Itterating

My absence here indicates one of two things. I've 1) lost steam and stopped baking, or 2) been so caught up in it that posting is more of a distraction. The latter is actually the case. Once I have more of a method and someone to photo/video the process, posting will go much more smoothly. Here are some of the things I have been working on figuring out: 
1) refreshing my sourdough - what % of water works best? I've decided on a 70% water to flour for my starter. This makes it much easier to incorporate into the dough since I don't have a mixer. Another starter quandary was how often to refresh. It seems that refrigeration is the best option here. Refresh, put in cooler, take out 6-12 hours prior to using for a dough.
2) using my sourdough starter to start other starters. Lots of starts, no stops there apparently. I've tried this with rye, wheat, and teff. Teff, as stated in the last post, is by far my favorite, but the other two offer their own unique flavors and personalities. I've gotten some positive feedback for my wheat starter, but it did not do well rising the dough. The best thing I've found to fix this is to start the wheat starter with a teff one. duh.
3) refrigeration of doughs. I've been playing around with bulk fermentation in the cooler vs. dividing and shaping loafs before putting the dough in the fridge. The second option seems to be the best, though the first option works - especially if it has a teff-based starter. It was beneficial if I was short on time, say, mixing a batch to close to bed-time. With bulk fermentation, I mixed the dough, let it rise for an hour and a half, folded it, and stuck it in the cooler. If I waited to divide the dough before refrigerating, it would have cost me an additional two hours of sleep. But dividing the loafs first is best because all you have to do is take them out of the fridge and let them finish proofing for a few hours - there's not really any additional work involved. Plus, you can leave them in the cooler for up to two days if the temp is at or below 45 degrees.
4) mixing methods - I've finally settled upon a tweaked version of the bertinet method (see video from earlier post). Now I'm trying to figure out the biggest batch size I can do using this method. I'm up to a six pound batch now, and I think I'll be able to do a ten to twelve pound batch at maximum. This would allow me to produce eight loaves at a time! And give me a decent upper body workout.
5) steam methods - I think for now I've settled on dumping about 6oz of water in the oven, 3oz on each side wall. I really should get a spray bottle. I imagine the current way is not very good for the oven floor.
6) there are a few other odds and ends that I have incorporated into my bread production that have helped efficiency, but I'll get to those once I have another post up depicting the creation of bread.
7) future considerations... I'm about to experiment with freezing my dough. I'll divide it first and put the loafs in molds before plastic wrapping them, or using some other way of making them air-tight. This way I could potentially increase my production quite substantially, but without increasing the amount of hands-on time spent. 
Anyway, this has been in part an update, but mostly just an excuse to put off running in rather warm weather. So before it gets any hotter, adieu.

St. Elmo Sourdough with Teff Starter

I've just discovered something about teff flour that, to me, is pretty amazing. Teff is a grain best known for its use in Ethiopian dishes, most notably the flat bread injera. I started experimenting with teff because I loved the flavor of injera the first time I had Ethiopian food - a very rich, sour flavor with intriguing hints of yogurt. I've used it as a starter a few times, but only noticed this morning that it has a rising capability seemingly akin to yeast. I wish I had taken a few pictures yesterday when I began my teff starter (1:1 flour water). I put about an ounce of my sour starter in the teff mixture at 8:30AM, and after I had incorporated the flour, water, and starter, the contents took up maybe an inch and a half of the container. By 12:00PM the starter had tripled in size filling at least six inches of the container, which isn't too uncommon for even a normal sour, but still very good action. By about 9:00PM that evening, I mixed my dough using 6 ounces of this teff starter (which smelled almost exactly like yogurt at this point) and 8 ounces of my sour starter. The formula was for a rye starter sourdough, but I substituted the teff starter for the rye. The dough was predominantly bread flour, but had a small amount of rye flour in it as well. I let the dough autolyse for about 20min after roughly mixing it together, and then kneaded it for 15min until I had decent gluten formation. I put the dough in a covered bowl and let it rise for an hour. When I checked it to give it a fold, the dough had doubled in size! I folded the dough, and put it back in the bowl for another hour. It doubled again! I let it sit for a final hour before dividing it and it still doubled. I divided and pre-shaped the dough and let it rest for about 15min before shaping and putting into loaf pans. I then covered these with plastic and placed them in the cooler at about 1:00AM, the loafs sitting a good inch below the top of their molds. I woke up today at 8:00AM and took the molds out of the cooler to find that the loafs had risen to the tops of their molds. This is with no yeast at all. I let them warm up at room temp. until 10:30AM, and the loafs were a good half inch above the tops of their molds. I've not seen this kind of action in traditional yeastless sourdough breads, so I was pretty excited.

                                                     This is my sourdough starter

I used about an ounce in the teff/water mixture

This is the resulting teff starter

                                         A view after I used most of it. Smelled just like yogurt.

Look at these guys! No yeast!

 

And the side view better illustrates the rise. Maybe even more than a half inch.

This bread also has one of the richest, most intricate sour flavors I have tasted. I am definitely going to explore the possibilities of teff further!

Who Kneads a Mixer?

And now for something completely different! (Bear with me, I'll probably shift gears like this often) Here are a few great clips portraying the original (and better, though less practical) method for mixing. The second video makes me want to build my own wooden trough and wear a white tunic.

Who needs a mixer? Not you. Just a little more time and exertion. Believe it or not, the dough comes out much better, and the bread is much more satisfying when you eat it. At some point I'll get a video up of my own method. The top video shows the Bertinet method, which is for doughs of higher hydrations. I don't know what method the second video shows - I just thought it was pretty cool. For most of the doughs I've been doing lately I haven't needed the gluten formation the guy in the first video is going for (he wants a very stretchy, fluffy dough). I usually mix the ingredients together roughly and let them autolyse for about 20 minutes. The ingredients all settle together and save me some work. After the autolyse, I use a combo of fold/stretch/roll. Anyway, I suppose my next post should provide a tangible example of a practical application for hand mixing. Perhaps with the beer bread formula?

Spent Baguette: The process

 There have been a few compliments of the spent grain baguettes, so I will show how it went here. I used a formula from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking that she got from The Acme Bread Company. I don't feel that sharing the formula here would be proper, but others haven't had such scruples, as you can see here. I've tweaked the recipe a bit, obviously with the spent grain, but also instead of making the old dough I just used some of my sour starter in combo with the poolish.

Yeast and water mixture. A number of formulas call for this step, but I've found it largely unnecessary.

Here I've roughly mixed the flour, salt, and yeasted water mixture. I let it autolyse for about 30 min.

This is my poolish after about 12 hours.

A look from above - nice and bubbly

Adding the poolish to the autolyse. I added about 4oz of sour starter at this point too.

Here is a frozen chunk of spent grain a few hours before I made the dough.

I soaked the grain for about an hour so that it wouldn't sop up all the hydration in the dough.

Grain after soaking.

Poolish, sour, and grain all mixed in. As you can probably see it's rather soupy.

After kneading for about 10 min. 

After proofing and turning thrice at 20 minute intervals, I divided the dough into 12oz pieces. 

They enjoyed each other's company. 

Shaped into baguettes and covered with plastic wrap so as to keep them from drying out. 

Final rest before baking. 

Trayed up. Unfortunately I broke my baking stone a while back. 

They can sense that the end is near. 

And the final product. Not as much color as I would have liked, but not terrible for a home-bake. 

These are excellent with a sharp cheese and, of course, beer. Since making these I've found two formulas I like better for the beer bread idea. When I finally get one I like, I'll stop fixating on the whole beer bread thing and move on to something else.

Spent Baguettes

The spent grain baguettes were a minor success, though I was not impressed by their flavor. This was largely due to the bland formula - I am currently working on a poolish-levain hybrid dough that I put in the cooler overnight. If the flavor here is more developed, I'm going to try the spent grain baguette again, but mix the portion of grain into the poolish when I start it. Hopefully this will draw the grains' flavor out even more than simply mixing it into the dough. I am also going to use hops-infused water for half the dough's hydration and an ale for the other half. This should solve the blandness problem. For another level of complexity, I am going to eventually try a teff poolish or sourdough. I think it's bitter-sweetness will complement the beer flavors well. If I like the taste of my hybrid french bread, I will put the formula here, and when I get a beer baguette that I am satisfied with I will put a formula for it here as well.

Pan biére

I am currently in the midst of making some french baguettes into which I will be mixing some spent grain I obtained from an awesome neighbor who brews his own beer! I will post the formula if it comes out well. If it doesn't, I'll keep trying until it does.

Levain

Levain has been the key to baking bread for thousands of years. As you can probably tell by the name, "levain" is related to "leavening," which means adding a yeast culture to your dough so it will rise. Clearly mankind didn't always have tidy little dried yeast packets that could rise bread in less than an hour. Levain is how we used to get our yeast, and even though it is very simple, it takes a long time to develop a culture of yeast. That's why, if you're familiar with your Bible stories, God told the Hebrews to make unleavened bread at passover - so they wouldn't have to wait forever to eat and leave!

Instead of continuing on with levain's insipid background, let's get down to actually making the stuff.

What you will need

1 part         flour

1/2 part      water

nonreactive container

How to do it

As stated earlier, this is easy - it just takes some patience. 

1. The first and most important thing is to use filtered water. Either buy some from the store, use a water brita (I'm not entirely sure the brita works), or boil your water and let it cool. The reason for this is to get rid of some chlorine and fluoride that will discourage or prohibit any bacteria formation (the yeast culture) from developing.

2. The second most importnat thing is to use small amounts of flour and water. You may want to begin by using just two tablespoons of flour and one tablespoon of water - you are only trying to develop a culture at this point so you can go for volume later. So here, just use two tablespoons of flour and one of water.

This has almost doubled in only three hours

3. Mix these ingredients in your nonreactive container (one with a lid, or you can use plastic wrap to cover) until it is a smooth mixture with no lumps of dry flour. Then put the lid or plastic wrap on.

Recently refreshed levain

4. Hurry up and wait. You will now let this sit for about three days, so if you are forgetful like me, you may want to label the container with the date that you first mixed your levain. At the end of the third day, and this is the part that explains why you only want to use a small amount of flour, toss out half or your mixture. If you have a compost heap, great! Add it on. If not, trash. After you do this, add another two tablespoons of flour and one of water (make sure this is still filtered or bottled water).

Levain in the freezer

5. Repeat this process about five times (about 15-21 days). Depending on where you live, you may start developing a culture faster. What you are doing is giving a developing yeast culture fresh food so it can grow bigger and stronger. By the end of this time you should at least see some bubbles on the surface of your levain culture (this is carbon dioxide). Probably you will also notice that the culture is growing about 1/4 to 1/3 its size after you've refreshed it. Once it has doubled in size, you will want to start refreshing it every day, otherwise the culture will run out of food and will start to die on you. It will probably take at least 21 days for your culture to get to this point. Once your levain is doubling in size every day, it is almost ready to use in a batch of bread.

6. Once you have tenderly grown your levain to the ripe old age of a month, take a glass of water and scoop a spoonful of the levain into it. If the levain floats, this means it's generating enough carbon dioxide to rise a loaf of bread. If it's not quite there, let it strengthen for a few more feedings and repeat the test.

Frozen levain

7. Now you can use your levain in some dough! More on recipes later, but for now if you don't plan on using this levain right away, scoop it into a tupperware container, put a lid on it, and shove it in the freezer. While you will not be able to take it out of the freezer and use it immediately, you still have a culture you can refresh - it will only take a few feedings for it to     double in size.

Here is the poolish video:

Well, I am bad at this. Not only did I get so caught up in making bread that I forgot to post, I also made an entirely different recipe. So... I will go ahead with the French bread recipe, though I will have no pictures at this point.

What you will need:

Pre-Ferment: Poolish

5oz Flour

5oz H2O

.05oz yeast

Okay, so if you don't have a kitchen scale (which you will need if you want to make consistently great bread) the ratio for poolish is 1:1 water:flour. Yeast is 1% of of the flour or water weight. For example, if you have a pound of flour, you would use a pound of water and .1 pound yeast. Easy, right?

Mix the flour, water and yeast in a nonreactive container (glass or plastic, something with a lid is the best) with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until the mixture is smooth and there are no clumps left. Then put the lid on the container, or use plastic wrap and secure with a rubber band. Let the poolish sit at room temperature for 8-12 hours (I know, it's a long time). If you're not sure when you'll use the poolish, you can put it in the fridge, which should double its life - just remove it about an hour before you plan on using it so it can warm up to room temp. That's the poolish. I will be working on getting a simple video up that shows this process, but it's a pretty simple way to cultivate flavor and develop strength for all sorts of bread formulas.

The Formula:

36oz (8 1/4 cups) Bread or All Purpose Flour

26oz (3 3/8 cups) Water (it's best to use brita water or boiled water that has been cooled in the fridge over night - this helps reduce stuff like chlorine and fluoride that will retard some important reactions in the dough) 

.8oz (3 1/2 tsp) Salt

.12oz (1tsp) Yeast

10 oz (3/4 - 1 cup) Poolish

How to Do It:

Mixing/Folding:

You don't need a mixer! You will be your own mixer though, and for me this provides more satisfaction. Get a bowl that will easily hold all the ingredients combined. I like to put all my liquids in first, this way nothing sticks to the bottom of the bowl, and everything gets mixed in. After you have your H2O and your poolish in, add the flour, yeast, and salt (yes, I use oxford commas) and start mixing. I've found a rubber spatula to be suitable to the task. What you will do is scrape down the sides of the bowl and scoop the contents at the bottom onto the top. Eventually as the dough gains strength, this will become more of a fold than a scoop. With each scrape, it's helpful to rotate the bowl slightly, so that you scrape down the entire bowl. Do this technique until the ingredients are matted together in a sort of rough mix. This is mix one, you will do it another five times. Set a timer for 1/2 hour. When the bell tolls, do this again until you've done it a total of six times (you'll scrape down the sides and fold over between 20-30 times per mix). The dough should be stronger each time, and by the final mix it will probably be somewhat difficult to do. This is a good thing! It means that the gluten in the dough is developing nicely, making it strong enough to rise and bake.

Dividing:

After the sixth mix, give another half hour and then flour a surface and scrape the dough onto it. I like to divide this recipe into two two pound loafs, but you can divide into smaller pieces if you like. Once you have divided the dough up into the sizes you like, you will take each piece and gently round. Do this by holding the dough in your hands and folding the sides under while rotating the piece of dough with each fold. If it's starting to look like the top of a mushroom, you are doing it right. Once you've gently rounded each into ball shapes, let them sit covered for 15-20 minutes more (put a towel over them, or spray them with water for best results).

Shaping:

Here I will describe how to shape a loaf. Again, a video will be up in a matter of time to show this process. Pat each round of dough into a roughly rectangular shape. Widthwise, or from side to side, take each end and fold them into the center - don't fold the rectangle completely in half, but enough so that about 1/4 of each side is overlapped. Now from top to bottom, take the top of the rectangle with the tips of your fingers and roll it about 1/6 of the way down towards the bottom (which should be towards you). After rolling 1/6 push the edge of the rolled section in slightly so it seals. You are folding the dough into a more or less log shape. Keep folding about 1/6 each time until you have a cylinder/oblong shape. Once rolled all the way, with the heel of your hand, seal the seam of the rolled loaf shut.

If you have bread molds, excellent! Spray them with non-stick spray, and put your loafs in. If not, do you have a pizza stone? This is pretty good too - put it in the oven and let it heat up with it. If you only have a baking sheet, that's find too - either spray it with non-stick spray, or put some cornmeal on it and then place your loafs on the sheet. Once you have done one of these things, you will have to wait about another hour, so set a timer and let the shaped dough rise one final time. With about 10 minutes left, turn your oven on and set it at 460F. If you want to be fancy, put a small baking sheet on the lower oven rack, I'll explain in a minute.

Baking:

If you have your loafs in molds or on a sheet pan, use a serrated knife to give three equal cuts diagonally across the bread (this gives a weak point to the loaf and keeps it from bursting in odd places). If you're using a stone, put some cornmeal on it, and then gently place your loafs on the stone and then cut (this will be tricky, and you'll have to develop your own method for doing it well). If you are being fancy, put your loafs in the oven and then quickly dump a cup of water on that baking sheet you put on the lower shelf, then quickly close the oven. This will provide some steam and help the dough's crust as it bakes.

Set a timer for about 26 minutes. If you have a thermometer, the optimal temperature for a loaf is 185F, so if you are in that ballpark when the time is up, your bread is finished! If you have your loafs in molds, allow them to sit for about 10 minutes before taking them out and placing them on a wire rack. If you have no rack, improvise: you do not want a large surface of the loaf to be in contact with another surface because it will cause condensation and make that part of the loaf gummy.

Lastly:

Enjoy! If it doesn't work, let me know. If you don't like the poolish step, you can skip it, but I'd advise against it. 

Next time: how to develop a levain culture.

Until then, "When God gives hard bread, he gives sharp teeth."

After a day and night of celebrating Mexico's improbable victory in Puebla (Cinco de Mayo), I was up a little later than usual and was pleasantly surprised to see that the liquid levain I have been cultivating had doubled in size. More on this later, I will be using it in the French bread I mentioned last post. And now that I think about it, the irony of making French bread on Cinco de Mayo would have been wonderful. Maybe next year.

So, when I get home from work tonight, I will check my levain again, explain here what levain is, and then hopefully go about making this French bread I keep talking about abstractly. I am not trying to build suspense, just revealing how disorganized I am.

Today I had the opportunity to bake at home for a change, and since I bake for half my living I thought it would be nice to make something easy; so I made some straight French dough which yielded two two pound loafs (which should last a week in my house). This is a great bread to mention in an introductory baking post because you don't have to use any fancy baking equipment or techniques; all you need are everyday kitchen tools and your essential bread ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast.

I will get into the specifics of this recipe in my next post, but I wanted to get something up just to get this blog started. This straight French dough offers a bread anyone can make in a relatively short amount of time, so if some of the following posts about preferments and over-night rising seem too involved and/or time consuming, it will be a good fallback. Until next time, "Better bread with water than cake with trouble" - Russian Proverb