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Follow Truffle Nation Baking Academy to start your own bakery business

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Here’s what you need to know about menu engineering for your bakery

PoV: you’re learning how to become a next-gen chocolatier in Truffle Nation’s chocolate module

One formula that every professional baker needs to know

If you keep baking bread with a soft crust, take a look at the recipe before changing your oven settings.

You might be making the kind of bread that’s meant to stay soft. With milk, butter and sugar in the dough, you’ll get a more tender loaf, like pav or sandwich bread. You can bake it darker, but you won’t get the same crust as a lean loaf.

For that crisp crust, start with a recipe built around flour, water, yeast and salt.

Then pay attention to how you bake it.

A Dutch oven helps because you can trap steam around the dough during the first part of the bake. Preheat it as your recipe directs, load your dough and put the lid on. The steam keeps the surface flexible while the loaf expands.

Partway through baking, remove the lid. You need that uncovered time to let moisture escape and give the crust a chance to brown and crisp.

It’s tempting to pull the loaf out as soon as you see a little colour. Follow your recipe’s doneness cues and give it time to develop a deeper crust.

Once you’ve taken it out, let it cool on a wire rack without covering it. Wrapping a warm loaf traps moisture and softens the crust you’ve spent all that time making.

For your next bake, try a lean bread recipe and compare it with your usual milk bread. You’ll notice the difference from the first slice.

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