After several nasty results years ago, I attempted yet again to bake a decent bread. I have had massive success...

I use a very wet dough and bake at 425 degrees for 30 minutes, then turn it for another 15-20 minutes.

Just one problem...

Obtaining the optimum temp of 200 degrees.  I do one of two things...take it out about 198 degrees, or leave it in for what seems forever and if I'm lucky it reaches 200 degrees.

What should I do...lower the temp for longer or raise it.

Today, since I normally use a very wet dough I attempted to bake it in a pot. I read that the temp should be about 210. Still I couldn't reach 200, much less 210. The second loaf is baking now.  The first turned out great, I took it out at 198.

Same question...higher temp or lower temp for longer? AND...why 210?

Thanks. 

I am a baker at a local restaurant. I do both the desserts and the breads, with much more experience in the pastry department than the breads. This has not caused any issue until this past week. The hoagies I am making are having issues. It recently got cold here  so the kitchen has gotten colder, as they do not put the heat on in the kitchen. Also, I just found out out that my manager recently dropped the temeperature of the walk-in. I store my hoagie dough in the walk-in, as I make a big batch twice a week and just pull out what I need each day. In this past week I have had lack luster hoagies, and twice where I had dough that got very sticky and refused to rise, at all. I looked at the walk-in temperature this morning and it was sitting at about 36 degrees farenheit, before people started moving in and out of it. Could this low temperature of the walk-in be causing my hoagie dough woahs? Or is there another culprit that I need to look into?

I know there is a lot of literature out there, including on TFL, but sometimes I feel like the more I know, the less I know :)) so if anyone wants to chime in (the venerable Debra Wink??), please feel free.

I've noticed a change in my starter's behaviour when I refrigerate it for storage. First off, I must say the feeding can be erratic because I do not have the luxury of baking every weekend. So this is not a stable, fed regularly, counter-top one. My method for storing starter in fridge: I make more starter than what I need for baking (usually refreshed twice or more), take sth like 20g, feed it in a 1:1:1 ratio, leave it outside (temp can vary from 25-31 celsius, I know that's a lot of diff but I figure it doesn't matter as much because it will be spending most of its time in the fridge), then in it goes into the fridge for abt a week, sometimes more.

Previously, there would be 2-3 days when nothing seems to be happening. Then it starts growing ever so slowly but steadily, to almost double the volume, before drooping. The smell will be a pleasant and mild sour. I liked this because it enabled me to stretch out the storage period to roughly a week before its refreshment for baking. All quite neat.

Lately, however, I've noticed that it kicks in very fast. From day 1 in the fridge it starts to grow, but only grows by about a third before it starts to recede and pull back. Also it is almost odourless.

IF, and that's a big if, my understanding is correct, yeast is less affected by cold than bacteria. So is it correct to assume that the yeast is what is propelling the growth, and that somehow the bacteria is now less active (which also explains the relative lack of smell), and that with the less active bacteria to break down the sugars in the starch, the yeast can only go so far??? At this pt, I can imagine Dr Wink and the other mavens  cringing at my simplistic summation :))

What HAS changed is that a few of my recent feeds have been using organic WW flour, although the last two have been non-organic non-WW. Is there a correlation??

Very fascinating all this. So many variables, so many factors... I won't forget how once, somehow, for the briefest stretch, through a combination of god knows what factors, my starter had the most wonderful floral and creamy, and yes, almost even buttery, smell. Alas I didn't seize on it nor prolong the conditions that led to this, and soon it petered out.. Such alchemy.

Hi all,
Question about baking temperatures.
Suppose we take two types of bread dough.
Dough #1. Typical French Bread  type of dough made with High Gluten Flour 100%, Water 68%, Yeast 1%, Salt 2%
Dough #2, Standard Hoagie bun or Dinner roll: Flour, Milk, Water, Eggs, Sugar, Oil, Salt
What would happen to both of these types of dough if they were baked at:
350 degrees?
400 degrees?
450 degrees?
    (I know the answer for dough #1 in this range)
500 and higher?
My main question is can I bake either of these doughs at 350 degrees?

Thanks

I've been trying in vain to bake french bread here in the Philippines and it has never turned out to be anything worth eating. It always ends up yeasty, hard/rubber-like and small! Would shortening the rising time or decreasing the yeast amount work?

Some details:
-instant yeast was used
-slamming was employed for the kneading
-the dough was given 2-4 hours for the first rise, 1-2 hours for the second, and 1-1/2 hours for the final rise
-the typical temperature around here is 36 C or roughly 97 F
-there was difficulty slashing the loaves because it sticks and it doesn't rise much in the oven

I am able to control the temperature of my sourdough loaves for overnight retarding and proofing and I wanted to get everyone's opinion of what you think the best temperature is and why. There has been a bunch of recent thoughts and discussion on this circulating in books and whatnot and I wanted to put this question out there to the masters.

Thanks!

Nick

Since the liquids in nearly every dough need to be tempered, I went looking for some straight forward, repeatable method to get the temperature I wanted. My answer was to use the microwave. The next step was to figure out how to get the right time for any mass of water or milk, and for any temperature change.

We can see that the time required (Sec) is proportional to the mass of the water (M) and to the change in temperature (ΔT), multiplied by some constant (C). 

M × ΔT = C × Sec

Rearranging to solve for the time; Sec = M × ΔT / C

With my microwave oven, the constant is 312.5 for weight in grams and temp in Fahrenheit. There's a kink in the formula though. My oven requires about 3 seconds to come up to speed, so I add that to the calculated time. For example, let's say I have 350g of  40F milk from the frig that needs to be 65F for an intensively mixed Vienna style dough. I need to raise the temp by 25F, so 350×25/312.5+3 yields 31sec to raise the temp to 65F.

How do you find your magic number? Measure some water, say in the 300-450g range. Take its temperature, and zap it for some reasonable time, e.g. 30 seconds. Measure the temp. Repeat with the same weight of water, for a different length of time. Plot the two tests on graph paper (or use a spreadsheet or graphing calculator), and extend the line through the points to where it crosses the zero temperature change line. Where it intercepts the zero temp, the time line will have some small value. That's your start-up time. Now multiply the weight of the liquid by the temperature change and divide by the time less the start-up time. For example, 350 × 25 / (31 - 3) = 312.5 Notice that that is from my own earlier example. Do the math on your other test(s). The C values should closely agree.

Once you have your magic number, any weight of water or milk and any (upward) temperature adjustment will provide the zapping time for your microwave.

cheers,

gary

I have a double whammy here.

Alright so I've been making bread lately (along with everyone else in the forum), and I've been having a few problems, about scoring bread, and refrigerating bread. First, about the scoring, i use our biggest knife, and spray it with pam, but it still get a lackluster score in the bread and ends up deflating it. Any help?

Second, about the refrigeration, I think my refrigerator may be too cold to have dough ferment in it because it's about 5-7 degrees celsius. However, it may have being the leavening agent that i used that stopped it from rising. Any help?

Thanks.

Hi Everyone

I just finished baking a Light Whole Wheat loaf from "Artizan bread in 5 minutes" and the result was not so good :-(

I have an automatic gas oven (gas oven controlled by electrical censor that will turn off the gas automatically once desired temperature is reached)

I have the oven lined with baking stone and i preheat the oven at 230'C (450'F) for 40 minutes before I put the loaf in.

I adjust BOTH the upper heat (flame) and lower heat at 230'C while preheating, and i also put a small oven thermometer inside the oven to double check the temperature. After around 20 mins of preheating and the small oven thermometer registered only 200'C, the censor turns off the gas.... I then assume that the censor is not accurate and then manually increase the oven temperature setting to 270'C. The censor then turned the gas back on and continue heating the oven until it reached the desirable 230'C as shown on a small oven thermometer.

I steamed the oven and put the bread in WITHOUT decreasing the temperature setting of both upper and lower flame. (now set at 270'C although the oven thermometer still registered only 230'C) I baked the loaf for 35 minutes until the internal temperature of the loaf is 200'F then take it out of the oven to find that the top of the loaf was burned!

My questions are...

1. Should I trust the built-in censors or the small oven thermometer that i put inside???

2. Was the upper heat (flame) was too high during baking?

3. Do you usually have to turn on the upper heat during baking, or it is only needed in pre-heating??? And if I turn the upper heat off during baking, can I achieve a beautiful colour crust?

4. I feel that the loaf was a bit doughy...although the internal temp is 200'C! What could I have done wrong???

Thank you everyone!

Fay

It's commonplace to recommend turning down the temperature from 500 to 450 when the proofed loaf is put in the oven. Why do we do that? In a WFO, you don't do that, and I would expect that in a commercial deck oven you wouldn't either. Is it to simulate a stone hearth which might be hotter than the air in the oven? I don't think so.

I think turning the heat down is to prevent the top element from coming on when the door is opened, ice cubes inserted, and a few pounds of room temperature dough added. The stone adds thermal mass, but the oven thermostat isn't sensing the stone (which is probably masked from the sensor by the bread anyway), so the heating elements turn on at full blast to correct the temperature, and the top of the bread gets a lot hotter than 500 due to the red-hot element just inches away from it. Turning the temperature down is exactly the same as turning off the oven for a period of time, till the oven has reached equilibrium at the new set point. The bread bakes from the retained heat of the oven in that critical first minutes in the oven. 

That is one reason that the cloche, the no-knead casserole, and Susan's pyrex bowl produce such good bread. No burning. The other (and probably the main) reason is that they trap the humidity of the bread as it heats and keep the outer layer of the bread gelatinized and prevent the slashes from hardening too soon. Without the cover, you need to turn the oven off for a bit to prevent burning.

Ovens have different cooling rates, just as they have different heating rates. My present oven is very well insulated, and I'm certain that old ovens cool off pretty quickly, so they would cook at a lower temperature than mine. I think more consistent results would be obtained by using a cover for the first part of the bake, and just baking at the desired temperature.