bread matters

My newly-developed totally immature habit. Shaving my bread.

Oh OK, from the beginning. I'm thinking about not baking bread anymore, because I'm not good at controlling how much of it I eat when I have a beautiful sourdough loaf in front of me. But I thought another solution would be to bake bread that I'm not crazy about, even if it's pretty good. That would be rye bread. Besides, I had all this rye flour at home, and white whole wheat flour (which I still don't understand). I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, so I thought I'd bake with them and see what happens.

I used these two flours with some bread flour (lost my notes, don't remember proportions - but you wouldn't really want to duplicate this bread anyway), sourdough starter, and a soaker consisting of steel-cut oats and flax seeds. Of course, topped with sesame seeds before baking.

Looks pretty good, eh? The taste is nothing extraordinary, which I expected, and the mouthfeel is not great. But the crust is beautiful.

Here comes the really immature part. I found myself nibbling at the crust, 'cause toasted sesame seeds are always awesome. And I couldn't stop. But I didn't want to eat the bread, 'cause that wasn't as great. So I kept picking at the crust. It was not an efficient method. I took my bread knife and sliced off the crust very thinly all around. Now I had nothing but goodness. The loaf ended up looking like this:

It's completely acceptable if you toast it. Plus this way, I don't eat a lot of bread. I think it's a great solution, but I don't know if I can continue to bake bread which at best is OK. We'll see.

developing good breakfast habits

I kicked the cereal/granola habit some years ago. I realized that I do not like sweet stuff in the morning. Lately, the routine has been toast with cream cheese. But regular cream cheese has too much fat, and low-fat cream cheese is too salty for me. Besides, I prefer something less processed.

Now that I make yogurt routinely, I decided to go for strained yogurt, which is marketed in the US as Greek yogurt, and is known in the eastern Mediterranean by its Arabic name labne. It's the easiest thing to make. I have a strainer with a very fine mesh, so I don't even use anything extra like cheesecloth or paper filters. Dump the yogurt in the strainer, place it over a bowl, and let it sit. I end up with this creamy and wonderfully thick yogurt, which accompanies my toast in the mornings. Hope I can keep it up.

If I add tomatoes with a bit of olive oil to this breakfast, it would be close to perfect for me. But it's probably not going to happen because 1) it's not safe to put a sharp knife in my hand when I first wake up, and 2) it's hard to get really good tomatoes and if I get one of those usual sour, tasteless, woody ones, I'd get really pissed off and that would not be a good way to start my day.

I have to say that breakfasts have become extra special because of home-made breads. I've stopped blogging about them because they have been turning out consistently good. The big turning point was starting to use a large stainless steel bowl to cover the loaf during the first ten minutes of baking (I wrote about it here).

Pretty, eh?

breads of the last ten days

I'm catching up on the breads I baked in the last ten days. First, I baked a couple of quick whole wheat breads  - half whole wheat flour, half bread flour. I'd been wondering whether I was overproofing my loaves, so I wanted to experiment with shorter fermentations. I divided the dough in half, and baked the first loaf after about 1.5 hours of proofing. As you can see, I had a blow-out, indicating it had not proofed long enough. I will continue to go with my instincts, instead of the usual proofing time suggested in most formulas.

This loaf was inedible. Unbelievably dense crumb. Couldn't bring myself to take a picture.

The second loaf of the same batch of dough was retarded overnight after shaping. The result:

Much better. Not a whole lot of oven spring. Taste still boring. The sesame seeds on the crust were the best thing. I miss the complexity of seeded breads.

A few days later, I experimented with long retardation.

the soaker (200 g dry):

• farro (first time I'm using farro in anything)
• steelcut oats
• flax seeds (using much smaller amount than before)

Soaked in boiling water overnight, with a pinch of salt.

the dough:

• sourdough starter (200 g)
• whole wheat flour (400 g)
• bread flour (200 g)
• water (400 g +)
• soaker, drained
• roasted pumpkin seeds
• salt (15 g)

Mixed very briefly, without the salt and the pumpkin seeds.
Autolyse for 30 minutes.
Added the salt and the pumpkin seeds, and mixed for 4 minutes in the mixer.
Gave it 3 s&f's at 20 minute intervals.
Covered and put in the fridge for retardation overnight.

Next morning, divided the dough into two, shaped the loaves, put one back into the fridge. The other one proofed at room temperature and baked as usual. That loaf had a very disappointing texture, mealy like the rye loaf that turned out terrible, though perhaps not quite as bad. This puzzled me to no end, so I checked my formulas and saw that both this seeded whole wheat and the seeded rye had a relatively low proportion of bread flour. I'm thinking that the amount of seeds and grains require the strength that the bread flour provides. The slices were better when toasted, but still not good enough.

The second loaf sat in the fridge for 3 days, then baked after an hour at room temperature. Significantly better. This long retardation seems to have helped the mealiness quite a bit. Wish I knew enough to understand why.

At first, this loaf seemed too sour, expected because of the long proofing. But the next day, the acidity seemed perfect. Generally, very happy with this loaf, though I think increasing the ratio of bread flour will make it much better.

The farro didn't give the same chewiness as wheat berries. I'll switch to wheat berries as soon as I get some more.

seeded rye not a success

Sounds better than saying it's a huge failure. Which it was, as far as I'm concerned. Don't be taken in by the fact that it looks kind of OK.

I'd never made rye anything, so I decided to try it. I used a formula relatively close to my whole wheat formula. The dough looked doomed all the way, and I had no idea how to correct it. Here's the breakdown:

the soaker (total 125 g before soaking):

• wheat berries (very small amount - all I had left)
• flax seeds
• steel cut oats

Forgot to add salt, but it doesn't seem to have mattered. I think. Covered with boiling water and let sit overnight.

the dough:

• rye flour (325 g)
• all purpose flour (75 g - don't ask me why)
• bread flour (150 g)
• sourdough starter (220 g)
• the soaker
• water (300 g, plus whatever came with the strained soaker)
• salt (11 g)

As usual, mixed ingredients without the salt, autolysed for 30 minutes, added the salt and mixed about 5 minutes in the stand mixer hoping to develop gluten. It looked like it wasn't happening. I did the Bertinet stretch/slap/fold. It cleared the table nicely, but not much elasticity developing at all.

I let the dough ferment for 45 minutes. It looked like nothing had happened. I did a few strech-and-folds, and half the time, the dough broke off instead of stretching. Not good news. I let it ferment another 45 minutes. Same thing. It just didn't look like it was developing any gluten at all. I let it ferment yet another 45 minutes, and then gave up. The dough was extremely sticky though it's a stiffer dough than my usual. And it didn't seem to have any strength, and it did not stretch. Bleh.

I floured the table and formed it into a ball and let it rest for 10 minutes. Time to shape. I was careful to go for surface tension this time, and I think I got it right, and finally the dough is starting to look like a loaf. Let it proof close to an hour, scored it, and baked it.

One good thing: The scoring was easy and worked beaurifully. I think it's because the dough was stiffer than usual.

I got oven spring. Yeay! I'm pretty sure it was the surface tension. Got a beautiful grigne too, and started to feel hopeful. I let the loaf cool overnight and cut into it this morning.

Calling it moist would be a euphemism. Moist to the point of goopy glompiness. You can't tell from the way it looks. It almost looks decent. True, the crumb is not open, but I didn't expect big holes with rye.

But if you press it even gently between your fingers, it turns into doughy mush. What's worse is the mouthfeel. For reasons I can't fathom, as soon as you put it in your mouth, it feels mealy, like you're eating porridge or something. I confess that a couple of times (stop reading here if you're easily disgusted) I took it out of my mouth to stare at it to figure it out, but I couldn't.

So what went wrong? Fermentation and/or proofing too short? Too long? Too much soaker interfering with gluten development, which is already not very active in rye? Didn't bake long enough? I have no idea.

On top of it all, the taste is nothing special. I'm not going to try and improve my rye bread, because frankly, it doesn't seem worth it to me. So who wants the rest of my rye flour?

seedy whole wheat redux

A miserably dark, rainy day. A perfect day to bake bread. The last time I baked this, the two loaves were smallish and were gone too quickly. Today, I'm making a bigger batch.

the soaker (total 250 g before soaking):

• wheat berries  - beautiful sensuous chewiness
• flax seeds - can't taste them, can't see them, but healthy
• buckwheat groats - adds no taste or texture that I can detect, finishing up my stock
• small pinch of salt

This time, I poured boiling water on the mixture and let it sit overnight. I wanted to see whether it would turn out significantly different from soaking in cold water. It did. It was much better.

the sourdough starter:
         I maintain my starter with all purpose flour, because I figure it's the most neutral. For this whole wheat loaf,  I built it up two days ago with whole wheat flour. When I tasted, it was a bit on the sour side and I wondered if I should have fed it closer to baking time. However, the sourness turned out just right, a remote whiff.

the dough:

• sourdough starter (400 g)
• whole wheat flour (625 g)
• bread flour (475 g)
• water (555 g, but I added more later)
• sunflower seeds (99 g)
• the soaker
• salt (20 g)

If these amounts read as though there was careful, precise calculation of ingredients, there wasn't. Either that's how much I had at hand (e.g. the sunflower seeds, the whole wheat flour), or my hand slipped (the water). I'm not getting obsessive with precise baker's percentages because (1) it's stressful, and (2) it doesn't let you respond to what's actually in front of you. And I don't have to replicate breads precisely, which is a major advantage of being an amateur baker.

I mixed everything except the salt on the lowest speed of the mixer. The dough was clearly much stiffer than what I usually shoot for, so I added more water. Don't know how much. Just added until it seemed right.

I covered the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes (autolyse).

I added the salt and mixed the dough for 5 minutes on the second from lowest speed.

I covered it to start the bulk fermentation. One stretch-and-fold after 45 minutes, a second one after another 45 minutes. Then 30 more minutes of fermentation.

I pinched off a bit to bake into a flat bread. Just experimenting. I divided the rest of the dough into two, pre-shaped them into balls, and let them rest for 15 minutes. Then I put one in a round basket, and the other one onto the couche, and let them proof for 1 hour.

I filled an iron skillet with lava rocks and put it on the lower shelf of the oven, and preheated the oven to 500 F. I was determined to get more steam this time. Didn't help.

While I was waiting for the loaves to rise, I made my flat bread. I stretched it with my hands and cooked it in a skillet on top of the stove baked it on the baking stone (brain-fingers not coordinated). Puffed up and cooked very quickly. A success!

That makes me very happy. Will repeat it often.

At the end of an hour, the loaves hadn't risen a whole lot, but once again, I was afraid of over-proofing. I first baked the loaf that had proofed on the couche. I transferred it onto the peel, sprayed the top with water,  covered it with sesame seeds, and slipped it onto the baking stone. Put some ice cubes in the iron skillet. When I closed the oven door, I saw the steam coming out in sheets. I'm not sure any steam stayed in the oven. Arrgh.

Turned the oven down to 450 F and baked for 15 minutes. Turned it down to 425 F, and baked another 15 minutes. This was a bigger loaf than my usual, so I decided to give it another 5 minutes and then I let it stay in the oven w/ the door ajar for 10 minutes. Next, onto the cooling rack.

In the meantime, I had placed the second loaf into a plastic bag and transferred it to the fridge, because it would have to wait while the first was baking and then while the oven heated up to 500 F again. I think I'm going to adjust my baking so that I can bake two smaller loaves at the same time. This is too much juggling.

I inverted the second loaf from the basket onto the peel, sprayed it with water, and covered with sesame seeds. Continued to bake in the usual manner.

Results: Very little oven spring. Crumb on the dense side. The breads were very moist, maybe too moist. Both loaves spread sideways when I put them on the peel. I think I may not have developed enough surface tension, so I'll focus on that next time. But I don't even know if a whole grain loaf that's so packed with seeds can rise very high.

This picture shows very uneven rising, but parts of the loaf were better:

I thought that the denseness might have been a result of overproofing. But the second loaf proofed longer, and the crumb turned out better and more even:

So maybe the first loaf was underproofed. Sometimes this feels like a crapshoot.

People might find the moistness of the crumb objectionable, but I actually found it very pleasant eating.  So yes, the crumb was way too moist, but that felt like an advantage after toasting. And the ratio of the soaker to the dough was absolutely perfect. This made for a chewiness that was orgasmic. And I don't use that word lightly. Not only was the texture great, but the taste was wonderfully rich and earthy. I couldn't stop eating it. This turned out to be my most favourite bread so far.

the burnt loaf

I finished the first loaf quickly, and had to start on the loaf that I had burned.

 I was also curious about the crumb, given that it had proofed much longer than the first loaf and I had screwed up the baking temeprature. It looked quite good, except for the fact that it was, well, burnt. I cut off the top crust before I tasted it. It was more sour than the first one, obviously because it had proofed longer, but it was not an overwhelming sourness. It was pleasant, actually. The crumb was better too - more and bigger holes. But the difference was not dramatic.

I think next time, both the bulk fermentation and the proofing will be longer. We'll see how it goes.

whole wheat with grains and seeds

I want my daily bread to be a healthy whole grain, and I like seeds and grains in it for texture. What's available here commercially is disappointing. First, almost all of them have sugar/honey/syrup added. I'm fiercely opposed to this, not just on principled grounds (which I am), but also because I can taste it immediately. I've been able to find a relatively satisfactory bread but you have to hunt around town for it, and it ain't cheap. So I decided to bake my own basic bread, which is what got me started baking bread again.

Now that I've baked a number of good all purpose flour sourdough breads to get my feet wet, it was time to get down to business.

 ingredients:

• sourdough starter (220 g)
• bread flour (300 g)
• whole wheat flour (300 g)
• water (300 g)
• roasted sunflower seeds (70 g)
• soaker (total 170 g before soaking)
• flax seed ('cause they're good for you)
• buckwheat groats ('cause I hadn't even seen them before and I was curious)
• wheat berries ('cause I love their texture)
• salt (10 g)

the night before: 
I feed my sourdough starter as usual, with all purpose flour.
I add a small pinch of salt to the soakers, cover it with water, and let it sit for about 14 hours.

mixing:
I strain the soaker, in all its gel-like gloopiness from the flax seeds.
I combine in the bowl of my stand mixer everything except the salt, and mix at lowest speed for about 2-3 minutes. That soaker doesn't want to incorporate.
I let it rest for 30 minutes.
I add the salt and mix for about 4 minutes on the second-from-lowest speed.

This dough may seem to be 50% hydration, but it isn't when you take into account the water that comes with the soaker. I debated whether I should add a bit more water, but it looked OK to me after the mixing:

bulk fermentation:
I let the dough rise for 45 minutes, and then do that magical stretch-and-fold thing. (I still have trouble grasping the fact that this is better than kneading.)
I let it rise for another 45 minutes.
After 90 minutes, I'm not sure that it has risen enough so I give it another fold and let it rise for 30 minutes more.

proofing:
I pre-shape the dough into two balls and let them rest for 15 minutes.
I still haven't gotten myself a new set of bannetons, so I decide to proof them on the couche.
I shape one ball into a boule and the other roughly into a batard shape, and place them on the well-floured couche.
I give it an hour. They rise minimally, so I give it another 40 minutes.
At that point, the fear of too much sourness strikes and I decide to bake them.

baking:
OK, now this is why I need to get me some bannetons. I'm not the world's most coordinated person anyway, but the feat of getting the loafs from the couche to the peel is daunting. When there is more than one loaf on the couche, I usually have trouble rolling the loaf straight from the couche onto the peel. So I wonder about what I can use as a flipping board, get lazy, and decide to roll it onto my arm, and from there to the peel. Arrgh. It's amazing how laziness can trump good sense. I wanted to apologize to my loaf, which now was a bit deflated and a bit warped.

I slash the top of the loaf (in vain, it turns out), and spray the top with water.
I slip the loaf onto the baker's stone in the oven preheated to 500 F, turn it down to 450 F, bake for 15 minutes, turn it down once more to 425 F, and bake another 15 minutes.

There was very little oven spring and no grigne. This loaf didn't look sexy. I put it on the cooling rack and turned to the second loaf.

I decided to bake the two loaves separately, because I knew getting the second loaf on the peel would take additional juggling while the first loaf was in the oven, and I didn't want to disturb the first loaf while it was trying to rise (ha!).

I reheat the oven to 500 F. This means that the second loaf proofed almost 40 minutes longer. Curious to see what that will do.

I slip the second loaf into the oven. When I'm back in the kitchen to turn the oven down to 425 F after the first 15 minutes, I realize that I forgot to turn it down to 450 F when I first put it in. So it had 15 minutes at 500 F. Jeeeez, how could I?!! Well, of course I can, because I've burnt even soup.

I turn the oven down to 425 F. Then I think maybe it should go lower still, and I turn it down to 400. I give it 10 minutes, then I turn off the oven and let it sit for 5 minutes.

I'm heartbroken, because the top crust looks really burnt. I know some people think you can't overbake bread (Clavel, Silverton), but that's not my taste.

However, this loaf has much better oven spring than the first one. I mean, it actually has oven spring. Was it the extra proofing? Or the crazy baking temperature. I dunno.

the morning after:
Ooooh, anticipation. I decide to try the unburnt loaf, and it tastes really really good. I toast one slice for breakfast, it's magical. I'm so so happy.

I compare it side-by-side to my commercially baked multigrain, and no contest, mine wins hands down. But look at the crumb.

How come it looks so good even though there was no oven spring? It's moist, chewy, with a rich earthy taste, and barely sour. So the loaf that doesn't look promising on the outside turns out to be super on the inside.

One flaw in the concept. Although the wheat berries are beautifully chewy inside the crumb, the ones that ended up on the surface of the loaf are hard and sharp. Unpleasant. I have to figure out a way to avoid that. In the meantime, I'm focusing on finding a good way to shave the burnt top crust of the second loaf to feed to my dogs.

buckwheat sourdough

Thought I'd follow a formula this time and see how it goes. I went with Susan's sourdough from her inspiring blog, since people on Fresh Loaf have such high praise for it. Susan notes that it's an adaptation of Jeffrey Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough, in his book Bread: A Baker's Techniques and Recipes. The bread turned out interesting and surprising. And good.

Try as I might, though, I didn't/couldn't follow her directions exactly. First, I halved the ingredients:

450 g KAF all purpose flour

60 g buckwheat flour

300 g water

180 g sourdough starter

11 g salt

Susan's formula calls for rye flour, but I didn't have any. I'd gone to the store to get it, but once there, I was completely distracted by cherries, sea bass, etc. I had buckwheat flour at home, which I was planning on experimenting with, so that's what I substituted.

I mixed it all in the stand mixer for about a minute, maybe less. Then let it rest for 30 minutes. 

Added the salt and mixed for about 3 minutes. It didn't look like it needed more mixing; it was beautifully smooth and stretchy.

Then I was supposed to fold it after 50 minutes. I don't have a good sense of time (meaning I usually disregard it), and the timer doesn't always help (because I disregard that too, to the dogs' distress). I have a feeling it was more like 70 minutes before the first fold.

Now the folding schedule was off, so I did the second fold a bit earlier, in another 30 minutes.

Yet another 30 minutes, and the fermentation seemed to be enough.  I didn't want to let it go for the suggested 2.5 hours, because I'm trying to correct a recurrent mistake, over-fermentation.

At that point the dough looked different from any dough I worked with before. Incredibly stretchy, but not many holes and no big holes. It had definitely risen some, and you could also tell by how it felt when you touched it, but I started worrying about how subdued the holes were. Maybe my starter wasn't vigourous enough? I had been sure that it was - was I wrong? Or maybe the culprit was the buckwheat. Buckwheat has no gluten. I hadn't added any high-gluten flour to compensate. Was it going to work?

On the other hand, there were reasons to think everything was going fine. The stretchiness of the dough meant that there wasn't a gluten problem. And when you gently placed your palm on the dough, it felt right - good resistance, beautifully smooth, etc.

Not like I had options at this point. There was nothing to do except to go on.

I had thrown out my bannetons some years back and haven't replaced them. What do I use for proofing? The dough was very soft so I knew it was going to spread a lot. Bite the bullet, I thought, make it a big ciabatta. I gave it a couple of gentle folds and let it proof right on the peel. I really don't know how long it proofed, but I think it was about an hour, at most an hour and a half.

In the meantime, the oven had been preheated to 500 F, with the baking stone in it. I slid the loaf onto the stone, with a sigh of relief when it actually did slide off the peel. Turned the oven down to 450 F and baked for 15 minutes. Dying of curiousity, I opened the oven door and peeked in. Hey! It had risen beautifully! I turned the oven to 425 F, and baked another 15 minutes. Then turned the oven off and was going to let the bread sit there for 5 minutes, when my time handicap struck again and I left it there for half an hour. Way too long. The crust got too thick and too brown for my taste. 

I let it cool completely, and cut off a slice before I went to bed. Ugh. The buckwheat was overwhelmingly strong. Disappointed, I went to bed debating how to choose between love of experimentation and enjoying a predictably good result. 

Next morning (yesterday), I gave it another try. Surprise! It had mellowed beautifully and tasted great. The buckwheat taste was there, of course, but it was not overwhelming and it was not too 'strong' to have for breakfast before your mind and your body readjusted to life. And this morning, it was even better.

So it's true, bread develops better taste after a day or two. I guess I didn't want to believe it because it would mean that I couldn't tear off a piece right out of the oven. But really, isn't that one of the main reasons we bake bread? To get to it while it's warm? I refuse to give that up. The solution is to bake at least two loaves, one to attack right away and one to let rest for a day. Then we can have our bread and eat it too. (Groan! I know, but I couldn't resist it.)

I loved the consistency of this dough when I was working with it, and the end result, so this formula will be repeated. The sourness was just right, the crumb had great texture, and it was moist and chewy.

I prefer a bit less salt, so I'll reduce the amount next time. Also next time, I won't screw up the crust by overbaking.

so it's good for something

Catherine McEver's work is super interesting, including her embroideries on Wonder Bread.

where are they?

Sourdough whole wheat bread I baked two days ago. Still not following a recipe, but I'm getting wiser. 

I used almost all whole wheat flour, and the starter had been fed with whole wheat for the last couple of feedings. Added roasted sunflower seeds, roasted sesame seeds, and flax seeds. I thought I'd put in a ton, but they're not very present, are they? Can't taste them much either. Next time I'll put in twice as much. 

Lessons learned:

• remember to soak whole grains the night before, so you can add them too
• less starter - it's OK to waste, as long as you don't tell my mom
• vastly increase seed ratio
• buy your seeds elsewhere so they're fresher

it shouldn't have worked, but...

I was going to feed the pet but I'd run out of AP flour and went out to get some. Back at home, I saw that I'd bought the white whole wheat flour (KAF) by mistake. Didn't even know such a thing existed. Read up on it at the King Arthur web site, and they recommend using it for cookies, muffins, etc., but there's no mention of breads. Not good. I looked into it a bit more, and it's a low protein flour, which is why it wouldn't be good for bread. But I was curious, so I separated some of my sourdough starter and fed it with this flour. Fermenting seemed OK, but it didn't rise much. Not a surprise. I fed it a few times more, decided it was time to try to bake it into bread. I incorporated some bread flour into it and let it rest about 40 minutes. After the autolyse, it looked very wet. So I added some more bread flour, until it was a respectable soft dough consistency. Folded it twice at 45 min intervals, then put it in the fridge to develop overnight. Next day I divided it into two, formed smallish boules, and let them proof in baskets lined with kitchen towels. After a couple of hours they were pouffy, but hadn't risen much. It looked like further proofing was not going to help. (How do I know this? I have no idea.) My oven was already preheated to 500 F with the baking stone in place. I didn't want to risk placing the loaves directly on the peel, because they still seemed not sturdy enough. So I lined the peel with parchment paper before I up-ended them. Sure enough, in 5 seconds, they looked like ciabatta. Not very hopeful, I stuck them into the oven. There was almost no oven spring, but again, it's not surprising given the qualities of the flour. I let the loaves cool overnight and cut into them the next morning. Surprise! They were not bricks. In fact, they were quite light and hole-y. And they weren't too sour. They looked and tasted better than most store bought 'artisanal whole wheat'. Definitely edible. Not nearly good enough, but definitely edible.

I'm confused. Low gluten flour, therefore not much rising, but still pretty good crumb. Shouldn't it have been dense and heavy? What do I know.

i have a plan

And my plan is to leave the house for a couple of days. Go somewhere, anywhere. When I return, I expect my kitchen to be spotless and all signs of disaster gone. You know, the kitchen elves.

Here's my couche with most of the goo already scraped off. I'm hoping the rest will come off when drier.

Everything in the shape of a bowl, including stainless steel bowls, plastic containers, baskets, the plastic colander (used as a banneton, 'cause I'd thrown out all my bannetons some years ago), was put to use in desperation. Not that it helped. What you don't see is the floor, the pile of stuff in the sink, dough stuck to every surface.

Let's start at the beginning. I'd been distracted from making bread for a week. A week ago, when trying to snap out of my bread paralysis, I winged a sourdough loaf again. Basically, I was experimenting with techniques that I'd never used or heard of in my previous bread-baking life eons ago. One was making a stiffer dough than I used to, another was the 'stretch and fold' method instead of kneading, and yet another was proofing the bread in the refrigerator and taking it straight from the refrigerator to the hot oven. This is what resulted.

Not bad, but not terribly good either. Nice 'grigne'. Too sour for my taste, and not enough oven spring. But I love the non-violent stretch-and-fold method.

Then I took a week off and didn't even think about bread. Two days ago, it was time to go back. I took out my neglected starter and started to feed about half a cup of it as starter.

The rest, I thought I'd experiment with. Hubris. I started building up about a cup of it.

Then  I wondered what would happen if I did something to the rest without fussing too much. Added whole wheat flour to get it going, then divided that into two. By the evening, everything seemed to be bubbling up nicely. Put it all in the refrigerator and went to bed.

Yesterday morning I took everything out. I'm now looking at four containers with stuff in it and trying to remember what's what. The starter-to-be-revitalized was easy, it was the smallest amount. I fed it, and put it away.

The batch I was building up looked good. Decided to attempt a loaf with it. To keep things straight, let's call that one 'pathetic hope.' It was very wet, so I fed it with more bread flour than water or starter. Did I measure anything? Hell no. That would be so unadventurous. Then I started to stretch and fold it in the bowl it was in. Here's how it looked before the folds.

Here's how it looked after the second stretch-and-fold. Looks promising. See how much smoother?

Then I added salt, and folded it two more times with 45 minute intervals. Looks good, is rising well. It's beautifully stretchy, better than anything I achieved when kneading by hand.

OK, so now it's time for proofing. Clearly, the dough is too wet to shape into anything. I have two choices. Add flour and start again, or proof it in a container. The second seemed easier. I put my well-floured couche into a bowl, put the dough into it and waited. 'Cause bread pans are for sissies, right? I waited for it to rise.

It rose some, but not a whole lot. First sign that the future might not hold success. But it was springy, and I thought I'd continue.  In my previous life, my doughs were always on the soft side, and I proofed them on a flat surface, transferred to a peel, and put them in the oven. So this time, I thought I'd up-end the bowl onto the floured peel, remove the couche, stick the 'bread' into the oven.

Here's the start of the hilarious part. I turn the whole thing upside down on the peel, take off the bowl, and ooops! The dough starts to flow on the peel. Really, it can only be called 'flowing', not 'spreading.' I start to panic and try to be quick. I try to lift off the couche. I know I'm in trouble because the part of the couche that touched the bottom of the bowl looks very wet. Sure enough, half of the dough is stuck to it. I try to scrape it off. What am I thinking? No way. Now I'm panicking to the max. I look at the goop that's on the peel, and decide to scoop it into a bread tin. Why am I not giving up? 'Cause I'm stubborn and I'm thinking 'who knows..?' The oven is already preheated to 500F. I stick in the bread pan and wait.

After about 40 mins, I remove it. Looks like crap. For some reason, the center of the pan does rise a bit. The rest not much. I was too proud to take a picture, but I'll describe it for you. A brick. (I'm thinking the function of bread pans is to form bread into shape of bricks.) I peel off the crust. The crumb is wet and compact, with few holes. I dunno if this can be called crumb. It still looks and feels like dough, frozen in time. I taste the crust - unbelievably sour. I throw it all out. End of 'pathetic hope'.

But there's more hope. I still had the batch of starter that should have been thrown out. With half of it, I quickly tried sourdough pancakes. Way too sour. Inedible. That gets thrown out.

The second half, which shall be called 'stupid hope,' I decide to go for a loaf. I build it up some, then give it a number of folds, and it's not looking bad at all. You might ask at this point, dear reader, if the pancakes were inedibly sour why would I think this bread might end up tasting good? Well, it's called 'stupid hope,' isn't it? The truth is I didn't care. I was just curious.

And there's an important lesson here. What makes a good scientist does not a good baker make. A baker needs to be an applied scientist, not a research scientist.

When it comes to final proofing, I remember that I forgot to add salt. Ah jeez. Add salt and fold, it all gets deflated, and I continue with giving it extra folds. Eventually, it rises some. I turn it out on the table, and add a lot of flour when shaping it, because this dough is also very wet and I don't want to repeat the disaster with 'pathetic hope.' Going for a different kind of disaster.

It holds its shape. I want to proof it directly on the peel. One side of the peel is stuck with the mess from before, so I turn it over, put down parchment paper, put the dough on it, cover it, and wait. Not much happens. By now it's getting late, and I'm starting to lose patience. Reality takes over. I know nothing good's gonna come out of it. So I transfer it to the oven. When it comes out of the oven, I don't care too much any more. I wait for it to cool, and this is what it looks like.

It has the semblance of bread, but it's clear that it hasn't risen enough. And it's way too sour. Into the trash it goes. I go to bed wondering why I spent the whole day doing this.

There, is however, a plus. You can use the dough as a fly catcher. Potentially useful discovery.

I wake up this morning and I know that my mission today is to understand everything that went wrong. Actually, let me start with what went right. The stretch and fold. The gluten develops beautifully.

Now to the bad stuff.

Dough too wet: This happened because I didn't fold it on the table with my hands. If I had, I'd have realized immediately that it was too wet. So that's how I'm going to do it until I'm comfortable with the feel of it, and then go back to doing it in a bowl. 

Too sour: When feeding the starter, keep a smaller amount of of the old starter. Keep starter strong. Start baking when the starter is at its peak, or almost at its peak. When building it up for baking, use ratio 1:4:4. Keep bulk fermentation much shorter than I've been doing.

Not enough oven spring: Don't overproof.

Finally, even if you're not going to follow recipes, it really pays to listen to other bakers. There are so many great bread sites and personal blogs that it shouldn't be a problem. Here's a baker's blog that was very informative for me, where Susan gives us two excellent quotes:

For reckless adventuring: People who work in family planning have an aphorism: Hope is not a method. 

In defense of adventuring: “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” –Thomas Edison

I'm taking today off. I'm not even going to clean.

because my memory always fails me

First post on my food blog. It'll basically be my notebook about what goes on in my kitchen.

These days, I'm obsessed with baking bread again. After decades of not baking. Let's start with a video of one of the masters.  (Sorry about the Katie Couric ad in the beginning.)

Watch CBS News Videos Online

And here's an entry from Ann Mah's blog on the Poilâne bakery:
http://annmah.net/2009/04/23/behind-the-scenes-at-poilane-bakery/

My initial motivation was to bake a multigrain bread with lots of seeds, etc. That's the kind of bread I eat these days, for health reasons. But seriously, we knew it was an excuse, right?

In March 2010, before I went on a longish trip, I improvised a bread with acceptable results, though not great. It was a yeast bread with a rich mix of seeds and grains soaked overnight. Here is the result.



I'll return to seeded multigrains later, but at the moment, I'm focusing on getting sourdough right. I got my live starter from Breadtopia and it turned out to be very vigorous, even though I was too sick to get to it for a while. So, feed and dump and feed and dump and feed and dump. Yesterday, I declared my starter strong enough to start baking.

Bake? I went into my usual paralysis when I'm tackling something new. OK, so I'm not really new to bread baking, but it's been a while, and I used to wing it a lot back then, which meant uneven results. And I could never get a good loaf without boosting my sourdough with a bit of yeast. Did I say I was winging it? My excuse is that I'm sure no bread maker of my childhood in Istanbul ever measured anything. There's that little matter of experience, though, which I thought I could compensate for with an abundance of guts and experimentation. Yeah, I know, arrogance.

My paralysis was fed by endless combing through all my bread books, checking out all the bread blogs, reading about a thousand different approaches, and of course not knowing where to start. Until yesterday.