The entries for all breads from the World Bread Day event are published!

Breads from all over the world, organized in four different groups, according to the countries -

a lot to see, you can check it out here

http://kochtopf.twoday.net/

In many of the recipes I come across, they call for over night ref.  Is this a "must do" step?I understand the bread will have better flavor but I just dont have the energy to start bread tonigh.  I really want to bake tomorrow.

Thanks

Amanda

I live in the Duluth Superior area and would like to find some one from TFL near me to maybe Get lessons from.  Know any one?

Thanks

Amanda

I am looking to order Flour from KAF's website, but I'm not sure which type to buy. I mostly bake Baguettes, Pizza/Calzone, Foccocia etc.  Is it worth the extra money to spend on the KAF French style and Italian style flours? I was also going to the the Bread and AP for my wife; she likes to make hearth breads, Rolls, Crossants etc. So if its not worth the extra money, then I just won't purchase them.

I have been craving sticky buns.  I usally make my grandmothers recipe.  I cant find the recipe card!  I know! Shame on me!  I am the only one in the family that has the recipe.  I know its in my house somewhere but untill I find it, could some one lend me a recipe.  The rolls were verry light and had lots of caramel on them. 

Thanks

Amanda

Well, I mentioned some time ago that I was considering attending the bread program at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Well, in an attempt to kick-start my career and get out of Ohio, I signed up and off I went. So here I am in Chinatown with aching feet and a big bag of baguettes and batards. I mentioned originally that I was going to blog my experience, and I have begun to do so.

The blog isn't all about bread, but bread is what ties it all together. I'll be doing restaurant reviews, bakery reviews, general NYC fun, and updates on my classes and progress. There are not yet, but there will be soon, pictures to accompany all of these things. Additionally, the layout of the blog needs some work but I'm on it and should have it all worked out soon.

I invite you to stop by my blog, have a read, and please, please leave comments. I will answer any questions I can regarding formulas and techniques if you leave them in the comments section, and I can always ask my instructor things that you wanted to know in the guise of me pretending it was my question! I hope he's not reading this. Sorry, chef!

Thanks, and may your ovens always heat true!

Corey

So, my absolute favorite breakfast is a nice half of a toasted baguette with butter and (preferably homemade) jam. But a close second is pretty much any type of breakfast pastry. Recently, I've been experimenting with using my sourdough starter in a few recipes. In this concoction, I made a basic sourdough recipe, added raisins and dried cranberries. After bulk fermentation, formed into thin worms, which I rolled in cinnamon sugar before forming the knot shape. I'm aiming for just a little sweetness with the sugar dusting, but didn't want to make a sweet dough. I haven't tasted them yet (saving for breakfast tomorrow) but the house smells delicious and I'm pretty excited.

Dough recipe: 1/2 c 100% hydration starter (fed last night), 1.5 c AP flour, 3/4 c white whole wheat flour, 1 1/4 c water, 1/2 c mixed raisins & dried cranberries. Mix & autolize 30 minutes, knead briefly. Then stretch and fold twice, at 20 min intervals. After the second S&F, fold in and knead dried fruit. Let rise until doubled--about 3 hours. Shape as described above (I divided into 6 rolls), then proof 40 minutes, and bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes.

Here are the rolls before going into the oven:

And the final result:

Reinhart's Yeasted Rye was gummy

This weekend I decided to try Reinhart's Yeasted Rye, from Crust & Crumb p.104. I realize sourdough has its advantages when making rye, but the reason I went with the yeasted is that, sadly, my wife doesn't like even the mildest sourness of sourdough. I followed my notes (below in italics) based on that recipe closely. I had to use half high gluten, half medium gluten flour for the bread flour, and used half pumpernickel, half whole rye for the coarse rye. I also brushed the top with an egg white and milk mix, then sprinkled on colorful seeds.

Reinhart's Yeasted Rye: Combine sponge ingredients and ferment, covered, 4 hours, to rise & fall: 126g bread flour, 126g coarse rye flour, 1 tsp instant yeast, 1  c cool water;  After 4 hours, add to sponge: 252g bread flour, 1 TBSP brown sugar or diastatic malt powder (I used the latter), 1.25 tsp salt, ½ tsp IY, 1 TBSP caraway or other seeds, 1 tsp caramel coloring, instant coffee or cocoa powder, optional (I used 1/2 tsp cocoa powder), ¼ c buttermilk (4 TBSP). Mix on low in machine 1 min, then medium a scant 8 minutes; don't overmix. Should be smooth, stretchy, tacky, evenly incorporated. Should windowpane. Ferment covered until double. Shape (e.g. for bread pan), put in greased loaf pan, cover, proof until nearly double; bake in preheated 350°F (177°C) oven for pan bread, with steam, 45-55 min. until internal 195F. Cool on rack 90 mins.

Ok, on my first try I lowered the oven temp slightly (about 170C) in an attempt to get a softer bread, baked 55 mins, and tested to 195F internal so I figured it must be done. I brushed the top with milk to soften the crust, as it was to be sandwich bread. I noticed a slight collapsing of the top crust at that point. I let it cool in the loaf pan 15 mins then tried to turn it out onto a cooling rack, but it started sagging, collapsing slightly.  After 90 mins cooling, I cut a slice and found it was all gummy inside (inedibly so), despite having been very brown on the outside and having reached the requisite internal temp. I doubt I overmixed, as Reinhart calls for a scant 8 mins mixing, and I probably mixed 6 mins, stopping since it seemed smooth and springy and didn't tear when trying to get a windowpane of sorts.  So was this more likely to have been underdone, or to have been that starch attack thing?

I then made a 2nd (successful) attempt, but being more interested in getting a usable sandwich loaf for today's lunch than in doing a proper experiment where only one variable at a time is changed, I moved the rye flour from the sponge to the 2nd stage (and an equiv. amount of bread flour from 2nd stage to sponge), switched from diastatic malt powder to brown sugar, scalded the buttermilk, kept the temp at 177C (i/o 170C), tenting with foil after 15 mins, and baked to 203F internal  instead of 195 internal. I let it cool in the loaf pan half an hour before transferring it to the rack, and there was no sagging or collapsing. After 90 mins cooling, I sliced a piece. The result was a perfect loaf with a perfect crumb, nary a hint of gumminess, and a lovely, light caraway rye flavor.

Now, other than telling me to do sourdough (I understand that the higher acidity of sourdough will inhibit amylase activity in the sub-176F range), what advice do the rye bread gurus have for me? Which of the above bolded changes do you think was most likely responsible for the drastic improvement of the 2nd loaf?

Do you think it was the lower baking temp combined with a non-acidic dough giving more time in the starch-attack temp range which had caused the serious gumminess in loaf #1? Would the presence of diastase have exacerbated this? Would enzymes from unscalded homemade buttermilk exacerbate this? Or is is possible that the loaf was just underdone despite clearly reaching the specified internal temp and being nice and brown on the outside (well, the top)?

I've already succeeded in changing the recipe to produce a successful loaf, but I'd like your input on which change(s) probably helped the most. Thanks in advance! :)  

This isn't a problem - it's just a big conundrum to me, and I'm simply wondering whether anybody can solve it...

The other day, I asked my husband what sort of bread he'd like for me to make the most.  He said a regular loaf - but salty! extra salt!  So I warned him that salt can kill yeast, and at best we'd have a very slow rise, but he said he didn't care - just salty!  (For safety's sake I made another loaf, the same recipe but without extra salt, too!)

So I went ahead with it - taking a basic loaf recipe with white flour, water, scalded milk, butter, sugar - but I upped the salt to about 4 or 5%.  Like I had predicted, the rise was extremely slow and small, both in the dough and the final proof.  I went ahead and popped it in the oven with steam, and it turned out to have excellent oven spring and a nice soft gold crust.  We were pleased.  

But upon the tasting - it was salty enough, perfectly so - but for reasons I simply can't explain, it tasted exactly like the breakfast biscuits we've had in a diner in the United States!  The other loaf tasted like a normal bread.  

Where did the biscuity flavor come from???  Spooky!  I just can't figure it out!  Any hints, ideas?  Thanks!

Maybe it's more of a pain au je ne sais quoi...

After seeing Shiao-Ping's post, "Pain au levain with wine," (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13989/pain-au-levain-wine-60-hydration#comment-86360) and Yozza's wine bread with sesame (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13949/winebaking-part-ii-what-happened#comment-86222) - and simply the sight of their absolutely gorgeous breads, I had no choice but to try it again!  Yozza had excellent recommendations, and Shiao-Ping seemed to have a resounding success with her sourdough starter;Yozza's seemed excellent, as did hers...   Unfortunately, I have never really liked sourdough, so on her recommendation of an alternate starter I tried a slightly different formula...  

Admittedly, I'm an amateur - this was simply improv on my part, probably foolhardy.  Here goes:

I've had great luck with the technique I first learned in Rose's Bread Bible - the method of letting a sponge rise beneath a flour mixture - so going off of some elements of Yozza's bread and Shiao-Ping's sourdough, I tried a variation, though in a smaller loaf.  

Starter:

80 g flour

110 ml warm water

1 tsp sugar

3/4 tsp yeast

Flour mixture, well mixed: 

120 g flour

4 g salt

1/2 tsp yeast

1/2 tsp sugar

And: 20 ml semi-sweet red wine (12.5 %), allowed to "breathe" at room temperature for 2 hours.  

(With the proportion of wine to water, I was trying to imitate Yozza's ratios.)  

In a midsize bowl, I mixed the starter until smooth and soupy, then sprinkled about half of the flour mixture on top and allowed it to ferment for approximately 2 hours, until the starter bubbled through the flour.  

At this time, I measured the wine and set it aside (I wanted to achieve the wine taste, but worried about the potential problems it might cause with the yeast, so I thought that perhaps letting it "breathe" at room temperature during the rising time would balance it out).  

After 2 hours, I began to mix by hand the rest of the flour mixture.  Then, I slowly added the wine.  It made for a very sticky dough, but very elastic and similar to what I have had in a semolina torpedo, with lots of gluten strands.  But there was no purple tone to be seen, and I wished I'd begun with more wine... So with the recklessness of a beginner I mixed about 25 g of flour with a further splash of wine into a paste, and gently kneaded this into the dough.

I allowed the dough to rise on its own at about 70 degrees F, until a depression in the dough rose back on its own.  Then, I softly stretched the dough, like I have with ciabatta, and shaped it into a rectangular loaf.  It was quite sticky, but manageable.  Here's the shaped loaf:

I let it rise for about an hour, while preheating the oven to 230 degrees C (all we have on our oven).  Then, after dusting it with flour, I popped it in on the lowest rack

, with steam.  After ten minutes, I removed the steam and reduced the temperature to 205.  After ten more minutes, the loaf had browned nicely on top, and the thermometer read an internal temperature of 208 F.  

The result:

And taste verdict: not at all bitter, as I had found my previous wine boule!  Not art, exactly, but enjoyable.  The crumb:

Chewy, though it had only a few of the iconic ciabatta holes.  But not nearly enough salt!  The wine taste didn't come through at all, so I am thinking that for the next experiment I'll substitute far more of the hydration with the wine, and adhere far more to the stretching process of some sort of ciabatta-type bread.  Any thoughts, suggestions, advice?  Thanks to Shiao-Ping, Yozza, and everybody!

(p.s. If anybody is interested or bored, there's more pictures of our continuing stages of winemaking on my blog: http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com/)