Help! Firebricks, bannetons and high hydration...
Hello!
I’ve been baking for a few months now and loving it, made some simple yeasted white and white/wholemeal loaves.
I recently changed a few things to up my baking game and am not doing too well...
First change was using a banneton which I’m pretty happy with... my question regarding these is;
I tend to make my loaves with 500g flour but I’m using a banneton for a 1kg dough.
Is this correct? Should I be using a 500g banneton??
Second change was upping the hydration rate. I’m experimenting and I pretty ok at handling wet dough (using Richard Bertinet’s slap/fold kneading method until I get windowpane results).
My third change was buying some firebricks to bake on in my standard domestic oven at home. These were from eBay and I’m a little dubious of them.
First of all they crumble very easily ie. i can crumble the sides of them just using my hands... is this typical of fire bricks??
Second is that my bread has been coming out an awful ‘flying saucer’ type shape which you can see on the picture I’ve attached. What is this?!
Third is that when taking the bread out of the oven, the base of the bread is soft and hardly baked! I preheat the oven for at least 30 minutes too. (I also didn’t have this problem when just baking on a normal metal tray.
Fourth is that the bricks appear to be peeling and leaving a layer of clay in parts of the bread. This is quite frankly disgusting! I am flouring the stones before baking too.
I intend to move on to sourdough breads and get good at that but in the meantime I’d love to master all these basic techniques. I have a sourdough course booked and looking at doing some work experience in a local bakery which I can’t wait for.
in the meantime, is there any simple yeasted wholewheat high hydration recipes someone can reccomend to me that I can keep on practicising before moving on to sourdough breads?
Hope you can help!!
Thankyou!
Jack
My first bread was hamelmans pain rustique. It’s a beautiful creamy white bread made with a poolish and uses an autolyse, a technique you generally use in sourdough making- if I was you I’d concentrate on learning about your dough ie fermenting and proofing characteristics as well as shaping and baking. The rustique is a generous bread when it comes to mistakes so a good one to play with and you can always sub in wholegrain flours....start with 10% and move up. High hydration does not guarantee anything except pain and stress until you’ve mastered the rest...I have the tshirt.
Proper firebricks are dense and really tough. As a guide, a 25mm proper firebrick with standard dimensions of 230 x 115mm weighs 1.35kg.
Sometimes on ebay you might see vermiculite bricks sold as "lightweight firebricks". These are not tough and might well be what you have got. They are insulating and totally unsuitable as a bake stone.
Another option is to use a kiln shelf - a dense, solid material that makes a good bake stone. That's what I use. Needs to be at least 1/2 inch thick, preferably 3/4 inch. Best bought new, to ensure no lead glaze remnants are lurking.
If you are in the UK, Bath Potters Supplies is a good place to get one.
Lance
Yuk. Don't use those firebricks anymore.
Just use a pizza stone and an inverted steel bowl, dutch oven, or black metal roaster w/ lid.
Don't bother with high hydration as a beginner. High hydration isn't a basic technique. It isn't essential, it's just for extra looks and wow factor, but it only does that if you have really solid skills. Otherwise you end up with a pancake. As a beginner it makes the baking process far more technical and difficult than it needs to be.
Your bread's probably coming out undercooked because of the firebricks. Heat can't get to the bottom center of the loaf because the firebricks increase the distance that heat has to travel to get there.
It's coming out in that shape because (I speculate) your hydration is too high for your shaping and gluten forming skills, so it can't hold a round shape. You need serious skills to make a high-hydration loaf hold its shape if you are baking on a flat surface, which is one reason people tend to like dutch ovens for that (they hold the loaf together a bit.) The banneton might be contributing somewhat because part of the purpose of a banneton is to prevent the loaf from spreading out as it rises. If it's too large for the loaf, it will be too shallow and the loaf will spread out more. Just try 850g loaves, that's the standard for a boule as I remember.
Fantastic thank you!
When you say make an 850g loaf... does that mean to use 850g flour??
Also does my 1kg banneton expect a dough with 1kg of flour??
Is 850g with all the ingredients.
A 1kg banneton will take 1kg of dough!
Or 950g - 1kg should be fine too. It doesn't have to be exactly 1kg but don't drop too low as it won't be supporting the dough very well if it's not filled enough. So there is a range of up to 1kg.