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Bread dough – The GialloZafferano Recipe


Podcast Recipe
Duration 4:00 – Steps 9
“How can you recognize good bread without tasting it? Not by the scent, not by the appearance, but by the sound of the crust: a symphony of crunches.” This is what Mademoiselle Tatou said in the Disney film Ratatouille and we imitated her in the Giallozafferano kitchen: we prepared a fragrant bread with a crunchy crust and a soft interior, with dense honeycomb. The preparation of bread dough is a timeless recipe, a magic that will take shape in your hands: water, flour and yeast to prepare a delicious loaf cooked in the home oven, with the necessary precautions to obtain a crunchy surface! One of the first testimonies of bread dates back to prehistory, when man realized that he could obtain a workable dough from the powder of crushed acorns mixed with water.
His wonder grew even more when he learned to cook this dough on hot stones, obtaining a harder but certainly tastier product: his first attempt at bread. Naturally, over time, the techniques for preparing bread dough have been refined, particularly in the more careful choice of ingredients. Curious to discover historical information on the evolution of bread making? You can find them in the curiosity box at the bottom of the recipe. In the meantime, you can prepare to get your hands dirty: with the basic bread dough, in fact, you can make a large quantity of preparations including pizzasfocaccias and savory pies as well as many varieties of breadsandwiches, loaves of bread and loaves with the addition of seeds or various condiments.
If you want to prepare bread with sourdough at home, discover our recipe!
If you prefer to simplify the preparation then try no-knead bread, an easy bread to make at home!
Bread dough
To make sure the bread is cooked, take it out of the oven and “knock” on the base with a closed fist. If the sound is dry and deep, it means it is cooked.
You can enrich your bread by adding olives, various seeds, dried tomatoes or other ingredients as you go 9.
Curiosity
The first to realize the importance of this miraculous mixture of water and flour were the Babylonians and the Egyptians, followed by the Greeks who added other ingredients to the basic dough, made of water and flour. But it was the Romans who made bread dough known and made it a popular recipe, even in the form of focaccia like the typical Umbrian torte al testo for example. On the contrary, in the Middle Ages, the preparation of bread and its consumption became a luxury reserved only for nobles and lords while the people had to be satisfied with a simple dough obtained from barley or rye. It was only in the Renaissance that bread once again became a popular food and, precisely in this period of great rebirth, the recipe was revisited, taking on those characteristics dear to us that it still maintains today. Renaissance bakers, in fact, introduced the use of innovative brewer’s yeast and high quality durum wheat flour. The great turning point in the world of bread-making, however, came in the 18th century thanks to the invention of the kneading machine and the growing production of artificial yeasts which made the preparation of bread simpler and quicker. Year after year, century after century, bread dough has maintained the same characteristics of the past and, as then, it is still one of the most used recipes today, perhaps also due to its versatility.