Crusty bread - what is your secret?

[demnan]

My brother makes the most wonderful crusty bread. I'm trying his recipe (with just instant yeast from the grocery store it may not be as good as his, he uses professional quality) Thought I'd post his recipe and observations and see what you good bakers have to say:

Mark's Refrigerator Bread
(makes 2 bagettes or one large "country style" loaf)

1/2 tsp professional quality "instant" yeast (if you don't have that proof 3/4 tsp yeast in a 1/4 cup warm water)
1 1/2 cups cold water
3 cups all purpose flour (plus additional needed in mixing and kneeding)
1 tsp salt

Mix the above ingredients together. Dough will be sticky. Gradually add additional flour until dough works together but is still rather moist. Mix or kneed throughly to work gluten. Place in a bowl coated with

2 tbls Extra Virgin Olive oil

turn dough over to coat throughly with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and place in refrigerator for two to three days.

Remove from refrigerator - roll out and form loaf or loaves. Dust a cookie sheet with cornmeal. Pinch together bread loaf seams and baste with egg white to seal seams. Slash top and use egg white and yolk wash to cover top of bread. Top with seeds (sesame, poppy, caraway) of your choice.

Bake in a 450 degree oven for 25 minutes or so (less for bagettes, more for country style loaf).

I'm in the refrigerator stage now. My dough was very sticky and I found that was ok because I mixed it in the Kitchen Aid (my brother doesn't have a Kitchen Aid).

So please weigh in on your wonderful bread recipes. My main goal is to make a bread with a wonderful texture and a nice crusty crust. I make sandwich style loaf bread just fine, but not crusty old world bread like my brother makes.

[politicat]

1. I throw some ice cubes in the bottom of the oven.

Creates some steam, which crisps the crust. You can also open the oven and spray in water with a spray bottle, but that lowers the oven temp. a few ice cubes doesn't.

Generally, I use the small, 3 ounce Gladware round containers for ice; I freeze a dozen every night. 6 of those work great.

A salt-water wash instead of an egg wash gives an interesting flavor.

My recipe does not require 3 days of rising; mine is an adaptation of a medieval Hungarian (and other Eastern European countries) recipe and is about as non-specific as a loaf of bread can be.

Start with 1 c water and a 1/2 c SD starter or 1 T yeast proofed in 1/2 c soured milk.

Add a mixture to taste of whole wheat, barley, oat and rye flour (usually 2 wheat, 1.5 barley and .5 oat or rye in this house, the latter depending on who will be eating it, as DH hates rye in all forms) to at least 4 cups, until dough is "right" (the kitchenaid is useless with this recipe because this is the mystical "feel") , 1 Tb salt and 2 T oil (linseed and/or butter or lard is technically correct, olive is not. I tend to use either ghee, butter or canola, depending on what I have at the time.)

I let it rest usually overnight, but not more than that. Medieval bakers would have started the dough around Nones (3 or so in the afternoon) and baked it early in the morning, as soon as the ovens could be stoked back up to baking temps; baking was usually started around dawn in the late summer through to Lent and an hour or so after dawn from Lent to late summer. (This has to do with the fact that from late summer to Lent, there was enough food to eat three or four times a day, but as the supplies ran low, starting around Lent, fasting became a necessity until the next harvest.)

The loaf is shaped (it does well as a cottage loaf, but really shines if braided and salt-washed.) and placed on a baking stone to simulate the brick/mud beehive ovens I don't have space to build. Ice goes in the bottom of the oven and the bread bakes for 45 minutes (or until the probe thermometer reads 160.) It then must cool for a minimum of 1 hour.

[NMDemDist2]

2. do a search in here, we had a great thread on this last winter/spring

look for H2S and housewolf's threads

[demnan]

3. My bread turned out great

it was the best artisan style bread I've ever made. Easy too! I'm making more this weekend for a baby shower I'm going to.

I'm going to use a bit more flour when I make it this time. It should be more "kneadable". Also I didn't note that you should let it rise for about an hour out of the refrigerator before baking. (Actually Mark said it would rise in the oven after you put it in, and it did.) This time I'm going to put in a small amount of whole wheat flour to give the bread a bit more fiber and flavor.