A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I mentioned at some point, probably towards the beginning of last week, that I’m working at coming to sourdough from “the other direction.”

I’ve been working with a “no knead” technique of keeping dough retarding in the fridge, and letting the initial rise in the oven take responsibility for it’s final rising action.  It’s been working very well in general.

But I’m really unhappy with the crumb.  The crust is delightful. The crumb is just too tight for my liking. It’s fine. Nothing normal people would complain about. But I need more.

So I’ve been experimenting a little bit with final rising, oven temperature and such and I’m just not getting far.  A couple things seem to be working a little, but not enough that I can say what they are.

However.

The flavor of the bread I’m coming out with is improving markedly with every single loaf. I’m really quite surprised.

The general procedure that leads to this almost looks accidental, but that it’s exactly what I’m driving for.

Take a double batch.  Mix it (just mix it. Don’t worry about kneading it.) Let it rise in a bowl for a while and then put it in the fridge.  Wait a couple/few days.  The longer the better up to at least a week, though I assume you could get away with more.

Take the bowl out, and split the dough in half.  Bake half of it as described elsewhere.

The other half goes in a mixing bowl in which you put another single-batch of ingredients, thereby replenishing the dough.

Then repeat the same way you started. (let it rise, back in fridge, etc.)

That all is well documented. No rocket surgery there.

So then what’s all this crap about sourdough?

A sourdough bread is a bread made with “naturally occurring” rather than commercial yeast.  If you mix flour and water together and let it sit, it will start getting bubbles after a couple days.  Split it and replenish it every day and soon you’ll have sourdough starter.  Where’d the yeast come from?  Ah… therein lies the magic.

Then you use a portion of that starter in your bread recipe, and don’t add any yeast.

I’ve never really been able to make that work.  The proportions and procedures have always been just a tad elusive.  I wondered to myself, I wondered… “Self?  What if you just made the whole damn thing sourdough from the get go?”  I just couldn’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work.

So in addition to the procedure I described above, I’ve been making one additional modification.

With every iteration I’ve dropped the yeast I’ve added by one gram.  So a 60-3-3 with 420g flour ends up with 13 grams of yeast.  I’m now down to 9.

I believe that what this is doing is transitioning to naturally occurring yeast, rather than having the dough start over from scratch every time.  Though it is possible that once I started with commercial yeast, that it’s simply the same strain from thereon out. I don’t know that much about the biology of yeast.

But what is undoubtedly happening is the flavor of this dough is maturing and strengthening.  It doesn’t taste like a sourdough by a long shot and indeed I think it will be a couple weeks beyond the point where I’ve completed weaning it off of commercial yeast before it does.  But there’s a flavor there that just can’t be achieved in a single baking cycle.

It’s really quite something.

Now I just have to figure out how to get an open crumb.  I’m thinking I’ve got some more playing around to do with the oven temperature, baking surfaces, hydration levels and protein content of the flour I’m using.  I’m very happy with everything else about my bread so far.

If you’ve been following along my bread baking posts you’ll be interested to see this.

Below is a picture of two (well, one and a half *urp*) loaves of bread. I want you to look at them for a bit.

So what do we have here? The one on the right is a notably dark, relatively flat loaf, without much to say in the way of character. You can see the scoring expansion going across it. Generally the crust is pretty, but nothing to write home about. The rise is low and it’s not particularly interesting as a whole.

Now, what about the other one? It’s nearly exploded out of it’s scoring (which was done in a cross at the top and a few more short scores around the side as well) like something from Aliens. In fact it looks an awful lot like an Irish Soda Bread. There’s a lot of interesting variation in color and texture. It’s light and rose high.

So… why bother showing this odd couple together?

Because my chillins, they are the exact same loaf of bread. There’s nothing in them but flour, water, yeast and salt (65-3-3 for those paying attention.) The proportions are precisely equal, they were both baked in a 450 degree oven for about 45 minutes with a roasting pan containing 6-7 cups of water, on a non-stick cookie sheet.

Well that’s all well and good. But what about the inside?

So WHAT THE CRAP!?!

This is the difference a subtle tweak in baking process can make.

Both of these loaves are from a rotating batch of retarding dough in the “artisan bread in 5 minutes a day” theme (though with a tweaked procedure.)

The crappy looking (but perfectly fine eating, aside from being awfully dense) loaf I let come all the way up to room temperature before baking. The one on the left (the fluffy goodness) I did not.

In fact the rough (correct) procedure (once you have dough in the fridge and all) is:

1. Take the dough out of the fridge
2. form it on a well-floured cookie sheet
3. dust the top heavily with flour
4. set a timer for 20 minutes (do NOT cover the dough or put it in an unusually warm place, as you would for normal bread rising.)
5. when the timer goes off, start preheating the oven to 450.
6. pour a bunch of water in a roasting pan in the bottom of the oven (I generally use 6 or so cups of water.)
7. set a timer for 20 MORE minutes.
8. When the timer goes off, score the dough (razor blade is best.)
9. Put it in the oven.
10. set a timer for 45 minutes
11. at the end of that time, take it out and put it on a cooling rack
12. LET IT COOL ALL THE WAY DOWN TO ROOM TEMPERATURE!
13. Feast

The difference. The ONLY difference between those two loaves of bread is this:

Step 4 I let go for 40 minutes, and in a traditional “bread rising warmth” environment (read: 85-90 degrees.)

That’s how sensitive this can be.

So why did that happen?

Here’s my hypothesis: 65-3-3 is a little wetter than the 60-3-3 I’m usually aiming for.  This means it’s tough to get it to rise “up” and instead it just sorta spills out.  Combine that with the fact that the dough has a dry ’skin’ on the outside, resisting it’s impulse to expand (with this method, expansion from yeast activity is mostly done in the oven.) My guess is that those few extra minutes allowed it to soften as it got up to room temperature and it rose by spreading (since it couldn’t lift.)  And, by the time it go to the oven, it just didn’t have enough rise left in it.

I could be wrong. But that all makes sense to me.  I keep repeatably tight watch on my procedure and ingredients.

This has been a perfect object lesson for me in the importance of keeping track of everything you do.  If I didn’t remember (read: if I hadn’t written down) that I had let Sunday’s loaf go the extra time (it was an intentional experiment) I’d have NO idea what happened and would be frustrated beyond all reason.

Success doesn’t mean shit if it’s accidental.

But making what might be the best unenriched loaf of bread I’ve ever produced?  Yeah. I busted my ass for that.

Delicious.

Here’s what came out of the oven today. It was a simple 65-3-3, half of a double batch mixed yesterday and retarded in the fridge:

As a part of my experimentation what I’ve decided to do is keep a double-batch in the fridge at all times. Then, when I take half out to bake, I mix in another single-batch to the remainder and put it back.

For the first few iterations (which I expect will be a couple/few days apart each) I don’t expect any difference in flavor at all. But it’s going to start to creep in there.

My thought is that I may then be able to wean out the commercial yeast, leaving a pure sourdough in it’s place. But we’ll see.

What a pain in the ass. Bread baking is without a doubt the only thing I’ve ever done and lapsed from that was not “like riding a bicycle.” I had a broken oven in Brooklyn for the last two years leading up to my moving to Ulster County this April.

I didn’t bake over the summer because, well… it was hot and I wasn’t particularly interested.

Finally as the silly season approached we realized it was time for me to get on the stick. So I banged out a couple loaves and… they were awful. Positively abysmal.

No problem. Must be some simple tweak on my part. I’ll just…

crap.

I had failure after failure after failure until I finally decided to roll up my sleeves, forget I knew anything, and start from scratch. It took somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds of flour and a month to get myself even close to where I was before. But finally I can make a reasonable loaf of bread again.

I’m not back to where I was even. But I have the baseline down.

And boy, lemme tell ya, I learnded me a couple things.

10 years of baking notes were totally useless in this process. All the formulae for different loaves of bread, temperature of the oven and time inside, ingredient lists down to the gram… useless.

If you don’t have the “hand art” down, nothing else matters. Not one other thing. You can’t cheat your way out of knowing how dough is supposed to look, feel and behave. There’s nothing I can really write here that will tell you “how hollow” a loaf is supposed to sound when you thump the bottom to determine whether or not it’s time to come out (other than “if you’re not sure, it’s not done.”)

I’ve baked no less than 20 loaves of bread in the last three weeks, all (but for the most recent few) with exactly the same recipe, and only the last 5 came out as reasonable bread. (That recipe is a simple 60-3-3 with King Arthur Bread Flour, Fleischman’s “active dry” yeast, plain morton salt (fancy salt is a steaming bunch of bullshit) and poland spring water.)

I really do wish I could describe what I’ve done differently. I do. Baking a basic loaf of bread is something everyone should be able to do. It’s one of the most wonderfully satisfying activities there is. But I can’t.

I did experiment with the overnight retardation method as a way of removing some of the up front work, and had some success with that. This involves mixing the dough the night before, letting it rise (or not. I’ve had equal success both ways), then putting it in the fridge overnight. It lasts for days before you have to bake it (getting better all the time.)

When you finally decide to bake it (or some of it) you pull it out, form it, coat it with flour, and let it come up to room temperature for a half hour before popping it in the oven (it’s VERY important to score the top, as it will be pretty dry and won’t rise much until it gets in the oven.) Then, tada! Bread.

Frankly I think you miss out on the joy of kneading bread that way, but if it makes the difference between baking and not baking, well… there’s only one choice to make.

So now I’m basically back to baseline. The next legs of learning are going to be getting my sourdough chops and starting to build back up to more interesting ingredient combinations, though I’ll certainly focus more on the former than the latter. The idea that you can take one of the four ingredients OUT of the bread and make it substantially MORE interesting and rich appeals to my sense of minimalism in baking and other hand-art pursuits.

So, start by mixing 1 to 1 flour and water. every day, half it, then re-add more to bring it back up to volume. In a few days it’ll start to get bubbly. A few days after that it should be rising like it was pumped full of yeast. Hopefully by then I’ll have something interesting to post about sourdough.

o/

…is something I’m not going to post.

Sorry Cigar Asylum dude ;)

This was going to be the follow up to last night’s post. But (ok, well technically it is, but… oh nevermind, keep reading.)

I got home tonight at about 9:30 and was not about to spend 4-5 hours screwing around with dough.
So I’ve opted for another tactic.  I’ve added the rest of the ingredients as I mentioned yesterday, but instead of letting it rise normally I’ve put the bowl in the fridge.

Doing a retarded overnight rise was going to be my next run through (and it may be yet. That’s worth doing in isolation. The difference is noteworthy.) But fatigue and an 11 hour work day with almost six additional hours of commuting has gotten the better of me.

But tomorrow I’m working from home, so I’ll be able to have some fun with it.

I asked myself that question, as I try to every day.  Usually the answer is “DAMMIT!” as I get up and do something crazy in the kitchen or down in the wood/machine shop.

The kitchen aid is going now with a basic bread dough.  For some reason baking bread isn’t like riding a bike.  I’ve lost it almost entirely and I’m here to tell ya, I used to be pretty damn good.

So going back to basics I measured by weight and came up with:

420g All purpose flour (king arthur, which has the approximate protein content of other brand’s bread flours.)

252g Water (tap.  We’ll see how that goes. I suspect the water in this place is hard enough that it interferes with the baking process.  This in part tests that.)

13g Yeast

13g Salt

That’s it.  The only four things you need for bread (and if you’re making a sourdough you can legitimately say “you didn’t add any yeast” as I do.

I added the water cold and it’s 4:59 now.  We’ll see what happens.  It will probably take quite a while to rise.

Experienced bakers will recognize this as the one loaf 60-3-3 formula.

I have to go set that to rise as I can hear the kitchen aid starting to complain about the strength of that dough.

… couple hours later …

Ok, that rose nicely in a hot water bath.  I pulled it out of the bowl (came quite nicely) and folded it two ways before putting it on a greased pan.

For a final pre-bake rise I took a large bowl and filled it with hot water, then placed the pan on top of that, turned a bowl upside down on top of the dough, then put a towel over THAT. (makes more sense than it reads.)

Left it there for a half hour, preheated the oven to 375 and in it goes.

…

Ok, because of the residual water on the bottom of the pan (from the steam of the water bath) the pan popped in to shape when it got hot enough, causing the final burst rise to collapse somewhat.  NOT a big deal, it was a little more dense than I like.

I pulled it out after 45 minutes or so (lost track of time) and it ‘thumped’ very hollow.  I let it cool completely (the toughest part of bread baking, keeping your greedy little hands off of bread that’s still hot.  Seriously, let it cool to room temperature if you care about the result.  It matters quite a bit.

Finally bit in to it at about 10:00.  It’s amazing how creamy it tastes, for an unenriched bread.  Definitely a solid success.  Time to stop using volume measurements again.  This was almost too easy.

Next will probably be the same thing as 2 part assembly with a preferment.

Peel a potato

cut it up so it’s somewhere between “cubed” and “shredded”.

Boil it for a half hour or so.

drain it, keep the water!

mash it to death.

Measure out somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup of potato.

Add that to 2 cups of sourdough starter

Add 1 1/2 cups of the potato water (cooled to something reasonable, add water to make the volume if needed.)

Add 3 cups of flour (King Arthur Bread.)

Mix & Knead

Let it sit and rise (Sourdoughs seem to take far longer to start rising than commercial yeast breads. Still experimenting.)

Punch it down, split it (this is a lot of bread) and form it up.  (I’ll probably do a simple boule and a 5×9 just to test them out.

Start up oven to … oh I dunno, about 425 while that rises.

Bake for … well, until done.  We’ll see.

UPDATE: That was remarkably wet. I added probably another cup and half of flour and half a teaspoon of salt. This may end up making 3 loaves.
add 1.5 tsp of salt.

UPDATE: Meh. Took my eye off the ball. Didn’t come out very well. Still learning my way around the second rise with my starter.

Ok, I’ve just been informed that there are people out there who actually read this drivel and used to do so for the baking.

Here’s the deal.

Oven’s expensively out of order, so I’m stuck with my Cuisinart bread machine. Delightful as bread machines go but it’s bloody cheating.

A few days ago I tried my BeerBatterBread recipe in the thing and it really didn’t work so well. It under mixed (I restarted the cycle to give it a thorough going over) and it didn’t rise very well. It’s a chemically leavened bread, not a biologically leavened one. Now, there are settings for that on the machine but either they don’t work well or I have to tailor the amount of baking powder in the recipe for bread machine use.

Eyeballing it next to the recipes they gave me yielded no meaningful clue.

The result did actually taste pretty good. Though it did bake a bit too long. This cooked all instead of almost all of the alcohol out, which is a shame. There’s a slight sharpness to it when properly made that I now understand is incomplete evaporation of the alcohol in the Guinness.

The original BeerBatterBread recipe is a slight modification of the one found in the most awesome Kuro5hin post of all time. (I figure it’s ok to post the same link twice seeing as how I hadn’t posted it in 5 or so years.)

I’ll do some more experimenting and see what I come up with.

Unfortunately my current economic situation rather perfectly precludes me from doing any reasonable baking.

This started as a comment on I Think Therefore I Blog, but I got a little windy so I cut it short over there.

As an almost “long time” baker (does 7 years count?) I finally succumbed to the pressure to buy a bread machine. It’s always seemed like cheating to me.

But I’ve got to say the results are absolutely stellar. I use it for a couple things:

• Bread to be ready when I get up in the morning (I try to keep this to a minimum.) Perhaps it’s a sign of getting old but I’d sure rather be woken up by the smell of bread than… well, nevermind.

• Testing ingredient combinations. This is awesome. If I have a “I wonder what would happen if I threw THAT in to a loaf” thought (which only happens a few times a day while sitting at my desk trading) I just set it up and let it go. If I like the result out of the machine THEN I do the real bread crafting work.

Got a loaf going now.  It’s just too rimey out not to have fresh bread.

Haven’t posted a bread recipe in a dog’s age.  I made this last weekend when in Virginia and it was a rather impressive hit:

For the dough:

You’ll also need:

Topping:

You can go a few ways with this. What’s worked for me is the following:

As you can see, it’s actually a very simple bread. Because the focus of this is primarily on the topping and crust, you have some latitude in how much attention you want to pay to the bread proper. This is something I pull out as a crowd pleaser when I don’t have my kitchen, bowls, scales, measuring stuff and ingredients handy (my kitchen doesn’t exactly travel well.)

1. So as for technique you can really just combine everything, mix and knead, then set to rise for about an hour and a half. It should be close to doubled if not more.
2. Pan the dough into two well-oiled 8×8 “brownie pans.” I’m a big fan of pyrex for this. However, this past weekend I used a large piece of stoneware that was quite nice. Unfortunately I don’t quite know what the dimensions were. Let it rise in this form for a bit over an hour.
3. Preheat the oven to 375
4. Carefully dimple the dough with your fingers. You should push down a little more than half way with your finger tips. This isn’t the most precise of operations. At the end the dough should have a grid of dimples over the whole thing.
5. Pour 1/3 to 1/2 Cup of olive oil over the dough. What you’re looking for here is for an awful lot of it to slide down the sides into the bottom of the pan, with a bunch pooling in the little dimples you just added to the surface.
6. Add the Kosher/Sea Salt and the Rosemary. But do NOT top the loaves with cheese. That comes later.
7. Into the oven (at 375) for a half-hour.
8. Pull both loaves out and then sprinkle the top with cheese. I’m frequently surprised at how much cheese can actually be added without overpowering this, so don’t worry. (If you put the cheese on before they go in the oven then the cheese will burn before the bread is actually done and you’ll end up with an unavoidable mess. Different cheeses behave differently, but doing things this way is pretty safe.)
9. Put them back in the oven for the last 10-15 minutes. You’ll have to eyeball it. You’re looking for the toothpick test plus a couple minutes.
10. Take it out and let it cool a bit before cutting in to it. It’s not a baguette so I’m not going to suggest you wait until it’s completely cooled. But give it a minute.

The addition of the Olive Oil is quite nice as it essentially deep-fries the crust. This is why it’s important you don’t try to do this on a simple cookie sheet or (heaven forbid) a silpat.

It looks like a lot of steps, but there’s really not so much that can go wrong. It’s a nice crowd pleaser.

I’d also encourage experimentation with toppings.

Of course if you’re being persnickety you can doll up the process a bunch and you’ll no doubt get a great enhancement. So things like proofing the yeast and setting up a preferment so you can get a second or third rise out of it is strictly optional.

Some time ago there was a great post over on Kuro5hin titled How to make Bread. Anyway, among the comments was a recipe for beer-batter bread. Yesterday I whipped it together (or a subtle variant) and it was AWESOME! It was easy as could be, took next to no time, and the result was (and still is) delightful.

Here’s my version, which is a subtle deviation from the recipe given.

• 3 cups unbleached all-purpose.
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 bottle fairly dark beer. (I used a 12 ounce bottle of dark St. Pauli Girl
• 1/4 stick of butter

Then…

1. Mix dry ingredients.
2. melt butter
3. Make sure oven is preheated to 375 (ish)
4. add beer and quickly mix as little as reasonable (it’ll be REALLY lumpy, but everything will be at least wet).
5. dump it into a 5″x9″, spread it out a bit.
6. brush butter over top, dump the rest in the pan.

The recipe said bake for 35-40 minutes but I found that (even with an over thermometer) a full hour was almost enough.

The important trick is to mix quickly, but not to over mix. You’ll get this really lumpy concoction that’ll be just fine. You are NOT looking for the kind of thorough ingredient distribution you want in yeast breads, you’re looking for liquid coverage of the dry ingredients. The chemical reaction that’s going to give you your crumb (the beer and the baking powder) starts as soon as those two ingredients touch. You want as much of that reaction to happen in the oven as possible, so it’s vital to get it in there quickly.

This will give you a very hearty sweet heavy bread, with a lingering taste of beer (which, even as someone who finds beer a fundamentally foul substance, I found quite pleasant). The quality of the crust is really quite amazing. It’s very crunchy, but you won’t hurt your teeth on it. Quite delicious.

If you make this, or a variant of it. PLEASE do two things:

1. go link to the original author (at kuro5hin, not me) and give him credit for the post.
2. let me know how it turns out and if you changed it, what you did. I’d love to try variations of this