yeast dough pies with powdered sugar, poppy seeds, caraway seeds, or even salt.
The flavor of baked goods improves if you add ½ cup of mineral water to the dough, in addition to milk. You can soften regular water by adding 1 teaspoon of baking soda, extinguished with lemon juice or vinegar. Such baked goods will remain fresh and fluffy even the next day.
To achieve tender and crumbly pies, you should use egg yolks in the dough, but not the whites. Buns and pies will retain their softness longer if you add diluted potato starch to the dough. Before adding raisins to the dough, coat them in flour. If you add too much baking soda to the dough, the pie will turn dark and develop an unpleasant odor.
The dough for a pie on a baking sheet should be rolled as thinly as possible to enhance the flavor of the filling. Thin dough is easier to roll out if you wrap the rolling pin in a cloth napkin. When the dough is wet, it can be rolled out more easily using parchment paper on top. To prevent the bottom of the pie from becoming soggy from the filling and sticking to the baking sheet, sprinkle the dough with starch before adding the filling.
The filling won’t dry out if you bake the pies at medium temperature. Any tall pie should be baked on low heat for even cooking. To separate the pie from the sheet, use a thread instead of a spatula. A pie made from shortcrust pastry should be removed from the mold after cooling. Also, any pie should be allowed to cool before serving; it’s not recommended to cut it while hot. However, if you must, heat the knife in boiling water and dry it before use.
The Perfect Loaf
Bread is the cornerstone of all, so recipes for baked goods should start with homemade bread. Grandma’s homemade bread won’t take much effort from the housewife, but it will require time for the sponge to rise. The dough rises because the yeast releases gas, and the gluten proteins form a network that traps the gas bubbles. This process cannot be rushed: baking according to a classic recipe takes over four hours, while the quality of such products cannot compare to a loaf made using “accelerated technology.”
Kneading the Dough
For fluffy bread, you’ll need 750 grams of high-grade wheat flour, warm water or milk (30 ºC), yeast starter, salt, and spices. In the sifted and warmed flour, add fine salt, mix, and make a well for the yeast. Pour the yeast starter into the well and mix until you achieve a lumpy mass.
Kneading the Dough
Transfer the dough from the bowl to a floured countertop and begin kneading: hold the dough with one hand while stretching it with the other, adding flour or water as needed. The dough should be firm but not too stiff. Continue to stretch and fold the dough for about fifteen minutes until it reaches the desired consistency. The longevity of certain cultures values this regular physical exercise for developing fine motor skills: for instance, Georgian women who work with dough almost daily maintain their mental sharpness into old age. Of course, you can also knead the dough in a mixer, as modern technology is designed to make tasks easier for people.
Rising the Dough
The kneaded dough should be placed in a dry bowl and covered with a damp towel to prevent drying out. Let it sit in a warm place for two hours. You can tell the dough has risen when pressing on it leaves an imprint that doesn’t disappear immediately. Bread will taste better if the dough rises several times. Achieving even porosity in the crumb requires slow rising—at least twice. To do this, you can halve the amount of yeast or place the dough in the refrigerator overnight. The dough will rise more slowly if you use bran or coarsely ground flour (corn, oat, etc.). By the way, you can freeze the dough and bake bread from it at any time.
Shaping the Dough
To form a loaf in the shape of a round bread, shape the dough into a ball by tucking the edges toward the center. After flipping the dough seam-side down, shape it into a round loaf by hand. Cover the ball with a towel and allow the dough to rise again. After it has doubled in size (in about forty minutes), sprinkle the surface of the dough with sesame seeds and score it with a knife in diagonal stripes. To slow down the formation of a crust and make the bread as fluffy as possible, place a wide heatproof bowl of hot water on the bottom of the oven.
Baking the Dough
Preheat the oven to the maximum temperature. After placing the dough on a baking sheet, spray the oven with water to create steam. After fifteen minutes, remove the bowl of water from the oven, reduce the temperature to 200 ºC, and bake for another ten minutes. Once you take the bread out of the oven, check its readiness by tapping the bottom of the loaf. A hollow sound indicates that the bread is done. If the sound is dull, bake for another five minutes. Allow the bread to cool for six hours (usually, the loaf is left in the oven overnight). The top of the bread can be decorated not only with sesame or poppy seeds but also with oats, semolina, or bran.
With Yeast or Without?
Typically, when baking bread and pies, fresh pressed yeast is dissolved in warm water and used immediately. Dry yeast is dissolved in water, left for fifteen minutes to absorb the liquid, and then beaten before mixing with the other ingredients. Instant yeast does not require preparation: in granulated form, it simply combines with the flour. However, homemade baked goods will be healthier than store-bought if you don’t use yeast at all. In a yeast-free alternative, sourdough, onions, and herbs are added to the dough to enhance the flavor of the bread and other baked goods.
To prepare yeast-free sourdough, barley and wheat are soaked in equal proportions: ½ cup of each ingredient. The grains should sit in water for a day, after which the water is drained, and the grains are covered with a damp cloth.
After a few days, the grains will sprout (usually on the third or fourth day). The sprouted grains should be ground, and then 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of rye flour should be added. The mixture is then simmered for an hour while stirring constantly. When the mixture becomes dry, add ½ cup of water. The sourdough will ferment over the course of a week, depending on the room temperature, taking anywhere from two to seven days.
When the sourdough smells like kvass, transfer it to a deep bowl, add half a liter of water, and 500 grams of flour (the dough should not be stiff), along with 1 tablespoon each of oil, salt, and sugar. Since dough made with sourdough rises more slowly than with yeast, it needs to rest for three hours. This homemade bread is baked at a temperature of 160-180 ºC. At the end of baking, the bread should be brushed with raw egg white mixed with sugar and sprinkled with caraway or coriander seeds.
Baking Soda or Baking Powder?
A common question among housewives is what is better to use in homemade baking: baking soda or baking powder? They are not the same, although baking soda is an ingredient in baking powder, and both can be considered interchangeable. The nuance is that when substituting baking soda with baking powder, the latter can be used in larger quantities; for one tablespoon of baking soda in a recipe, you would need three tablespoons of baking powder. In other cases, the amounts will be the same. This depends on whether the dough contains acid.
The fact is that baking soda is simply sodium bicarbonate, while baking powder contains, in addition to soda, other ingredients: the same flour and various acids. By combining baking soda with powdered citric acid, you can create a substance similar to baking powder. Like baking powder, baking soda helps the dough brown during baking, so it can be used just as effectively in cookie recipes. Baking powder, due to its own acid content, is better used in the absence of fermented dairy products in the dough: for example, in baked goods made with water or milk.
If the dough contains acidic products, baking soda can be substituted for baking powder in the same proportion. However, when there are no acidic ingredients in the dough, the taste of baking soda will be noticeable in the baked goods. To avoid ruining the impression of the pie, baking soda must be properly neutralized. Besides citric acid and lemon juice, 9% vinegar can also do the trick. For satisfactory results, use 7 drops of vinegar for every teaspoon of baking soda.
Popular Recipes
Baked goods can be made with or without the addition of baking soda or baking powder. The first example includes baking soda, while the second does not.
“Quick” Pie
For the dough: 200 g of flour, 2 eggs, 150 g of yogurt or sour cream, 100 g of grated cheese, 150 g of mayonnaise, ½ teaspoon of salt, ¼ teaspoon of baking soda, ½ teaspoon of ground nutmeg.
For the filling: 2 eggs, 50 g of grated cheese, a bunch of green onions or ramps, 2 tablespoons of butter.
For the topping: 2 tablespoons each of grated cheese and sesame seeds.
Mix the flour with the yogurt, mayonnaise, and baking soda. Beat in the eggs, add the cheese, nutmeg, and salt. Stir the mixture and pour half of the dough into a greased and floured mold.
For the filling, chop the hard-boiled eggs and sauté the onions or ramps in butter. Season with salt and mix with the grated cheese. Spread the filling and pour the remaining dough on top.
Bake the pie for half an hour in an oven preheated to 180 ºC. At the end of baking, sprinkle it with sesame seeds and grated cheese, leaving the pie in the oven to melt the cheese.
Apple Charlotte
Ingredients: 150 g of flour, 150 g of sugar, 4 eggs, 2 apples, 1 slice of lemon (for sprinkling on the apples), butter or oil (for greasing the mold).
Wash the apples, dry them, cut them into pieces, and remove the cores (the skin can be left on if it’s not thick). Slice the apples thinly, sprinkle them with lemon juice to prevent browning, and place them in a separate bowl.
In another bowl, crack the eggs and beat them with a mixer until frothy, gradually adding the sugar. Then, sift in the flour and mix from top to bottom until the dough fully absorbs it.
Grease the baking dish with oil and dust it with flour. Pour half of the dough into the bottom of the dish, then layer the apple slices on top. Pour the remaining dough over the apples.
Bake the charlotte for forty minutes in an oven at 180°C. Do not open the oven door during baking to prevent the charlotte from collapsing. You can tell the pie is done by its light brown crust on top and the absence of raw dough on a toothpick when pierced.
…Currently, those who oppose food substitutes prefer homemade products over ready-made ones, turning to the wisdom of older generations who were well-versed in this area. After all, baking and cooking are respected crafts that require knowledge and proper preparation.