The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Hello! and my 75% project

cmwaso's picture
cmwaso

Hello! and my 75% project

Hello from Alexandria, Virginia!  I'm a trauma nurse who spends a lot of time stress baking :)  I've had a sourdough starter for the past few years that I've alternately toyed with and neglected in the fridge for weeks on end.  This year it was my new years resolution to learn to handle dough better.  I got inspired after reading Trevor Wilson's "Open Crumb Mastery" to spend less time experimenting with different recipes and more time focusing on technique and dough handling to learn to manipulate my dough for specific results.  So I set an ambitious project for myself and in 2019 I'm baking 365 75% hydration lean loaves to figure out how to make pretty bread!  I've been posting these loaves to instagram to motivate me to keep going. So far I've found out that 1) I have a long ways to go, 2) I'm even more inconsistent than I thought, and 3) all my neighbors appreciate fresh sourdough loaves, even if they're horrifically misshapen.   They've all been supportive but confused.  So here I am looking for bread nerds to tell me I'm not crazy.  Please tell me I haven't slipped off the deep end!

alfanso's picture
alfanso

slipped off the deep end.  If so, you have plenty of company on TFL.  A few years ago one poster asked if it was crazy to pull up a chair and watch the entire bake cycle through the oven glass door.  And whether other people also did so.

As far as misshapen loaves: try to figure out from bake to bake what has changed, if anything.  Keeping notes is not for everyone, but mental notes are important to.  Anything and everything can be a culprit.  Whatever you suspect is in the wrong for that bake, try to minimize any changes from one bake to the next through changing no more than one variable.  That also includes figuring out how to deal with ambient temperatures, whether the room temperature, the post-mix dough temperature or the oven temperature.

There are dozens of ways to do something right, but unfortunately dozens of ways to do the same thing wrong.  Figuring out how to stay on one side of the ledger is important ;-) .

Learning to bake with consistency is not just an exercise in physical motion or movement of your hands to manipulate the dough.  It is also a head game as well.  I've seen a number of posts where folks get all jittery and nervous as they approach the scoring of a loaf before it enters the oven, as well as any other number of factors that may have nothing to do with the actual dough creation itself.

Consistency is a key factor in being successful at baking.  You will find that as you become more skilled, the dough and especially the levain will become more forgiving to any "mistakes" along the way.  Good skills become a valuable compensation for all but the most egregious errors.

In summary - yes, you have a lot of loons to keep you company here on TFL.  Good luck with your mission and ask away and post your progress in words as well as pictures along your journey.

alan

David R's picture
David R

... then it's absolutely certain that something changed to cause that. If you get a different result, and you analyze, and you conclude that nothing changed, it just means that what did change was something you used to think wasn't important.

cmwaso's picture
cmwaso

I've been working on a form to fill out as I go to record weights and formulas, and temp/humidity etc.  I want something that gives me as much information in as small of a time burden for actually doing the recording as possible.  Here's what I've got so far, but I've been tweaking it every few bakes, and I only fill in the parts that are relevant to what I did that day (the whole autolyse or stretch and fold sections occasionally get crossed out).  I'm wondering if any of you have any thoughts on what else I should be recording? 

here's a link to the current iteration of my form https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tQd76LZ-cp7rz0Kx01Q6zuwV3P1Bs7K0D-ITVWUajg8/edit?usp=sharing

And pictures to go with each loaf are being saved to this instagram

https://www.instagram.com/75percentproject/

David R's picture
David R

... to over-think this, I think. ;)

 

A (any) system like this puts so much emphasis on the actions of noting and recording that it's possible to lose sight of the fact that you have a brain, made for just this sort of information.

 

Having the ability to look up some obscure detail on your chart is IMO no substitute for maintaining your awareness and your general sense of how things are going. The chart might be more busy-work, more distraction, than you were hoping it would. Note I said "MAY". If it really is helping, keep it up; but do be skeptical about whether it's helping.

cmwaso's picture
cmwaso

haha I've never been accused of being obsessive or overthinking things before ;)  idk if it's helping or not.  I'll give it a few weeks and keep doing it, or not, or in a greatly altered way, who knows?

Danni3ll3's picture
Danni3ll3

I have to admire you setting yourself such a goal! But unless I am mistaken, that means you plan to bake a loaf every day for a year? Wow! Just wow! It takes me 3 days minimum to make a batch of bread. I don’t know how I would keep track of overlapping batches! 

cmwaso's picture
cmwaso

yeah.  instead of baking one loaf a day, I allow myself to kind of cheat and have a few going at a time, and I made a form to remind me of the different loaves.  But.  I also have been allowing myself to make triple batches and count it as three loaves.  It still feels ambitious, but I admit you could see it as cheating.  It's also been interesting to do so since it's let me see how bad I am at consistently shaping, when the oven spring from two halves of the same dough varies pretty dramatically sometimes.