The Patient Path to Perfection: Why Small Adjustments Work.

I tweak recipes often, trying to get a better or healthier product for my family.

This morning I was driving my husband to the train to go into the city. He asked me what I had on my plan for the day. I immediately said I would be baking bread, as we'd been totally out of yeast bread for a couple of days, and I had used my morning two days ago to clean house for his homecoming, then grocery shopping in the morning yesterday. So I put off baking bread until today. 

Okay, so ramble, ramble, but that's how the convo went. He then asked if I would be making 100% whole wheat again. While away, he'd really missed my homemade bread. He said even though he had 100% whole wheat bread over the week, it just wasn't how he liked bread.

My reply was that I thought I'd scale back on the whole wheat flour just a bit, to the level of whole wheat from the previous baking, 1/2 cup white flour to the rest whole wheat for a 3-loaf batch.

Over the course of the last few months I'd been increasing the proportion of whole wheat to white flour in my bread recipe. I began at about 2/3 whole wheat to 1/3 white flour. Each week I would adjust the amount of white flour just a hair lower. In the last batch I had been down to 1/2 cup white, so I thought why not just go all whole wheat in this next batch. After all, how much difference can 1/2 cup of flour make? But it did make a difference, and we all noticed it. That batch dried out faster after baking.

This morning I used the 1/2 cup white flour version and was pleased again with the results. I don't use added gluten because, well that would cost a bit more and also my digestive issues. That 1/2 cup of white flour seemed to help strengthen the bonds developed in the dough. Sliding back up to this small amount of white flour instead of all whole wheat helped me produce a good batch of bread while meeting health goals.

This is how I go about changing the ways I do things. Sometimes it's a recipe that I want to improve.  Sometimes I want to see how short I can make my showers without being uncomfortable. And sometimes I want to see how many stops I can make while out running errands without exhausting myself going in and out of businesses. 

You could say that I'm trying to optimize how I do things. To do this, I make small incremental changes with each time I make a recipe or perform a task. At the point that I'm unsatisfied with the result, I slide back to the previous recipe, time allotted, or elements of a task.

This works especially well with recipes, as recipes use specific amounts and times of processing with each batch. I can also do this with time-related tasks, like shortening my showers, by using a timer. But there's still that subjective observation about how satisfied I am with a shorter shower, or how tired I feel running 4 errands while out instead of 3. A batch of bread can suffer from unfavorable conditions, like a cooler than normal house or moisture content in current batch of flour. But all in all, recipes seem to give me objectively quantifiable results, such as length of time until going stale.

If I were to make one large change in my bread recipe, we may find the result completely unsatisfactory and have to suffer through a bad batch of bread for a week. But by making small changes incrementally, we feel fairly confident that the result each time will be somewhere between okay enough and tolerable. I don't have to be a baking genius to figure out a better bread recipe. Incremental changes are safe mode for tweaking a recipe. It does take more time to tweak a recipe bit by bit over several months. But patience eventually pays off with a pleasing end result.

My bread is still not perfect. We would like a slightly lighter loaf while maintaining our new whole wheat flour to white flour ratio. I'll be working on other variables, such as the type and quantity of fat I use, or how much or little sugar and salt goes into the dough. I tackle one element at a time so I can know which change either had the affect I was after or resulted in something we didn't care for.

I started today's batch of bread around noon and worked on it through the afternoon. My husband walked through the door just as I was pulling the loaves out of the oven. The house smelled fantastically like baked goods. Not meaning to toot my own horn, but I think the aroma of freshly baked bread is a nice way to be welcomed back home at the end of a work day.