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This is my first attempt to post a blog. I have been baking bread and looking at the site for many years....here it goes.

I try to make a bread at least once a week especially when the weather is agreeable. I was looking for a bread to make over the week-end and saw the Cherry Pecan sour dough recipe posted by Mountaindog....and thought...that will work! I did tweak the formula a bit, I used 35% white whole wheat, 5% rye and increased the hydration to 73%. (my flour tends to be thirsty). It was not fussy at all and had a nice oven spring. Next time I might try leaving out the ww and up the rye.

I like a bold bake......

That was touch and go tring to get the photos in....

Being sent to Yeast Spotting

Cheers

You ask, what could be more decadent, and I say absolutely nothing. Cartellate are traditionally made during Christmas. They are traditional Pulgiese fried pastries, filled with roasted almonds, honey, spices and chocolate.

They are a holiday cookie and although mostly made at Christmas time, they are our star dessert on our Thanksgiving table. They just seemed so suited to a beautiful Thanksgiving dessert table. 

These cookies are a labor of love and not easy to make, but the good news is that you can place the shells in a brown paper bag and keep some for Christmas.

http://turosdolci.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/traditional-holiday-cookie-cartellatecluster-are-filled-with-honey-nuts-spices/ 

Well here I am;

and I will fear no bread. This is my first post outside of a few comments one of which was admitting to feeling intimidated by many of the “high-end” bread books. I buy them, get very excited, then back off and retreat to my known and used comfort formulas. But I want more. I find this site and the people here very inspiring, creative and helpful and I want in. I only have a computer at work so I’ll be a bit sporadic. I started years ago with a bread machine and a fear of yeast (”They have box mixes for these things don’t they?”). Loathing the machines loaf shape and stupid paddle hole pretty soon I got a small loaf pan and after the dough cycle put the ball of stuff from the mix into the oven. I was right to fear yeast. They are extra terrestrial beings! Like pods they rise up, take over our brains and alter our normal budgetary disciplines with mad cravings for new bread books, bannetons, heavy duty mixers, and every kind of milled grain from everywhere on the planet. They may have overcome many of you earlier but yes I am a yeast head like you. Thank goodness for this site for I will catch up.

I got PRs Artisan Breads Everyday and I find it very relaxed and accessible. After hearing a lot around TFL about Struan loaves this is where I jumped in. I was especially curious as the formula is very similar to a favorite of mine from an old bread machine book that was called Irish Brown bread. I posted this recipe here in a response awhile back (_somewhere?). I didn’t add the brown rice, and used a multi-grain cereal. It came out great. Good moist crumb and very crisp crust. Now I want to try his other versions of this bread. Has anyone done both, and how would you compare the different methods? 

I also made a small Oatmeal Maple Nut loaf from Beatrice Ojakangas Whole Grain Breads book. When I’ve used maple in the past I find it is just too subtle so this time I added some natural Maple flavor_KAF, 1/4 teas. per cup of ingredients. What a tasty loaf and boy did my house smell good. Next day I was compelled to remake this very same loaf when upon returning from a quick trip to the store I discovered I had left the loaf sitting on the edge of the counter where I had sliced off my breakfast. With irritated resignation I retrieved the tea towel from beneath a cupboard while my maple/pecan breath Boarder Collie slunk nonchalantly to his resting area. I took out the last of the pecans and began again.

Here’s also a couple of my regular sourdough loaves. They are made with a starter from KAF that I got about 3 years ago. Does anyone use the same? If you have a KAF starter and still feed by their directions (volume) what hydration do you figure it to be? I did a bunch of math weighed things out and converted it to a 100%. A month later it’s raising power had diminished disturbingly so it went back to once a week discard of 1 cup and feed the remainder (a 1/4 to 1/2 cup) with 1/2 cup of water and 1 cup of flour. It’s taken awhile to get it’s strength back but now it’s back on track. In a week I’ll have enough time off to maybe brave beginning the PR starter from his new book. Hmmm pineapple juice. Now where have I heard of a starter like that???

Love you Guys and Gals. Thanks for helping me along on my journey from the paddle hole through Norm’s fantastic onion rolls to stretch and fold prior to autolyse and maybe someday a rye starter.

Many thanks and..bake on.

Dosi

(Ureeka!!!! I just got the photos to show up...only took an hour! The Send To Editor part was what I missed. Is that in the FAQs instruction? Sorry these are bigger than necessary next time I think I know how to do it better, for now I'm leaving the office I'm too beat to redo them.)

I want to thank Paddyscake here on the TFL for sharing her raspberry tart recipe last July (divine is the word to describe it).  She said she substituted the mascarpone cheese with cream cheese and used Pepperidge Farm for the crust.  She said despite these substitutions, the pie was just about gone in a heartbeat.

In "Two Pies, One Lie" on my personal blog – www.sotsil.wordpress.com – I featured Paddyscake raspberry tart because I did some cheating of my own.  I bought  mascarpone cheese (almost had a coronary when I saw the price) but berated myself for pairing it with a Graham cracker crust that was idling in my cupboard for two months.  On hindsight, I thought it was kind of criminal to buy expensive cheese and drape it on a store-bought crust.  Nature is very forgiving though; this raspberry tart had a silky, delicious, whistling taste.

The Dutch Apple Pie below was taken from the Canadian Living  Test Kitchen.  For this one, I stayed faithful to the recipe ingredients and procedure.  Nothing was tweaked or substituted.

During the fall, there’s a lot of apple picking going on in the eastern seaboard of North America.  Quebec’s apple route is in a town called Rougemont – rustic, postcard-pretty kind of town.  I used Cortland apples for this one.  The ¼ cup whipping cream gives it a different twist.

For Paddyscake raspberry tart recipe, this is the link:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/12424/kalamata-olive-sundried-tomato-and-feta-bread

(you need to scroll further down – it's a thread that starts with Pam’s Kalamata Olive bread).

For the Dutch Apple Pie, I reproduce it below.

For about two years previous I had been making bread for groups of college students as a part of the college student outreach at my church. Every Sunday morning I would bring pounds of retarded yeast fermented dough to the church kitchen, prep it on site, and bake it off for our college lunch. I was pretty proud of the formula I used for it, mostly this was because it was mine. I chose the hydration, the fermentation technique, and the shaping and baking of it. And it always came out beautifully every time. Later on, i even started fermenting it with my sourdough starter. 

Fast forward five months. In addition to baking off a spiked sourdough boule, we would be making pane francese, a rustic dough that we would be forming into baguettes. It was made with a high proportion of biga, and a high hydration, around 70.5%. We ended up putting 6 folds into it as it dribbled around on the bench, then it would be shaped, proofed, and baked. It was supposed to be an exceptionally beautiful bread with a wide, open crumb. And it was.

Sometime after Chef showed us how to shape the loaves, and before his loaves went into the oven I recognized something interesting about the loaves. That shaping technique was the exact same one I used for my church batards. I thought this was intriguing and dismissed it. Curiosity bit me a few seconds later as I decided to check the exact hydration...70.5%. Another interesting thing. And to top it all off you use biga to give it great flavor and texture.

And then it was that I realized that for the past two years I had been making pane francese. Its amazing that by thinking about how I would make good bread, and implementing those factors, you can come up with a bread is very very old. 

Background:

In Eric Kayser's book "100% Pain", the Foreword written by the celebrated French chef Alain Ducasse waxed poetic about Kayser's Tourte de Meule, which literally translates to "Millstone Pie" and which is basically a Country Miche made with High Extraction Organic Stone Ground Flour and a Liquid Levain.

 Eric Kayser's "La Tourte de Meule"

In my last blog, I mentioned that I was able to bring back 3 types of Organic Flour from the "Meunerie Milanaise" in Quebec, the same mill that supplies Daniel Leader's "Bread Alone" bakery in Woodstock, New York. In addition to the basic Type 55 AP Flour, I also bought their Type 70 and Type 90 Organic Stone Ground flours. Having secured the proper ingredients, I decided to give EK's Tourte de Meule a try.

EK's original recipe:

- 700 g T 80 Organic Stone Ground Flour

- 300 g T 65 Organic Stone Ground Flour

- 200 g Liquid Levain

- 2 g Fresh Yeast

- 25 g Sea Salt from Guerande

- 700 g Water

Since my flours have slightly higher extraction, I decided to use half T 90 (83% extraction) and half T 70 (81% extraction) Organic Stone Ground Flour. I also halved the recipe to 500 g total Flour Mix and converted the yeast amount to 1/8 teaspoon Instant Yeast (for 500 g total flour). I used Grey Sea Salt from Guerande and Deer Park Spring Water. My Liquid Levain build was 100% hydration using T 70 Flour.

I modified the procedures slightly from Kayser's instructions. He calls for mixing all the ingredients, fermenting the dough at room temperature for 2-1/2 hours with stretch and fold at 15 minutes and then at 1-1/2 hours, shaping and proofing in banneton for 2 hours before baking.

My Procedures:

- Combine the Flour Mix and Water and autolyse for 30 minutes.

- Add the Liquid Levain, Yeast and Salt and knead with a dough hook on slow speed for 2 minutes.

- Do 10 stretch and fold in the bowl at 45 minutes interval 4 times.

- Ferment the dough at room temperature for 1 hour and retard in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

- Shape the dough into a Boule and let the dough rise in a lined Banneton for 1 hour.

- Bake in preheated 440 degrres F oven for 15 minutes with steam and at 410 degrees F without steam for 30 minutes.

Results:

The loaf had great oven spring. The exterior had a deep amber color and was nice and crusty. The smell was sweet and caramelly. The crumb was open and medium soft with a slight chewiness. The crumb color was beige with fine specks of bran, similar to a whole wheat crumb. The flavor was wheaty, tangy with a touch of acidity. When sliced and toasted, it took on a whole new dimension. The taste of toasty grain came out with an extra dose of sweetness. Overall, I was very pleased with the result.

Don

I am not a fan of bananas but every now and then for my kids I make banana muffins, banana bread (quick bread), banana pancakes and cakes, and banana milk shake and smoothie just to remind myself why people like bananas.  Whenever the bananas in my house have gone sesame (ie, growing freckles), the motherly cook's instincts in me start eyeing on them.  I never force my kids to eat any fruit or vegetables.  That's why the house ends up having so many unlikely combinations of chutney and jams.

Now, I have not come across bananas in a savory, or at least non-sweet, combination with flour.  What if I inject that lovely banana flavor (not to me!) into the crumb of a sourdough bread and use it for sandwiches or just toasts?  Would it work?  No harm trying.

Step one:  I started with four very large ripe bananas (475 grams).  My idea was to use bananas as hydration for final dough.  To puree bananas in my blender efficiently, I need to add some sort of liquid, and I chose to add 20% of banana weight in water (95 grams).  I got 570 grams of banana puree.  In addition to that, I had 100 g of diced banana to put in separately.

Step two:  To decide on a dough hydration percentage.  I picked 65%.  For this I needed to make an assumption as to the solids to liquid ratio in the bananas - my guesses were 35% to 65% (like pumpkin). 

Step three:  To calculate how much flour and starter that I would need for the given amount of banana puree.

Step four:  To work back to see if the figures match up before starting on the dough.  

Well, was I in a hurry?  I didn't go through Step Four properly. Immediately after I got the preliminary flour and starter figures, I poured my banana puree over the starter eagerly and began mixing!! 

The formula that I used is as follows:

Formula for Banana Pain au Levain 

• 570 g mature starter at 75% hydration (5% rye flour)
• 570 g flour (5% rye and the balance white flour)
• 570 g banana puree (made up of 475 g banana and 95 g of water)
• 100 g extra banana diced
• 18 g salt

Total dough weight was 1.8 kg and approximate dough hydration was 80% (not 65% as I set out to do)**!! 

**Assuming bananas were 65% liquid, total dough hydration from the above formula was:

• (475 + 100) x 65% = 374, being hydration from bananas
• 374 + 95 = 469, being hydration from banana plus water added to make up the banana puree
• 570 / 175% x 75% = 244, being water content in starter
• 244 + 469 = 713, being total hydration
• 570 / 175% x 100% = 326, being flour content in starter
• 326 + 570 = 896, being total flour
• 713 / 896 = 80%, being total dough hydration

No wonder the dough felt very wet and sticky and 3 sets of stretch & folds were needed during bulk fermentation for dough strength.  This dough was very difficult to shape.  An ample dusting of flour on the work bench and quick, swift movement and minimalist handling during shaping were necessary.

Procedure

1. Bulk fermentation 2 + 1/2 hours with 3 sets of stretch & folds of 30 - 40 strokes each, including autolyse of 20 minutes.
2. Divide into two doughs of 900 g each.
3. Proof for 2 hours.
4. Retard in the refrigerator for 10 hours (I found with this recipe that the retarding process was essential because during the first few hours of the fermentation the dough appeared very sluggish.  It was almost as if my starter was finding it tough adjusting to bananas, but in any event, after many hours of retardation in the fridge, the dough rose nicely.)
5. Bake with steam at 210C / 410F (lower temperature than usual due to sugar content in bananas) for 20 minutes then another 25 minutes at 190C / 375F (Note: I baked one dough at a time. Lower heat and longer baking appear to be the way to go. Under higher temperature, the crust would just burn.)

My daughter said this bread smells heavenly-banana.  I don't know if that is possible but I have to admit that, for a person who doesn't like to eat banana, I find this sourdough very delightful.  It is incredibly moist - a slice of this bread on your palm weighs heavily.   The effect of bananas on dough is probably not dissimilar to potatoes on dough.  It is also very chewy and sour (at least medium strength of sourness to me).  There was no trace of the sweetness from bananas left in the bread. 

My son had a great idea - he spread peanut paste on a slice of this bread and grilled it.  It tastes amazing:

Well, if you are interested to try this formula, I would suggest a lower hydration for easier shaping and handling of the dough.  Below I calculate for you an approx. 72% hydration dough formula for a dough weight of 864 grams:

Formula for Banana Pain au Levain @ approx. 72% dough hydration

• 285 g starter @75% hydration
• 285 g flour (5%, or 14 g, rye flour and the balance 271 g white flour)
• 285 g banana puree (made up of 245 g banana and 40 g water)
• 9 g salt

If it is done right, I believe the simplicity of this formula allows the natural flavor of fermented flour come through and it is in the spirit of what Pain au Levain is about.

Happy baking!

Shiao-Ping

This story is a confession of humility. Something happened to me a few days ago that is just to good not to share with my friends.

I was mixing a batch of a simple white bread I make all the time. As I looked out the kitchen window at the fall leaves, mixing my dough with a plastic scraper, I was thinking how a couple years ago I would of been thinking "this dough is to dry" and been tempted to add additional water. Then as I continued to push and knead it started to come together better. I was pleased with myself for having had the confidence in my judgment to keep going and not fall prey to the dry dough dilemma. Just about that time as I was feeling good about the knowledge I have gained, I looked across the counter to see the small bowl of 100% poolish that I had forgotten to add into the final dough mix. Ughhh what a moment of humble pie. No wonder it was so dry.

I thought I would share this moment with you all. I have learned a lot about baking while here at the Fresh Loaf. How ironic that the first time I am gloating internally about how well tuned my powers of observation are, the rug is yanked from beneath me. I guess I had it coming. Now I go forward having learned to think about my process and the steps. I'll try to not fall into a complacent confidence that allows me to work mindlessly.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Eric

November 10, 2009 was an auspicious day. It was the second baguette day, and a day I thought would be as interesting and full of questions as I could be hoping for as early in the program as we were. I had my concerns of course, as the product we were finishing and baking was the direct baguette.

A stiff dough with no prefermentation or autolyse mixed in to make it more interesting, all the direct baguette had going for it was a long, cool, overnight proof, and all the hope I could knead into it. Since becoming a bread baker I had always used pre-fermentation and retarded yeast fermentation. More recently my whimsical bread baking techniques have wandered into such techniques as autolyse, flour scalding, and wild yeast fermentation, but today I was returning to my bread baking childhood and would be making an artisan bread without any tricks or mind bending biochemistry.

The crust was a golden yellow color! To say nothing of the crumb, a tight, cottony consistency. Nothing like what I was used to seeing in my own formulas, baguette or otherwise. Which is not to say that they weren't beautiful, there is no higher category of judgement then the grigne of the scores, yet upon seeing the crumb, I just had to shake my head.

But I think this was the definition of the intensive mix method, the dough was at 57% hydration, we used stand mixers to mix up the dough to a perfect window pane, fermented it, punched it down, shaped the baguettes, then let them proof overnight. Retarding the dough had promise, but I think in order to get that nice crumb structure the retarding must occur in the bulk fermentation, rather then afterwards. What the retarding did do was produce a mild, subtle flavor to the baguettes, which I appreciated. 

I look at my loaves, and I see potential. 

I have had several people ask about this recipe so here it is. Sorry for taking so long.

Nicho Bread (Named for my grandson)

19.25 oz Good quality AP flour    
10.65 oz Milk
3 Tablespoons Sugar
3 Tablespoons Butter
1.5 tsp Salt
1.5 tsp Instant Yeast

This makes up about 2 pounds of dough, I bake it as a single loaf and it makes a TALL loaf. That's the way we like it around here but you could easily make 2 smaller loaves with this recipe.

Place the Flour, Salt, Sugar, and Yeast in a Large mixing bowl and stir to combine.
In a small sauce pan heat milk until very warm. (I do this in the microwave, about 90 seconds) add the butter to the warm milk. Stir until the butter melts. This gives the milk time to cool if you got it too hot.
Dump the milk/butter on the flour mix and stir with a big wooden spoon until it has absorbed all the liquid. Dump onto your counter top and begin kneading by hand for about 1 minute, Just trying to incorporate all the flour at this point. Cover and let the dough rest/hydrate for 5 minutes.
Continue to knead by hand for another 5 minutes. It should not be sticky. If it is, use a little flour to help make it workable. It should form a smooth, soft dough that is not sticky.
Place dough in lightly oiled bowl and cover with plastic. Let rise until doubled, usually takes about 60 to 90 minutes but let the dough dictate the time.
After doubled, deflate and form into a 5 x 9 loaf pan. Cover and let rise until doubled. Again, let the dough set the time.
Bake on the lower rack of a 325° oven until done. I use a thermometer at between 195° and 200°
You may need to place a sheet of aluminum foil over the top of the loaf to keep the crown from burning.

Notes____________________________________________________
(I often have to cover with aluminum foil for the last 10 minutes to prevent burning the top crust)
(You can use bread flour if you want, Also, I sometimes use 30% WW flour)
(I use 2% but have used whole, skim and even buttermilk, I have also made this with water in a pinch)
(I have used Honey, brown sugar, Lyle's Golden syrup and molasses)
(I have used margarine, Vegetable oil and olive oil, and lard)

Lets make some bread, No fancy Kitchen Aid required

First the dry.

Now the wet

10.65 Ounces is about 1 and 1/4 cups

Nuke it to get it warm. But be careful not to get it too hot.

3Tbsp butter

Melt it in your warm milk, Should look something like this.

Now, Everybody into the pool. and mix with a spoon until the liquid is absorbed.

Dump onto the board and work just enough to get it incorporated.

Then let it rest 5 minutes and then knead for 5 minutes

You should end up with a lovely smooth, soft, not sticky ball of dough.

Proof it

Deflate and pan.

Can you see where I poked it with my finger. It's ready.

Slashed.

Surface tension causes the dough to open at the cut. Can you see the crumb structure even in the raw dough?

Nothing left but to put in a 325° oven. It bakes for about 25 minutes but I don't watch the clock, When it looks done I check it with a thermometer.

This loaf is so tall that I have to cover it with foil for the first 10 minutes to keep it from burning on top. Maybe if I had a bigger oven, but even with the rack on the lowest setting it still will burn if I am not careful.

Wow, Talk about oven spring!

and the requisite crumb shot...