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Over the last few weeks I have been experimenting with making different styles and recipes for baguettes.  A couple of weeks ago I tried TxFarmer's 36 hour sourdough version but I had some issues transferring the rested baguettes to my oven and the results were less than stellar.  This time I decided to concentrate on a recipe from Dave Snyder for his "Rustic Sourdough Baguettes after Phillipe Gosselin".  This recipe is also similar to Peter Reinhart's formula for Pain a l' Ancienne from The Bread Bakers Apprentice where he uses yeast and no starter.

I wanted to give Dave's recipe a try using Yeast Water instead of a sourdough starter and I also wanted to incorporate some Durum flour into the mix.  I created a Durum Yeast Water starter over 3 builds and also used some KAF French Style flour in the final dough which is medium protein, high ash flour which is supposed to mimic the flour used in France for their world-famous baguettes.

The only mistake I made on this recipe was the forming of the baguettes.  I knew I should have re-read the directions from TBBA but I was too lazy and paid the price.  I didn't use nearly enough flour to control the extremely wet 75% dough and had a difficult time forming them into baguettes without man-handling them.  The final result turned out pretty good with a nice open crumb and sweet nutty flavor.  Keep in mind this dough is very wet and is not meant to form the baguettes in the normal fashion.  You basically just pat the dough out into a rough rectangle and cut 3-4 strip and carefully stretch them out to form a baguette.

Procedure

Yeast Water Starter Build 1

60 grams Durum  Flour (KAF)

60 grams Yeast Water Starter

Mix the flour and Yeast Water in a bowl until thoroughly combined.  Cover the bowl and let it sit at room temperature for around 4 hours.  The starter should almost double when ready to proceed to build 2.

Build 2

Add ingredients below to starter from above and mix until incorporated.  Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 4 hours.

100 grams Durum Flour

100 grams Yeast Water

Build 3

Add flour to starter from above and mix until incorporated.  Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 4 hours or until bubbly and either use immediately or put in the refrigerator for the next day.

60 grams Durum Flour

60 grams Yeast Water

(Note: I made extra starter since I wanted to use this for another bake.  You can cut the amounts down to make the 200 grams needed in the recipe)

Main Dough Ingredients

100 grams Durum Flour

300 grams French Style Flour (You can use AP flour to substitute)

200 grams  Yeast Water Durum Levain from above

275  grams Ice Water

8.75 grams Sea Salt or Table Salt

Procedure

Build your Yeast Water levain the day before you are ready to bake or start in the morning the day before you want to bake the actual baguettes.

The evening before you want to bake, mix the mature levain with the flours and 225 grams of the ice water.  (I measured the water and added a few ice cubes for a minute and then removed the cubes and measured again).  Immediately put the flour mixture in the refrigerator in a covered greased bowl.  (Note: you can follow Dave's original recipe and substitute your 100% hydration sourdough starter for the Yeast Water starter).

The next morning, (Due to my schedule as we took a ride out east to buy some pumpkins and taste some wine I didn't prepare the dough until about 8 PM),  add the salt and 50 grams of ice water to the dough and mix using your hands until all the water is absorbed into the flour.  You will have to squish the dough and the water together for a few minutes until all the water is absorbed.  I did this in the same bowl the dough was resting in the refrigerator in, but you can transfer to a clean oiled bowl if desired.

Cover the bowl with the dough and ferment at room temperature until the dough has doubled in volume which should take around 3 hours.  Every 30 minutes for the first 2 hours do a stretch and fold in the bowl.

About one hour before ready to bake, set your oven for 500 degrees F.and make sure you prepare it for steam.  I have a baking stone on the top shelf and the bottom and use a heavy-duty rimmed baking pan that I pour 1 cup of boiling water into right as I put the loaves into the oven.

After 3 hours or when the dough has doubled, transfer the dough to your well floured work surface (use about 1/2 cup of flour).  Sprinkle more flour onto the top of the  dough if necessary and using a wet dough scraper and wet hands pat the dough out into an oblong .  Be careful not to degas the dough or you will lose all of the nice big open holes you are looking for.  Cut the dough using your metal dough scraper into 4 strips and transfer them with floured hands to a piece of parchment paper on the back of a baking sheet.  Gently coax the dough until it is about 12-14 inches long.  You may need to let it rest for 5 minutes to relax before doing this step.  Score the dough as best as you can.  You may have to dip the blade in ice water between each cut.

When ready to bake place the loaves into your on  your oven stone with steam and lower the temperature immediately to 460 degrees.  It should take around 20 minutes to bake  until the baguettes  are golden brown and reached an internal temperature of 200 - 205 degrees F.

Let the loaves cool down for at least an 20 minutes or so before eating as desired.

The results were pretty good with a nice open crumb and light but crispy crust.  I will certainly try this one again and hopefully follow my own directions about shaping this time!

I'm in the process of starting a new starter.  I decided to try it without raisin water or pineapple juice or anything special, just whole wheat flour and water. 

At the end of day one, no activity but no problem.  Similar after day two.  At the end of day three it smelled nice when opened the cupboard, so I removed the plastic covering the bowl and...

Ew.  

So now I'm trying again using the pineapple juice formula that Debra Wink and SourdoLady recommend.  Hopefully the additional acidity will prevent this from happening again.

In better news, I tried baking crackers the other day.

I didn't exactly nail it but they were better than any crackers I had previously made.  

-Floyd

I just received my delivery from KAF and I wanted to use some of the new flours and ingredients I purchased.  I decided to make a multi-flour bread using white spelt, whole spelt, rye chops (chopped up rye berries) and some black cocoa. The black cocoa is the darkest version you can buy and really turned the dough a beautiful chocolate color.  The final dough was a nice dark color with a chewy crumb that was also just light enough to be perfect.

You don't really taste the cocoa very much but with the  addition of the rye chops and the 2 different spelt flours I was very happy with how the crumb and crust came out.

I used my standard 65% AP starter for this recipe.

Directions

AP Starter

227 grams AP Flour

71 grams AP Seed Starter

151 grams Water at Room Temperature (80-90 degrees F.)

Mix ingredients in a bowl until thoroughly combined.  Cover the bowl and let it sit at room temperature for around 8 hours.  The starter should almost double when ready to proceed.  You can either mix in final dough or put in refrigerator for at most 1 day before using.  If your kitchen is warmer than mine which is usually about 70-72 degrees with my air-conditioning you can proceed sooner.

Main Dough Ingredients

425 grams Refreshed AP Starter (65% hydration) from above

110 grams White Spelt Flour (KAF )

110 grams Whole Spelt Flour (KAF)

300 grams European Style Flour (KAF, you can substitute bread flour with a little whole wheat mixed in)

50 grams Potato Flour (KAF)

70 grams Rye Chops (KAF)

15 grams Dark Cocoa (KAF)

25 grams Olive Oil

16 grams Sea Salt or Table Salt

400 grams Water  (Room temperature)

797 grams Total Flour

551 grams Total Liquid

69% Hydration

Procedure

Mix the flours, dark cocoa and rye chops with the water (leave out about 50 grams for later) in your mixer or by hand for 1 minute. Let it rest covered in your bowl for 20 minutes.   Next cut the starter into small pieces and put in bowl and also add oil, salt and the rest of the water.  Mix for 5 minute to incorporate all the ingredients. I mixed on speed #1 for 3 minutes and speed #2 for 2 minutes.   The dough should have come together in a ball and be tacky but not too sticky.

Next take the dough out of the bowl and place it on your work surface or as in this case place it in an oiled bowl or container.  Do a stretch and fold and rest the dough uncovered for 10 minutes.  After the rest do another stretch and fold and cover the dough and let it rest for 10 minutes.  Do one more stretch and fold and put the dough into a lightly oiled bowl and let it sit at room temperature covered for 2 hours (if it is already in a bowl just make sure to cover it).   After 2 hours you can put the dough into the refrigerator for 24 hours or up to 2 days before baking.  Feel free to do some additional S & F's if you feel it is necessary.  I baked the bread about 24 hours later.

The next day (or when ready to bake) let the dough sit out at room temperature for 2  hours.

Next, form the dough into your desired shape and put them in floured bannetons, bowls or on a baking sheet and let them rise covered for 2 hours or until they pass the poke test.  Just make sure to not let them over-rise.

Score the loaves as desired and prepare your oven for baking with steam.

Set your oven for 500 degrees F. at least 30 minutes before ready to bake.  When ready to bake place the loaves into your on  your oven stone with steam and lower the temperature immediately to 450 degrees.    When both loaves are golden brown and reached an internal temperature of 200 degrees F. you can remove them from the oven.

Let the loaves cool down for at least an 6 hours or so before eating as desired.

Feel free to visit my other blog at www.mookielovesbread.wordpress.com for all of my recipes.

Crust has became damp when cooling stage. what problem? Ever, Excessive amount of steam? Humidity inside the oven is too high, Because the amount of one steam ejected too high (use steam oven)?And the crust does not sound.What Problem?Help me please.

After the last 100% Kamut and 100% spelt bakes, both at 100% hydration, we decided to get bake to more of our normal kind of bread we like so much.

This one is 57% whole grains made up of Kamut, spelt, rye and WW.  The seeds at 20% and include, hemp, chia, pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

We had made some Greek yogurt earlier in the week and wanted to use some of the whey in this bread to help bring out the sour but not so much the whey took over.  The whey made up 20% of the dough liquid but only 14% of the total liquid in this bread.

The SD levain was built over (2) 3 hr and (1) 1 hour build and then refrigerated for 48 hours. The flours were autolysed with everything except the levain and seeds for 3 hours.  The levain was allowed to come to room temperature over and hour and then hand kneaded for 5 minutes into the dough now only minus the seeds.

After resting in an oiled and plastic covered bowl for 20 minutes, 4 sets of S&F’s were performed with a 15 minute rest between them back in the covered bowl.  The seeds were incorporated in stretch and fold #3 and fully distributed in fold #4.

There was only a15 minute ferment after the last S&F and the dough was pre-shaped shaped into a boule and final shape 10 minutes later.  The boule was upended into a rice floured basket seam side up.  The basket was placed in a trash can liner end closed and placed into the fridge for a 12 hour retard.

The mini oven was cranked up475 Fto pre-heat with the bottom of the broiler pan inside.  The boule was un-molded onto parchment that was on the vented top of the broiler pan.  For once it was artfully slashed, ½ C of water was thrown into the bottom of the broiler pan, the bread was covered with stainless steel mixing bowl and the broiler top, parchment, boule and bowl were placed into the bottom of the broiler pan to steam.

After 5 minutes, the temperature was turned down to450 F.  The bread was allowed to steam under the stainless bowl for an additional 15 more minutes - 20 minutes total.  The covering bowl was then removed and the bread was baked another 16 minutes at425 F, convection this time.  The bread was rotated 90 degrees every 4 minutes.  The bread was deemed done when it registered205 F  internal temperature.

The bread was allowed to crisp in the turned off mini oven, door ajar, for 10 more minutes before being moved to cooling rack.

We just love the authentic, taste texture and chew of Stan Ginsberg’s Favorite Bagels that are authentic and just plain delicious any way you want to eat them.  We keep messing with the grains and starters to get what we want in our favorite bagels.

 All the whole grains are in the starter, a new thing we are trying out lately.  The grains were home milled rye, WW and Kamut and make up 17% of the total flours.  We also included a little less than 10% of roasted potato left over from Beer Can Chicken. 

 As usual with out take on bagels, there is some barley malt, red and white malts were included to improve the color and taste of the bagels along with adding the enzymes that break down carbohydrates and starch into sugars that the yeast and bacteria can use to do their thing gas and sour wise.

 We have been using a combo YW and SD starter to build the levains for recent bagels and we did so again this time.  We get a nice moist open crumb with a slight SD tang using a combo starter.

From left to right front - Chia seeds, Sesame, white sesame and Multi - all the prvious plus, black sesame, kosher salt, basil and  nigella seeds.

 We used exactly the same method as last time and baked the bagels off in the mini oven using Sylvia’s steam developed for it.  Our change from Stan’s method is to proof the bagels after forming for 1 hour before refrigerating and we retard them for 24 hours before boiling them.

 These are now our favorite go to bagel and have now met our taste, texture, chew and color criteria.  They are just delicious.  Now there is not reason to go to NY for bagels anymore and it sure is cheaper too.

 Method

We built the YW and SD levain together over (2) 3 hour and (1) 2 hour build and then refrigerated them for 48 hours. Home ground whole wheat berries were used for the starter and accounted for all the whole grains in the final dough.

The flours, salt, mashed potatoes and malts were autolysed for 3 hours and hand mixed into the levain. The stiff dough was kneaded for 10 minutes by hand and then allowed to rest, ferment and develop for a whopping 15 minutes covered with plastic wrap on the counter.

The dough was them divided into (10) 122g pieces, folded into balls and then into 12” tapered, from middle to end, ropes. The ropes were rested for 10 minutes and then formed into bagels by the ‘over the knuckles’ method where the ends were rolled on the counter to seal them together.

The bagels were placed onto a parchment covered and corn meal sprinkled cookie sheet, covered in plastic wrap and refrigerated for 24 hours.

Latest $2 Goodwill purchase yesterday at half price.  It's a 901 - just perfect for an oval shape bread or nice baked chicken. 

After removing the bagels from the fridge, they were immediately simmered for 30 seconds a side in 1 gallon of water with 1 T of barley malt syrup and 1 tsp of baking soda. The wet bagel bottoms were placed on a kitchen towel for 5 seconds after coming out of the water, dunked in the topping of choice and then placed on parchment paper sprinkled with semolina which was on the top cover of the mini ovens broiler.

The mini oven was preheated to 45o F with the rack on the bottom. A 1 cup Pyrex measuring cup with a rolled up dish rag, half full of water, was micro waved until the water boiled. Sylvia’s steaming method was then placed in the middle of the parchment paper between (4) bagels at the corners.

The bagels were steamed for 8 minutes with the heat being turned down to 450 F. At the 8 minute mark the steam was removed, the bagels turned upside down and the rack rotated 180 degrees. The Mini Oven was also turned down to 425 F, convection this time,  at the 8 minute mark too.  After an additional 4 minutes, the bagels were turned 18o degrees on the parchment – still upside down..

At 16 minutes total baking time the bagels were deemed done. They were nicely browned top and bottom and sounded like a drum when tapped on the bottom. They were moved to wire cooling racks until cooled.

Formula

Last weekend had me going.  My work schedule gives me every other Friday off and last weekend was one of my 3-day weekends.  First up, repairing some of the heat and drought damage that my yard suffered.  Lots of weeding and raking and seeding and watering, followed by loudly protesting muscles and joints.  But it's done.  In another week or so I should be seeing new grass growing in areas that were entirely killed.

Saturday was pretty low key, given the ongoing protests mentioned earlier.  Still, I did manage to get in a batch of the NY Deli Rye from the BBA for this week's sandwiches.  Love that stuff!

Sunday afternoon, protests or no, was given over to some further test bakes in preparation for the classes that I will be teaching in a few weeks.  First I mixed up a batch of Bavarian Christmas Braid.  It's a beautiful dough, slightly sweet and redolent of mace and lemon zest.  The almonds and brandy-soaked raisins don't hurt anything, either.  The bread is made up as a small braid stacked on top of a larger braid, which makes for a very pretty loaf.  In the hands of a competent braider, it would be downright beautiful.  After coming out of the oven and cooling slightly, it is drizzled with a light glaze flavored with almond extract.  

Here is how it looked just out of the oven:

And after glazing:

Not being particularly fond of candied cherries, I elected not to garnish the loaves.

While the braid dough was fermenting, I got to work on candying some orange peel that would be needed for some stollen (currently fermenting as I write this).  I'd never done it before and was pleasantly surprised to find how simple it is.  A bit tedious, yes, but not difficult.  Since the Web is rife with instructions, I'll not duplicate them here.  However, I will share some pictures of how they turned out.

Just out of the syrup:

Starting to dredge in sugar:

And all done:

Last but not least, some savory muffins rounded out the day's baking:

Paul

No proofing basket? No problem. Heh.

510 ml of water (which may be slightly less or more, depending on the kind of flour!)
5 teaspoons of salt (Bartender)
2evőkanál powdered sugar
1000 gr flour BL55
5 tablespoons melted butter or margarine
40 g of yeast
+ Sourdough
 
Making Sourdough, 1-2 days before cooking.
 
sourdough:
250 ml water
80 BL 250 gr flour +2 tablespoons bran
½ teaspoon of salt
15 g of yeast

This past week I've acquired two new baking books worth mentioning here.

The first is Home Baked: Nordic Recipes and Techniques for Organic Bread and Pastry by Hanne Risgaard.  Hanne and her husband run Skærtoft Mølle, an organic mill in southern Denmark and home to one of the world's largest bread festivals each fall.

The extended title pretty well sums up the contents of the book: lots of recipes and beautiful photos of Nordic breads prepared with organic whole-grain flour. Whole wheat, spelt, and rye flours all play prominent roles, as do both sourdough and commercial yeast. There are a few more conventional options too like hamburger buns.

Jeffrey Hamelman, who penned the forward, calls attention to the final section of the book entitled "Leftovers." Indeed, some of the ways of using up old bread such as the Rye Bread Layer Cake and the Rye Bread Porridge with Whipped Cream recipes look quite intriguing.

I've not had a chance to bake from Home Baked yet, but this looks to be one of the more substantial baking books coming out this fall and one worth checking out.

The other book I just acquired isn't new but is new to me: Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters.

Andrew Whitley is co-founder of the Real Bread Campaign in the UK and gave the keynote at this year's Kneading Conference West. In his presentation he told compelling stories about his experiences running a small bakery that uses mostly local ingredients and how a local bakery can play a pivotal role in forming a strong rural community.

Bread Matters is one part baking guide like Bread Bakers Apprentice and another part political manifesto along the lines of Omnivore's Dilemma. In it Andrew argues strongly that there is a direct correlation between the reduction in nutritional content -- and the increased use of enzymes as processing aids -- in the increasingly industrialized bread being consumed in Britain and the increase in allergic and negative health issues being experienced throughout society. His articulation of his position is worth hearing, and whether you buy his argument or not the recipes and baking instruction section of this book is substantial and impressive. I've marked a number of pages to come back to once I have a starter going strong again.

A special note for Canadians: I found a copy of Bread Matters this week at a local Indigo bookstore. It was the 2009 edition, hardcover, and in the clearance section. Original retail price $42.99, I got my copy for $9.99! If you check the website you can find out if there are any copies at that price available near you. For under ten bucks, picking up this book was a no-brainer.