The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

pmccool's blog

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pmccool

I'm back from a week's vacation in the San Diego area with my wife, her brother, and his wife.  We did a lot of the touristy things, including the zoo, the Midway aircraft carrier tour, watching sunsets from the beach, whale watching, Balboa Park, museums, eating some fabulous Mexican food and seafood, horseback rides, and a vineyard tour/tasting.  Each of us came away with our own set of highlights from the trip but one of the best for me was spending a good chunk of this past Wednesday visiting and baking with Stan Ginsberg at his home.

Prior to leaving on the trip, I had contacted Stan about the possibility of meeting while we in San Diego, thinking that it would be pretty cool just to stop by his warehouse to say hello and chat a bit.  Stan proposed a better option in his reply: how would you like to spend some time baking together? I was happy to accept and, after he addressed his wife Sylvia's concerns about letting someone they'd never met in person into their home (she is a sensible lady), we agreed that I would drop in at 10-ish Wednesday morning for some baking.  And so I did.

Stan and Sylvia are both outgoing people and we were soon at ease with each other.  Stan had a couple of sponges bubbling for some rye breads that hadn't been in the test bakes for the new book he is writing.  I need to digress at this point to mention that the slate of 90 recipes that went out to the test bakers is not an exhaustive sampling of the rye bread world.  Stan continues find more breads from a broad range of sources.  It doesn't hurt that he is fluent in German and able to translate some of what he finds.  He also has a network of friends and acquaintances who can help translate bread formulae from other languages.  So, the three breads we baked Wednesday were possibilities that Stan is considering for inclusion in the book.  One, a filled roll made from a laminated dough, absolutely deserves a place in the book.  And I'd say that the other two are also worthy.  As a matter of fact, I'm still savoring the flavor of the grilled turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich that I had for lunch today made with one of the breads.

As we measured and mixed and shaped and baked, we talked.  We talked a lot; about everything from craft beers (another of Stan's passions), to how a decline in basic kitchen competence has made a generation of American home cooks fearful of failure, to Chinese cuisine.  We talked about NY Bakers and the trends that Stan is seeing in that business.  We talked about Norm Berg and his influence on ITJB.  We talked about the new book and finding a thematic thread to connect such varied breads made from the same grain.  We talked about the influence of climate and soil on culture and the influence of culture on history.  We talked about how breads, some ancient and some quite recent, spring from the continuing swirl of people moving to different places on the globe.  Stan made sure that we didn't dehydrate during the working and the visiting, sharing some of his favorite liquid bread from local craft breweries.  (Hint: if you find some Lost Abbey brews in your area, give them a try.)  

Somewhere around 2:00 in the afternoon, with most of the work done and bread cooling or about to come out of the oven, we cleared away the bread-making paraphernalia and Stan set up a lunch consisting of various cheeses and breads and crackers.  It was just the thing to cap a delightful visit and bake session.  The rest of my group came back for me around 3:00 and I regretfully said my goodbyes, leaving with bread in my hand, happy memories in my head, and a smile on my face.

And who wouldn't smile, after such gracious treatment by such an affable host?  That's Stan on the left and some of each of the breads we baked on the tray:

 

Many thanks, Stan, for such a pleasant visit.  

Paul

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pmccool

I received a new My Weigh KD-8000 scale to replace the Oxo scale that developed some form of digital psychosis recently.  More capacity and an even easier to read display make it a pleasure to use.  It's already received quite a workout just since Christmas.

There are also two new books that are competing for my attention.  One is Ken Forkish's Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast which has been much discussed here.  The other is Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food by Jeff Potter.  It's sort of but not exactly a lighter version of Shirley Corriher's CookWise, aimed at a younger, techier crowd.  Perhaps I've been acting more engineer-ish than usual lately?  I've gotten about a third of the way into it and am enjoying the author's observations at least as much as the technical information.

The best gift of all is a houseful of kids and grandkids, which is why this post is a short one.  

Paul

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pmccool

A couple of weekends ago, I was doing some test bakes to finalize recipes for a class that I will teach in December.

First up, Julekake, glossy with egg wash:

And the Julekake crumb:

And it tastes even better than it looks, what with the fruit and cardamom flavors.

And some Sweet Vanilla Challah, which I've posted about previously.  While not specifically a holiday bread, its turban shape and vanilla flavor make it a natural for any festive meal:

 

Paul

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pmccool

My second bake from last weekend had more to do with some fresh figs that I had found than it did with bread.  Although I grew up on a farm and had plenty of first hand experience with many kinds of fruit, figs weren't part of the local scene.  I don't recall seeing a fig outside of a Fig Newton cookie any time prior to my high school graduation.  When I did eventually encounter figs in their whole form, they were dried instead of fresh.  The farm, by the way, is located in northern lower Michigan, which explains the dearth of figs.  At a guess, I must have been in my 40s before I ever laid eyes, or hand, on a fresh fig.

Imagine my surprise and delight on finding a tray of fresh figs at a store recently!  (They aren't that common here in NE Kansas, either.)  They followed me home and we considered all sorts of options before settling on this Fig and Rosemary Chicken from the Foodie Fresh blog.  How do I love it?  Let me count the ways.  1) Figs.  2) Fig and balsamic reduction (that's the 'sauce' for the pizza).  3) Fresh rosemary.  4) Goat cheese.  5) Grilled chicken.  6) Caramelized onions  7) All of that in one place at the same time!  8) Pizza!

Oh.  My.

All I did was throw together a simple dough, maybe 70% hydration plus a drizzle of olive oil.  My wife did the rest of the work.  And when she got done, boy, did it all work together!

Here's a ready-for-the-oven pic:

Isn't that a thing of beauty?

But wait, there's more:

That's right, fresh from the oven and ready to eat!  This, people, is some seriously good food.  There were no leftovers.

Energized by the fabulous pizza, I managed to put together some kolaches for the third bake of the weekend, using dough from the previous weekend's class.  Those turned out pretty well, too.  Sorry, no pictures of those.  Having sized them at 80g each, I think I'll try shrinking them to 50 or 60g each the next time that I make them.  That will allow for a higher ratio of filling to bread.

That's more baking than I tend to do most days but I'm happy with all three outcomes.  (The first was Hamelman's Whole Rye and Whole Wheat bread, covered in an earlier post.)

Paul

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pmccool

Consistency has much to recommend it but a person needs some variety in life, too.  Hence the first bake from this past weekend - Hamelman's Whole Rye and Whole Wheat bread.  Mostly.  It seems as though I've had more than my share of white breads in recent weeks.  It wasn't the result of any grand plan, just happenstance.  And they were good breads, too.  They just left me wanting something browner and grainier.  

In thumbing through Hamelman's Bread - 2nd Edition, I came across his Whole Rye and Whole Wheat bread.  It sounded like just the thing to break the white bread streak.  The formula is pretty straightforward:

Bread Flour  50%

Whole Rye Flour 25%

Whole Wheat Flour 25%

Water 68%

Mature sourdough culture  5%

Salt  1.8%

Yeast, fresh  1.25%  

In spite of the yeast in the formula, this is a sourdough bread.

I did take some liberties with both ingredients and process.  First, I left out the yeast.  That allowed for a fuller sourdough flavor and a slower rise, which fit better with the day's other activities.  The recipe calls for 6 minutes of mixing in a spiral mixer.  Wanting a close-textured crumb for sandwiches, I opted for approximately 18 minutes of hand kneading.  Finally, I mixed together the levain, the water for the final dough, and the whole wheat flour, allowing the mixture to sit for about an hour.  This gave the bran in the wheat flour an opportunity to absorb liquid and soften somewhat before I mixed in the bread flour and salt.

So, other than changing nearly half of the variables, it's exactly as Mr. Hamelman intended.

Since my starter had been refreshed the previous weekend and put back in cold storage, I simply used the called-for amount straight from storage to build the levain.  The mixed levain was covered and allowed to ferment overnight.  By the next morning, it had grown appreciably and was bubbly throughout.

As noted above, the final dough water and whole wheat flour were combined with the starter and the bowl covered.  After an hour or so, the salt and most of the bread flour were mixed in to make a rough dough.  The dough was then treated to an extended session of hand kneading.  Kneading was a bit of an effort.  Twenty-five percent rye flour, pre-fermented, equals sticky dough.  I had held back perhaps 20 or 30 grams of the bread flour in anticipation of needing it for bench flour.  That turned out to be a good call, as the dough wanted repeated flourings to stay manageable.  By not adding more flour or water than the formula called for, the dough was at the intended hydration level when kneading was complete.

Finally, it was covered and allowed to ferment for until approximately doubled, which only took slightly more than three hours.  The loaves were pre-shaped, rested, then shaped into batards, placed on parchment sheets, covered with plastic wrap and allowed to ferment without any side support.  Happily, there was a limited amount of spreading during the loaves fermentation.  With the warmer temperatures this time of year, the loaves were ready to bake in less than three hours.

The loaves were slashed, then baked with steam at 460F for 15 minutes.  After that, the temperature was turned down to 440F for another 20 minutes of baking.  At that point, the loaves had reached 208F internal temperature, so they were removed from the oven.

Oven spring was good, with slightly more than a doubling in height from the unbaked loaf.  The slashes opened up very cleanly, with no tearing.  As always, I need more practice to get uniform cuts.

I'm becoming a fan of Hamelman's penchant for bold bakes.  While I won't push as far as he does, getting a dark crust and browning of the grigne is as pleasing to my tongue as it is to my eyes.

The resulting crumb was very much what I wanted, well aerated but able to retain condiments:

This bread is more to my liking than the Vermont Sourdough and its variants from the same book.  It has a significantly higher wholegrain flour content, for one.  The blend of rye and wheat seems tastier than either one alone, too.  Even at 68% hydration and 50% wholegrain flour content, the crumb is pleasantly moist.  It's close to a week now since I baked the bread and it shows no sign of staling.  My wife sliced some today and made a bruschetta of sorts with a balsamic-fig reduction spread on the bread and scattered bits of goat cheese.  That was toasted in the the toaster oven and, oh, my, was it good!

The good news is that this is a bread worthy of being in the regular baking rotation.  The bad news is that there are so many other good breads in Bread that I don't know when I might get back to it.

Paul

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pmccool

Two weekends ago, I brought some Portugese Sweet Bread dough home from a class I had taught about sandwich breads.  One weekend ago, I baked the bread.  This weekend, finally, I have an opportunity to post about it.

The class itself was about sandwich breads.  We made ciabatta into ciabattini, or ciabatta rolls, and made the Portugese Sweet Bread into, um, rolls for hamburgers and hotdogs. The length of the class was long enough to allow us to bake the ciabattini on site but the Portugese Sweet Bread dough was taken by the participants to bake at home.  Since my work schedule has been unusually busy of late, it was the following weekend before I had the opportunity to fish the dough out of the refrigerator and bake it.  I opted to shape it in two loaves, rather than rolls.

I am often asked by students whether dough can be held in the refrigerator for baking at a later time.  That question gets a confident "Yes".  The follow-up question is usually "How long can it be held?"  The answer to that question is a less-confident "It depends."  Generally, it is safe to say that a 2-3 day hold won't hurt anything.  Beyond that, it becomes a question of how quickly the dough was chilled, how long it took to get from classroom to home, and how cold each participant's refrigerator is.  In this case, in a cold refrigerator with temperatures in the 34-37F range, I got away with a full week's delay and no appreciable degradation in the quality of the finished bread.

During it's long stay in cold storage, the dough had approximately doubled in volume so I started to shape it immediately after removing it from the refrigerator.  That didn't go so well.  The dough was so stiff that it balked at my attempts.  So, I covered it back up with plastic and let it sit out at room temperature long enough to regain some flexibility.  Once it had, it was shaped into two boules and placed in rice-floured bannetons to rise, with plastic wrap draped over the exposed surface of the dough to prevent drying.

The dough took nearly two hours to double in the bannetons; most likely because it was still warming during that time.  Given the long hold in the refrigerator and the lengthy final fermentation, I was concerned that most of the free sugars in the flour might have been consumed by the yeasts.  As a result, I applied an egg wash to the loaves before slashing them and then baking them in a dry oven.

I needn't have worried.  As you can see in the photos, the slashed areas that are free of any egg wash are nearly as dark as the crust which has the egg wash.  Oven spring was good but not explosive.  The crumb, which I did not photograph, is very typical of this bread: fine textured with even distribution of small alveoli and slightly golden in color.

One thing you should know about me: if it were possible to rank artistic capabilities on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd score somewhere around a -2.  Nevertheless, I played with some decorative scoring on these loaves (the results support my previous statement) and I am pleased beyond any reasonable expectation with the way that they look.  Foolish, I know, but whoever said pride was reasonable?

One unanticipated result of this of scoring pattern, bi-lateral symmetry on two axes, is that it turns a round loaf into nearly a square loaf.  Look, Ma, no pans!  Yes, I'm aware that scoring affects loaf shape, but this was an outcome that I hadn't observed in previous bakes.  Maybe it is because the others didn't have the secondary slashing between the primary axes.  Or sunspots were especially active that day.  Or...

Paul

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pmccool

Between wanting a break from my GF experiments and my starter requiring a refresh, it was time to bake something different, something with sourdough.  For reasons not entirely clear to me, I keep going back to Leader's Local Breads in spite of its known defects.  It probably has something to do with the fact that the breads, when they work, are just so good.

A case in point would be the Polish Cottage Rye.  It's the very last formula in the book and it has no errors.  Moreover, it is a very pretty and tasty bread.  At 1215g, unbaked, it is also a hefty loaf but not in any way a brick.  I'm getting ahead of myself...

Since I had Friday off, one of my morning tasks was to pull the starter out of the refrigerator and give it a good feeding.  Thinking that rye flour might be a good pick-me-up for the starter, I used the whole rye flour that I had on hand.  At that point, there was no plan for a specific bread, just getting the starter back in fighting trim was the primary goal.  Even though the kitchen temperature is in the 75-78F range these days, the starter was a bit sluggish from it's 2-3 week stay in the refrigerator.  It was midafternoon before the starter showed real evidence of activity and late in the evening before it was ready to launch a levain.  By then, it had more than doubled (with rye flour, remember) and was eager for more food.

Since there was only finely milled whole rye flour on hand instead of the white rye that Leader calls for, that was what went into the levain build.  After a thorough mixing of the starter, water, and rye flour, the levain was covered and left to its own devices through the night.

It was about 7:45 Saturday morning when I walked into the kitchen and found a levain that was ready for bread.  All that was left was to combine the levain, water, bread flour, and salt into the final dough and give it a good knead.  About 15-18 minutes of kneading, according to Leader.  So I set to with vigor, using the slap and fold method because of the dough's relative softness.  There were a couple of intervals where I used the traditional push-turn-fold method of kneading but I found myself adding more flour than I wished to because of the dough's stickiness, so then it was back to the slap and fold method.

Per Leader's directions, the dough was set to ferment until it had expanded about 1.5 times its original volume.  I suspect mine was somewhat closer to doubled but without any adverse effects.  The dough was then shaped into a single round and placed in a floured banneton for the final fermentation.  While the loaf was fermenting, the oven was set up with a baking stone and a steam pan.

When the loaf was nearly doubled, the oven was switched on.  After it had preheated to 450F, boiling water was poured into the steam pan.  The loaf was immediately tipped out onto parchment paper, slashed, and slid onto the baking stone.  The loaf looked well proofed before going into the oven.  Once there, though, it experienced even more expansion; perhaps less than doubling but certainly a 1.5 expansion from the pre-bake size.

The fragrance while baking was wonderful.  Lots of roasty/toasty notes with sourdough highlights.

We had to leave as soon as the bread came out of the oven, so I simply plopped it on a cooling rack with a towel over it.  When we returned home, we found that it had been singing during our time away:

Quite a bit, actually.

That second picture also gives a sense of the amount of oven spring.  You can see how there was some tearing at the intersection of two slashes on the right-hand side. It's also evident when looking at the top of the loaf:

The deep chestnut tone of the crust is just as appealing to the tongue as it is to the eye; lots and lots of malty and nutty flavors.

Given the length of the kneading, it's no surprise that the crumb is very regular and rather finely textured:

Some of the crumb texture may also be attributable to the use of whole rye, rather than white rye, flour.  Since I made no adjustments in the formula's hydration, the perceived hydration may be lower than it would otherwise be.  

This is a very satisfying medium rye, at least in this incarnation with whole rye flour.  With white rye flour, it would no doubt be an equally satisfying light rye bread.  The flavor is a delightful combination of rye and wheat, with the additional richness of the sourdough flavors.  Neither seeds nor bread spice are needed in this bread; it is complete as is.  

If you have, or can obtain, a copy of Local Breads, I heartily commend this bread to you.

Paul

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pmccool

This past week, I've been enjoying my lunchtime sandwiches made with my first-ever gluten free bread.  It's been a learning experience, in a good way.  The flavor is pleasant, albeit not the least bit wheaty.  I think I'd like it better without the buckwheat flour but that's purely a personal taste issue.  The crumb is moist and slightly spongy, with just the faintest hint of grittiness.  The texture is fairly close-grained, with plenty of small bubbles of fairly uniform size.

Perhaps I should back up a bit.  My sudden interest in gluten free bread has nothing to do with a personal health issue.  Rather, I've been asked to teach a class on gluten free baking at CCKC and have, somewhat grudgingly, agreed to do so.  Grudging, because so much of the present gluten free craze is driven by faddish self-diagnoses and probably has no medical basis.  Only somewhat, because I'm perfectly willing to help people who truly suffer from celiac disease and want to develop baking skills and prepare safe foods.

So, here I am, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't and, more importantly, why.  This first bake is a case in point.  From my reading here on TFL (thank you for your shared experiences and wisdom!) and from other sources, it seems that guar and xanthan gums aren't well-tolerated by some celiac sufferers.  Chia and flax seeds offer some binding power for gluten free breads and certainly bring additional nutritional punch.  However their ability to form stable gels isn't always enough to support the demands of a sandwich style loaf.  Eggs can be used in some baked goods but there are many who have egg allergies, too.  The new binder on the gluten free block is psyllium husks.  It provides enough gas-capturing capability with a heat-stable gel to produce some reasonably good breads.

You may have already encountered psyllium, without even knowing it, in the form of a laxative.  Don't panic!  Even though I've eaten this bread made with psyllium all week long, it hasn't caused any, um, problems.  Psyllium's ability to absorb as much as 20 times its weight in water, forming a firm gel, is what makes it so effective in both laxatives and breads.  Having learned that, and a number of other facts, I searched for recipes that featured psyllium husk as the binder, rather than gums.  Turns out there aren't nearly as many out there on the web, yet.  The one I eventually selected to experiment with is from The World of Gluten-Free Bread blog.  One factor in my decision to use this recipe was that it seemed to be in the sweet spot for hydration levels and flavor in Juergen's experiments with different flours and ratios (see his Google doc here).

The recipe calls for a mix of sorghum, millet and buckwheat flours.  While shopping, I found the sorghum and buckwheat flours but not the millet flour.  Having seen a number of recipes that included brown rice flour, I took a chance on substituting that for the millet flour.  The other substitution that I made was potato flour in place of the potato starch that the recipe calls for. Luckily, things turned out quite well in spite of those two substitutions. 

The dough requires a different process than a typical wheat bread.  The first step is to mix the water and psyllium husk until a gel forms, perhaps 2-3 minutes.  Then the other ingredients are added and mixed for several minutes.  Since my KitchenAide mixer's condition is not especially robust, I chose to mix everything by hand.  Some of the recipes I found call for several minutes of kneading, so I followed that advice.  The dough texture was, not surprisingly, quite different than a wheat dough.  It was somewhat firm and rather elastic.  Nevertheless, it was kneadable.  One piece of advice that I saw somewhere along the line was to treat gluten free dough more like a rye dough than a wheat dough.  That seems to be good advice.  The dough wasn't nearly as sludgy or slimy as rye dough can be, but there were some similarities.  

Unlike many gluten free breads that are batter-based, this bread is given two rises, the first after mixing/kneading and the second after shaping.  At the end of each rise, the dough felt puffy and aerated.  Unlike wheat doughs, there's no such thing as getting a tight sheath on the outside of the loaf during shaping.  I definitely need more practice and understanding to achieve a smooth outer surface.  

Unlike the recipe's direction to bag the dough after covering it with cling film, I simply used the cling film with no noticeable drying of the dough.  From prior experience, my opinion is that the oiled cling film leaves a haze on the baked crust.  It's a relatively small price to pay for protecting the dough from drying but I'd like to find a method that results in a more eye-pleasing result.

The dough was enough to fill a 4x8 bread tin.  I would have liked to push for more volume but small bubbles were beginning to appear on the top surface.  In rye doughs, that means the fermentation has passed the point of the dough's ability to hold the gas.  With that in mind, I bundled the pan into the oven just as soon as the oven reached temperature.

Not surprisingly, there was no oven spring.  Fortunately, there was no collapse, either.  The only area of some concern for me during baking was that the bread took forever to reach 200F.  At the end of the prescribed baking time, the internal temperature had only reached 145F.  It took another 30 minutes of baking to reach 200F.  My oven is fairly accurate in its temperature settings, so that wasn't the problem.  Gluten free breads tend to be very high in hydration (this one is nearly 100%), so that's a factor.  Although I expected that the recipe's bake time would be fairly reliable, it wasn't my experience.

The bread was allowed to cool to room temperature before slicing.  The crust was initially quite crunchy when first sliced but softened to a pleasant texture after a night in a plastic bag.  The crumb is very moist but still firm, with the distinctive purple/gray shading of the buckwheat flour as seen here:

Kinda looks like a rye bread, doesn't it?  It has a similar heft, too.

 

I wanted to see how flexible the bread was, so I trimmed the crust from a slice that was about 1/4 inch thick.  Surprisingly, it had quite a bit of flexibility.  When I finally pushed it to the point of cracking, it was virtually doubled over.  Even then, it held together:

For anyone accustomed to wheat breads, it won't win any beauty contests:

Nevertheless, it tastes good, it hasn't dried out or turned crumbly, and it makes a decent sandwich.  I haven't tried toasting it, so don't know how that might work.  If I couldn't have gluten-containing breads, this would be a pretty good thing.  

If anyone has any tips or suggestions, I'm open.  I really want to understand how this stuff works.  Right now, I have one attempt and one success but no clues as to why it turned out the way it did.  I'll keep experimenting so that I get a better grasp of the hows and whys.  My students rightfully expect value for their tuition, so I need to be prepared to give them good information.

Paul

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pmccool

It's been two months since I last posted and I've scarcely gotten past the lurking stage here at TFL in that time.  The new project has kept me very busy at work, with more overtime than I care for.  The good news is that if the project progresses past the current stage, I'll get to work even more overtime for the next three years!  Yippee!  It's kind of like the airlines; if you fly with them often enough, they reward you by - wait for it - letting you fly even more!  I really can't complain too much, though, having learned that being underworked is a lot less satisfying than being overloaded.

Nevertheless, I have managed to fit a bit of life in and around the work schedule.  In one 7-day period in mid-February, I taught a sandwich breads class (Portugese Sweet Bread and Ciabattini) and a sourdough class (a light wheat sourdough and wheat/rye sourdough crackers) at the Culinary Center of Kansas City.  In between those two classes, there was a King Cake class for the Slow Food Kansas City organization.  It was cool to get acquainted with Chef Jasper Mirabile and have 20 or so people up to their elbows in flour.  This weekend, I taught an artisanal breads class (a French country boule and a variation on Pain a l'Ancienne) at CCKC.  

You never know what will resonate with the students.  This last time around, while discussing measuring ingredients by weight instead of by volume, one exclaimed "Why hasn't anyone ever told us about this before?  Learning that alone is worth the price of the class."  For others, learning techniques for handling high-hydration doughs was a big benefit.

Besides baking all of the breads for the classes (anywhere from 2-4 times each), other baking has included Mini's Favorite 100% Rye (absolutely delicious), as well as some lavender lemon scones that I've been testing for an upcoming class (my neighbors are really happy).  

So, even though I may not show up around here as often as I have previously, I'm still having fun with bread.

Paul

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pmccool

January has been a busy month already and there is nothing to indicate that it will slow down anytime soon.  Consequently, I haven't posted much recently but I have been busy with baking.

I taught two classes at the Culinary Center of Kansas City this month.  Last weekend was a Breadmaking 101 class and this weekend had an advanced course on formula design utilizing the BBGA spreadsheet format, which I think is unique to the area.  Each went well, with 17 in attendance for the Breadmaking 101 class and 5 in attendance for the formula design class.  We would usually cancel a class if only 5 people sign up for it, since it isn't profitable for the Center to deal with a group that small.  However, we felt that it was important to hold this first-ever class so we made some adjustments and rolled with it.  The small attendance may have been a real advantage, since it gave me much more time with each student than would have been possible in a larger group.

As the name implies, the Breadmaking 101 class was geared to people who are new to baking bread.  The focus was on introducing the basics that are so important, and often so daunting, to new bakers.  We only dealt with two breads during the 5-hour class so that students would have an opportunity to learn about ingredients, mixing, kneading, and fermentation first-hand.  While I had wanted to have the students bake at least one of the breads while they were in class, circumstances just didn't allow that to happen so they took the dough that they had prepared to bake at home.  They did get to see the bake for one of the doughs that I had made while setting up for class, which gave them an idea of how the finished product should look, as shown below:

I'm not sure what point I was making but it was obviously an important one!  The bread in question is a simple Italian-style white loaf.  Here's a picture of what I baked from the demonstration dough:

Interestingly, the adjoining classroom had an all-day Italian cooking class going on.  From talking to that instructor before our classes started, I learned that her father had owned S&A Italian Bakery, one of the larger bakeries in the Kansas City area dating back to the early 1900's.  Apparently the old bakery building in downtown KC has been converted into condominiums and one of those condos still houses the old brick oven, though it is not in use.  Her comment was "Someday, I'm going to buy that condo!"  When we took a break for lunch, I carried one of the loaves into her classroom, making her a very happy camper.

The other bread featured in class was a honey whole wheat, which gave the students a panned bread to work with, too.  As usual, I stressed the importance of measuring by weight, instead of by volume.  This was the first class in which I had the students do all of their measurements by weight, using new scales that the Center has recently acquired.  That presented some mental shifting of gears for a few of the students but all got through it in good shape.  One student commented that the whole idea of hydration, and how it could be controlled, was an important new understanding for her.  All in all, a tiring but enjoyable day.

This Saturday's class was the polar opposite.  It was structured to have the students develop and make a bread of their choosing (within some parameters that I set to keep things simple) so that they could familiarize themselves with the thought processes that go into formula development.  I had set up a spreadsheet with three different templates, all based on the BBGA format, that was emailed to the students in advance of class.  They were encouraged to bring a computer, or tablet, or other device that would allow them to manipulate the templates in class to produce their formula.  Before getting to the spreadsheet proper, we covered the importance of measuring by weight and how to use Baker's Math, since those two concepts are at the core of the BBGA format.  As part of that discussion, we mixed three series of hydration experiments, one each of bread flour, whole wheat flour, and rye flour, with hydration levels from 50% to 90%.  Each sample used 50g of flour and the students did all of the mixing by hand so that they could see how the flours behaved across the range of hydration levels and how they changed from one flour to the next.  That turned out to be an eye-opener for them, since they gained a visual and tactile understanding of what the hydration numbers meant.  Each student's packet included two worksheets with a series of questions that prompted them to think about what they wanted in the finished bread, with regard to intended use, flavor, shape, texture, crust, and other factors.  With that background, each one put together a draft formula for their new bread.  I also let them use some bread books as references, not so they could copy formulae but so they could get a sense of how different ingredients were combined, and in what percentages, for various styles of bread.  

After mixing, kneading and setting their doughs to ferment, we regrouped for a discussion and demonstration of various techniques.  From there we broke for lunch, with occasional interruptions for stretch and folds by a couple of the students.  The menu included sandwiches made with Italian bread and German Farmer's Bread, the latter from Hamelman's bread.  It's absolutely lovely stuff, very flavorful with a small inclusion of rye and yogurt, moist, and chewy.  A loaf is shown in the headline photo and sang quietly while its picture was being made.  Some slices showing the crumb are pictured, below:

After the students shaped their breads, we spent some time discussing various ingredients that can be used in breads and what kinds of effects they have.  Then the students went to work on designing a second bread.  By the time they were ready to mix and knead their second bread, the first set of loaves were ready to bake.  After their second doughs were prepared, we cleaned up our area and had a discussion to answer any questions that hadn't been adequately covered earlier in the day.  Eventually, the breads came out of the oven and the students went their separate ways with one baked loaf and some dough to bake at home, plus a headful of new understanding.  

Considering that it was the first-ever presentation and radically different than any of my other classes, I'm very pleased with how the class went.  There are things that can be improved, certainly, but it was a definite success.

A bake from earlier in January featured Hamelman's Tarte Flambee, which is a kind of pizza in much the same way that a Bugatti Veyron is a kind of automobile.  Luxe, in other words.  Bacon, onions, creme fraiche (I substituted Mexican crema), a hint of nutmeg, plus some mushrooms that I threw in just because; all combining to produce an artery-clogging rapture.  This is seriously good stuff and should probably not be indulged in more than once a year.  The picture, below, was taken with my cell phone and seems to have emphasized the red end of the spectrum, leaving the bacon appearing much more pink than it actually was.

The other thing that I've been playing with is King Cake for Mardi Gras, since I've been invited by Slow Food Kansas City to teach a class at their February meeting.  The dough itself is where I want it to be and I've worked out a shaping technique.  The only thing that I'm still fiddling with is the filling.  The one that I have used tastes great but it has a tendency to liquefy and ooze out of the cake while baking, so that needs a bit more work.  The second iteration, unadorned, is shown below:

That about catches me up, I think.

Paul

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