Hello Today we will show you how to make Italian rustic bread using regular all-purpose flour that we easily find at the supermarket. In one of the first videos of the channel, we made this same recipe using a stronger wheat flour (flour with higher protein content), which not everyone can easily find. For this recipe we will a Renata flour (Brazilian brand) which is a well-known flour and can be easily found in the south and southeast of Brazil.
We will show that it is possible to make good bread using standard supermarket flour, once their limitations are respected. Italian Rustic Bread with All-purpose Flour In a bowl we mix the flour and water. The first limitation of weaker flours is their ability to absorb water.
In this case we should use a smaller amount of water in relation to the amount of flour (by weight), what we call hydration. For this recipe, we will initially use 68% hydration, that is, 68% of the weight of the flour in water. At the end of the video we will show that for this specific flour, it is possible to increase that amount a little bit more.
Note that this 68% hydration is not universal for any AP flour that we find in supermarkets in Brazil. Some flours will absorb smaller amount of water than others. The only way to know how much water your flour in specific supports without losing the structure and become too soft to the point of not to be able to manipulate, is to test it.
Start with low hydration, something like 60% and increase it by increments of 2% in the next bakes and observe your results. Leave in the comment section which flours you use or have used and what hydration they suppported. This will help people who are starting making artisan breads.
Mix the water and flour well without kneading the dough. The idea here is just to hydrate all the flour. Cover and let it rest for 30 minutes.
This process is called autolyse and will make our dough more pliable for the next steps. A second limitation of AP flours is that the gluten present is usually weaker and for these cases a shorter autolysis is indicated. Cover and let it rest for 30 minutes.
We separate 20ml of the 68% water that we will use and set aside to dissolve the dry yeast that will be added later. Do not put the yeast straight into the dough because it will not incorporate well. We are using 1/8 teaspoon of dry yeast.
This is less than 1g. It's a pinch of yeast, you don't need a precision scale or be exact about that amount. It is an approximate amount.
We let it rest for 30 minutes (same time as autolyse). With wet hands to manipulate the dough, we can see that after autolysing the dough it is already much more elastic tha before, since the gluten formed with the addition of water in the flour. We now incorporate the dissolved yeast and we mix well.
I made little holes in the dough with the tips of fingers so that the yeast is evenly distributed over the entire dough surface. Mix well until all the liquid yeast is incorporated. This should take about 2 to 3 minutes.
The dough will get a little stickier due to adding more water. Cover and let it sit for 20 minutes. We see that the dough is even more elastic over time.
Let's put the salt now. Spread the dough again and distribute the salt on the surface of the dough. Wet your hands only as much as necessary to that the dough doesn't stick to your hands.
Do not incorporate too much water into your dough. Mix well for about 2 to 3 minutes. I usually already take this moment to make some folds in the dough to further develop the gluten.
In the end I like to create a tension on the surface of the dough before letting it rest, making this movement of pushing the edges underneath the dough. Avoid pushing it too hard so as not to tear the dough surface, but if you rip it, that's fine too. Cover and let it sit for another 20 minutes.
We will now do two series of folds. For every series I like to check the gluten development. As we mentioned before, the gluten present in AP flours is weaker, so do lighter folds in the dough, avoiding tearing the gluten net that we are forming.
Avoid, for example, using more aggressive techniques like lamination. My suggestion is to do light folds or “coil folds”, as we will do in the last series of folds. Cover and let it sit for 20 minutes.
In this last fold we made some “coil folds ”just to show that other option, you can still make folds if you prefer. Coil folds is a very gentle way of working with the dough, preserving the gluten net we've developed so far. If you notice that your gluten is not yet fully developed and the dough is not as smooth as in the video, do one or two more sets of folds with 20 minute rest.
Cover and let it ferment until the dough triples in volume. As a reference, we usually make this dough at night and let it ferment overnight, which gives about 12h of fermentation. My kitchen temperature was between 20 and 23C at night.
If where you live is hotter than that, the dough will take less time to ferment. In that case, you can use ways to reduce the temperature of the dough during fermentation. For example, use ice packs close to the dough.
This will prevent the dough from over-fermenting and losing its structure. Another option is to prepare the dough in the morning and monitor its growth during the day. I do not recommend fermenting it in the fridge, as the temperature of the refrigerator is 4C to 8C which is very low and the dough will take a long time to ferment.
After fermentation, the dough needs to be like this, with great volume and full of bubbles. Take the dough out of the bowl and shape it. Here we will make a traditional oval shape.
After forming a ball by pulling the edges of the dough to its center, Make movements of dragging the dough on the table to create tension on the surface of the dough. Place the dough on floured banneton if possible with rice flour. I recently started using rice flour and I found the result much better, since rice flour doesn’t let the dough stick on the baneton.
If you don't have rice flour, sprinkle wheat flour generously. If you don't have a banneton, use a deep bowl with a dish towel sprinkled with rice/wheat flour. Cover with plastic bag.
The function of the banneton or deep bowl is to keep the structure and shape of the bread, preventing it from spread. Here you have two options, let it ferment at room temperature for about 1 hour and bake it right away, or leave it in the fridge to ferment for another 4 hours until it doubles in volume. I prefer to put it in the fridge, because I think that the bread is firmer when putting in the pan and it's also a lot easier to score.
Avoid fermenting for much longer than this, because the dough can ferment too much (over-proof) and lose its structure and flatten when baking. The dough grew a lot after the cold fermentation. If you don't have this specific baking paper, sprinkle flour on the bottom of the preheated pan.
And place the bread directly in the pan. Remove the excess of rice flour and make cuts on the surface with a razor to facilitate the expansion of the bread inside the oven. Pan preheated for 30 minutes at 250C.
In an oven preheated at 250C for at least 30 minutes with the pan inside, bake the bread with the lid on for 20 minutes. Then remove the lid, lower the temperature to 220C and bake for another 20 minutes or until it reaches the desired color. The bread expanded a lot inside the oven.
And it got a beautiful caramel color. I baked in an electric oven, only with the bottom turned on, I never use the broiler. Let the bread cool completely for at least one hour before slicing.
A well-baked bread must have this hollow sound. The skin should be very crunchy and the crumb very soft. If it got heavy and a quite dense, probably the bread didn't ferment well or it was not baked correctly.
Since the hydration we used (68%) is not that high, we got a bread with smaller alveoli. Larger alveoli are usually obtained with higher hydration, that is, using more water in the dough. However, weak AP flours may not support a high hydration and the dough could get extremely soft and difficult to work with.
Bread generally tends to be flat and without volume. In that case, you will probably need to use stronger flours that support higher hydration. We also tested this same recipe and flour with 72% hydration, 4% higher than the 68% that we showed.
That was the result. The flour supported the higher hydration well and I particularly think the crumb is softer and moister. The alveoli were very similar to the 68% hydration version.
In terms of crumb texture, I liked it better of the 72% version. This flour may support hydration even higher, but we didn't get to test it. If you liked the content of this video, subscribe to our channel and activate the bell to receive notifications of upcoming videos.
Recipes in the video description. Thanks and see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.
