Advices and Recipes to Bake the Bread

To bake you can use the plate of the oven covered with a piece of oven paper, even if you do not use the classic pizza ovens, you can also use the trays, which must be low and of heavy material, the iron and copper ones are very good. To prevent pizzas and calzones from having the bottom wet and not enough cooked, it is sufficient to put some aluminum paper between the plates and the bottom of the preparation: this material enhances the effect of the heat and allow pizzas and calzones being cooked uniformly.

To make a good bread, you do not always need all pastry equipments. For example, to test the baking level of the bread, you just have to put in the center a wooden skewer: if the dough is well-cooked, it should come out dry.

To test the baking level of calzones, put a wooden skewer in the center, but keep in mind that it will never come out perfectly dry because the components of the filling (ricotta, tomatoes, mozzarella) maintain, even in the end, a certain percentage of wet.
Do not extend the cooking beyond due time, otherwise the crust of the bread becomes too hard.

The temperature of the environment in which the dough is worked may affect the leavening: if the kitchen is cold, it does not swell enough. A trick to avoid this is to heat the oven to 200° and shut it down after waiting 15-20 min for it to be warmed, introduce the bowl with the dough and then keeping the oven closed.

A very easy and certainly very good recipe to cook is white bread.
You have to crumble the yeast in a bowl and dissolve it with a little warm milk, then add 50 gr of flour, the malt (or honey) and sugar. Now add the remaining flour, salt, butter pieces previously softened to room temperature and the rest of the milk; you need to mix all very well and then transfer the dough on the work surface, working it for about 10 minutes until it becomes hard, elastic and no longer sticky.
Now let’s form a ball and after having greased it with oil, put it again in the bowl and cover it with a moistened cloth. Now it has to leaven in a warm place with no draughts for about two hours, this will make it double in volume.
After this time, work the dough again for a few minutes, give it a cylindrical shape and move it into the mold previously buttered. Brush the surface with the egg yolk and let it rise again for another hour.
Now bake it again at 180 degrees for about 35 minutes, then take it out of the mold and continue cooking for another 10 minutes, then serve it cold.

For those particularly attentive to their health, we need to recall that some weeks ago the all the major bread industrial associations, representing the handmade baking, and the Italian industries association Industrial Alimentary Products, representing the industrial baking, signed with the Deputy Minister for Health Ferruccio Fazia an agreement intended to reduce the salt content in bread, against hypertension.

fiera della panificazione
Consorzio Sipan