QuarterBaked's blog

One of the drawbacks of the hearth-style breads such as found in FWSY is that the crusts are tough for little kids to chew. I've been baking a lot of FWSY inspired bread, and so we've stopped buying bread from the store, but that means PB&J sandwiches with "adult" crusts, which means lots of unfinished PB&J carcasses. Alright, a new challenge! How to make kid-friendly sandwich bread using a low-knead, high-hydration dough, as inspired by FWSY?

While researching this problem, I discovered the pullman pan and wondered if it could be put to use in solving this challenge. I recently got a USA brand 13in. pullman pan, and gave it a try with half the dough from an otherwise typical FWSY recipe. It wasn't enough dough for the size of the pan, but baked at 350 for 25min covered/15 uncovered, it was a success! My eldest: "Wow, dad, this bread is pretty good!" (implied: in contrast to that other stuff you make us eat).

The attached photo is my second attempt, using my own hybrid of an enriched Pan de mie and a FWSY levain dough.

Recipe:
Autolyse 500g AP/60g whole wheat, + 3 grams milled flax seed, because I have it in my fridge and need to use it up. Used 208g whole milk/200g water at a temp of 95.

I then mixed in 1 egg. I don't know if there was an advantage to delaying the egg, but it was a pain to incorporate!
I then added 13g salt, 1/4 tsp instant yeast (to speed up the ferment just a bit due to my schedule), and 138g of 80% hydration levain.

Bulk ferment for 9hrs in my oven with the oven light on, then shaped into log and put in pullman pan. I figured the proof would be about 3hrs, but I had to leave for 5 hrs, so I'll put into my basement to partially retard. Oops, forgot to do that. 2 hrs later, I remembered, and thought, well, I'll call my wife and tell her to put it into the fridge. Oops, forgot to do that too. 

Arrive home to a clearly bulging pullman pan. I made a half-hearted attempt to slide the lid back a little to look at it, but couldn't get it to budge. Better not try any harder, or I might do something undesirable to the dough. I had asked my wife to preheat the oven to 450 when I left work, which she did. I put the pan in right away. . . and then forgot to reduce the heat down to 350! I did not realize this until it was time to uncover the pan. Needless to say, it didn't need any baking time uncovered. The oven spring was so forceful, that the escaping dough had managed to force the lid open about 1/4in (the same lid I couldn't budge). The only way I could remove the lid was by pounding it off with the heel of my hand (with oven mitt on!).

And you know what, despite being massively overproofed and baked at too high a temperature, it turned out well, and my kids ate it some for breakfast this morning. Crust was a little thicker than the first one I baked, but still better (for the kids) than the typical FWSY loaf. Success! 

I've always felt comfortable with cooking--not necessarily good at it, but comfortable--but I never considered myself a baker. In fact, until I began baking bread a year and a half ago, the extent of my baking was throwing the specified ingredients in a hand-me-down Breadman bread-machine, because, well, we had it, and I'm a sucker for new gadgets, even if it's someone else's old gadget. The bread was ok, but it's only real appeal was that we were involved in the process. Unsurprisingly, we didn't use it very often, and I didn't care.

So, if you had told me in early November of 2014 that within two years I would own multiple bread books, which would live on my counter, and that I would be baking bread and be setting my alarm early enough to make sure I had time to feed a sourdough culture in the morning, I would have told you that you were crazy, especially regarding the getting up early part. But here I am, and I completely blame the sourdough. Not the bread--the culture.

Yes, that living microbial throng is the reason I am now a baker. I previously thought that "sourdough" was a flavor at best, and probably mostly a marketing thing. Instead, I saw the instructions for making your own sourdough culture in a book somewhere and thought, "Wow, that's a cool science experiment!" Just mix water and flour together, and stuff starts to happen! Before I knew it, I had a relatively large quantity of bubbling brew, and loathe to throw all of it away, I figured I ought to use it for something!

So, without bothering to look up a recipe, I just took some of the culture (I think it was in the 100% hydration range), added some more flour to make it seem more like dough (remember, I really haven't baked before), and threw it in the oven. I probably preheated the oven, but no salt, no proofing--nothing one generally considers an essential part of the leavened bread process.

Fortunately, I only made a small. . .thing. . . as it was as horrible as you might imagine. Looking back, I think I also used culture from an early stage in the development

This is the point at which I could have chalked it up as just another experiment, and moved on. But I couldn't! I didn't expect my experimental bread to be be any good, but I hadn't expected it to be so bad, and I had to figure out why. I at least had to try an actual recipe for sourdough bread. The first recipe I tried might have been from the book that introduced me to sourdough, but it also might have been the Extra-tangy Sourdough from the KAF website. The result was actually bread. Somehow, I had managed to conjure forth an actual loaf of bread! But it was still not particularly good--edible, but rather mediocre.

How could there be such mystery and challenge to taking such a simple seeming set of ingredients and forming it into such a simple seeming product? This mystery and challenge, combined with a certain strange affection for my starter culture, made me want to continue trying this baking thing, even though I still didn't care very much about bread itself!

So I kept baking, and little bit by little bit, got better at it, especially once I started getting books out of the library and learned more than just how to follow a recipe. My wife started liking the results, and I found a friend who also baked, and I found myself telling politely-disinterested people about bread, and realized that my scientific curiosity in micro-organisms had grown into bread-baking pleasure.

It's possible that it would have remained an occasional hobby, except that I took a chance on Flour Water Salt Yeast at the library one day. I can't say where FWSY stands in the pantheon of bread books, but for me, it was just what I needed. Something about the presentation, the method, the explanations, etc., just clicked, and almost overnight, I went from making decent bread to pretty good bread. For the last 6-9 months, I've been baking almost exclusively using FWSY recipes (err, formulas), or my own derivations. I've been very happy with the results, so I haven't felt much need to try other things, but I've also wanted to reach the point where I feel like I've internalized the method to some degree.

So, for me, the next step is to become more intentional about documenting what I do, as well as planning ahead some more. (With four young kids around, if I don't do advance planning, I'll have no choice but to do something familiar.) Since I like both gadgetry and writing, I thought that keeping a blog-diary of sorts would be a way of making this part of the process a bit more fun. My plan is to keep the finer details in a paper notebook on my counter, and then post a report of sorts to this blog.

[Edited due to prematurely submitting unfinished post]