About two months ago, I decided I wanted to try baking bread.  I began perusing allrecipes.com, a site I have begun using quite extensively since I really began cooking a lot a half year ago.  I found a recipe for "Amish White Bread", and as it had good reviews, I decided to try it, just for a sandwhich bread.  It went very well, considering the fact that I hadn't really taken much time to learn about bread baking.  After the bread had undergone its first rise, I discovered that the outside of the risen dough was a little dry.  After it had proofed, the outside of the dough was again just a little dried out.  I formed the two loaves, popped them in the oven, and had to take them out about ten minutes prior to the end of the prescribed baking time. 

The two problems I encountered came from me allowing the dough to dry out, I believe.  The loaves both had an enormous crack along the side and top, and as I found out when cutting and eating, there was a little portion inside each loaf that was not quite done. 

Now, these didn't prove to be too big of problems, however.  My wife LOVED the bread, despite the very small vein of almost-baked dough.   As for the cracks, although they were more accidental and pronounced than the natural cracking that (often purposely) occurs from the oven spring, they weren't a big deal.

Needless to say, I was hooked, and had to learn more about this (then) mysterious process of baking.  So the next day I went to the local bookstore, bought their only book on bread baking (The Art of Baking), and checked out two books from the library (Daily Bread and Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads).  Within about a week I had read through all three, and here I am...baking away! :)

I would like to find a good video showing someone baking a basic white or white and whole wheat bread without a bread machine.  I really enjoy watching people bake or cook.  I can learn better watching than just reading the steps.  I know there are lots of vidoes out there but am wondering if anyone has found a good one.

Thank you.

 Ginny

I know this is the Fresh Loaf and this isn't a bread, but I just want to share this recipe with you.

The souffle, one of the world's most feared desserts.

You'll need:

Rhubarb compote:

• 100g of rhubarbs (frozen are great), cut into centimetre chunks.
• 25g sugar
• A splash of water

• 100g of good quality white chocolate
• 2 eggs, seperated yolks from whites
• 60g sugar

Other

• Unsalted butter
• Sugar

Instructions:

Butter the inside of your ramekin and refrigerate it.

Make the rhubarb compote: Put the ingredients into a pot, heat it up and let it simmer until it get a somewhat smooth consistency, don't worry if it has a few chunks. Set it to cool.

Melt the chocolate in a water bath, get some water boiling in a pot and place a bowl on top of the pot and place the chocolate in the bowl and wait for it to melt completely. Take the bowl off and let it cool a little.

Whisk the eggwhites with the sugar until they become somewhat stiff, not really stiff, but certainly full of air.

Add the eggyolks and rhubarb compote to the melted chocolate. Make sure the chocolate isn't too hot, so the yolks cook.

By this time you should butter your ramekin again, so it has two layers of butter. Put it back in the fridge.

Carefully mix the eggwhites with the chocolate/rhubarb mix. Gently turn the whites in without knocking any air out of the mixture, little by little.

When all has come together, take out your cool ramekin and pour some sugar into the bowl and pour all the excess sugar out.

Gently spoon the souffle dough into the bowl, make sure not to get any dough on the edges or knocking any air out. Fill up the bowl all the way up and use a knife to make the surface completely even. Use the tip of your thumb to clean the edges of the bowl, so the souffle has no resistance at all when rising.

Your oven should at this point be at exactly 200 degrees celcius. Place the souffle on a low rack. It is very delicate, so keep an eye on it at all times, it should take about 6-8 minutes for the souffle to rise to it's desirable glory. Watch it.

By the time it's finished it should have risen 1-1½ centimetres over the top of the ramekin and still have a gooey centre.

Bon appetit!

Poolish

250g all purpose flour
250g water
1/16 - 1/8 of a tsp yeast (more if it is cold, less if it is hot)

Mix together and leave for 12 hours.

Dough

300g white bread flour 
130g milk (scalded)
unsalted butter 6g
10g salt
3g instant yeast
a little less than 1/4 tsp of ascorbic acid

[Hydration = 69%]

Scald milk and add butter and salt to it. Stir until dissolved. Allow milk to cool to room temp.  Add to poolish, then add dry ingredients.

Knead for 5mins - rest for 5mins - knead for 5mins. Allow to proof until doubled. A stretch and fold half way through fermentation is necessary not so much for gluten strength, as it is to degas the dough.  Pre-shape. Shape and put into a two pound tin. Let it rise until coming about an inch over the top of the tin. (My tin is a 10x19x11cm 900g loaf tin).

Bake at 230 C with steam for 15 mins and without steam at 190 C for 35 mins. Remove from tin for last 10 mins .

This loaf has a crisp crust and a tender, moist crumb.  It toasts very evenly and makes a good sandwich.  It keeps well, too.

Syd

So... time to try something new and the pictures of the pita breads on the right side of TFL has always appealed to me.

Being European, I had to use some other measurements and didn't bother getting the exactly like the recipe, so here's what I did, inspired by http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/pitabread.

Ingredients: (Made 8 pita breads á 50g)

• 1 dl tepid water
• 15g fresh yeast
• ½ dl plain natural yogurt (I can't seem to stop using this in my creations)
• 5g sea salt
• 5g honey
• 10g olive oil
• 50g durum/semolina flour
• 150g regular wheat baking flour + some for dusting and adding as nessecary.
• Optional: Spices (I used a tiny bit of ground chilli, smoked paprika and ground cilantro)

Mix the yeast with the water, add the yogurt, oil, salt and honey, mix well with a fork, till it's a greyish, oilish mixture.
Add the flour, a little at a time (100g) and stir with the fork as long as it makes sense.

Knead for around 10 mins or so. Let it rise under a luke warm tea towel in a warm place for 30 mins.

Carefully fold and strech the dough, and make a sausage. Cut the dough-sausage into appropriate size lumps, I weighed them and made them 50g. Let the pieces rest and rise for 5 mins.

Use a rolling pin to flatten the dough and hopefully you'll succeed in making them circular as well. Just make it really thin, not paper thin, but 3-5mm thick.

By this time your oven should be really hot (max. heat) and if you have a baking stone (which helps), it should be hot as well. Place the pancake lookalike dough onto the stone and bake them for 3 mins in 200°C or to taste. The breads should blow up like balloons.

Cut them up sidewise and enjoy your pitas.

Filling suggestion:
Garlic and herb roasted shoulder of lamb, sweet corn, tomato, cucumber, salad leaves and hot salsa.

...I'm going to quit blogging now and eat some more...

So in a recent thread I posted a recipe that I based on a bread someone had seen on TV. I just did my best guess, based on provided ingredients and my own experience. 

I figured I should post the results, because it was mostly theoretical, but I believed it would work. The goal was yeasty, soft, fluffy bread, and use of a preferment. 

Here's the recipe, makes eight (8) 92g rolls/buns, or one good-sized loaf of bread...hence BreadBuns!

• 100% hydration starter (sourdough or not) 100g (26.50%)
• All purpose flour 375g (100%)
• Water 218g (58%)
• Brown sugar 38g (10%)
• Salt 10g (2.65%)
• Yeast (instant) 12g (3.30%)
• Melted butter 26g (7%)
• FINAL DOUGH WEIGHT (g) 778g

First, make a 100% hydration starter with 50g flour, 50g water and a pinch of yeast, mix, cover and leave at room temp for at least 6 hrs (or use some existing sourdough starter). In this case, I used some starter that I had around. 

Combine starter with remaining ingredients. This is after 1 minute of mixing at low speed. 

Mix with dough hook for 6 minutes total at KitchenAid speed #2 (low speed); this is the end result: soft, supple, quite smooth and satiny. 

Flatten, then roll into log and/or shape into ball and let rise for 1 hr in warm place, covered. 

Shaped and ready for rising...

In the bucket, ready to rise

After a 1 hour rise, it's doubled.

I decided to shape into 92g rolls, placed in a greased 9x13 pyrex dish:

Cover and let them rise in a warm place for about 1 hour, til doubled. Preheat oven to 400F

Bake for 23 minutes at 350F on middle oven rack.

Here's how they look after 10 minutes, just starting to get a hint of browning.

After the full 23 minutes, they're looking nice and brown. 

Remove from oven, carefully remove from pan and let cool on rack about 10 minutes before devouring. 

Crust and crumb are soft, light, tender and fluffy as expected. I think they could use a bit more brown sugar though, a touch more sweetness for this kind of bread. 

I like to store these in a Ziploc plastic bag to maintain that fluffy softness. Enjoy!

Been experimenting a little lately, and so far this is the recipe I'm most satisfied with. Baked it twice already and it's been amazing both times.

200g wheat flour
200g durum/semolina flour
40g wheat flour - for dusting and adding if it's too sticky.
15g fresh yeast
200g water
15g sugar
5g sea salt
100g plain natural yogurt
25g oil (preferably olive)
40g carrots.

Peel the skin off the carrots and use your peeler to finely slice bits of the carrot. Chop the carrot slices to reasonable pieces, quite small.

Mix the yeast with the tepid water as usual, add the sugar and salt and mix everything. Add the yogurt, make sure it's about room temperature, if it's too cold, microwave it for a few seconds, add the oil as well.

Get your flour in the bowl, add around 100g at a time and mix with a fork for as long as it makes sense. Get your hands in and start the kneading. The entire dough needs to be kneaded for approximately 10 minutes. While kneading add the carrots, little by little, so they get into the dough.

Get the dough into a bowl and let the dough rise for 6 hours (should quadruple). Get the dough out and handle it really carefully, shape it into loaves or rolls and let it rise under a moist lukewarm clean towel for around 2 hours.

Get your oven to maximum temperature, place the bread in and turn the heat down to 200°C. Bake it to taste or until golden brown. If possible spray milk on the loaf/rolls every once in a while. If possible, use steam while baking.

Expect incredibly light, fluffy and tasty bread.

*They are not supposed to be this burned

I've been trying and trying to get my sourdough bread up but have had little success.  The 1-2-3 recipe worked out ok except it was always too gloppy to make anything but ciabatta.  So I started experimenting with different forumlas, twice a day for two weeks. I think I've hit on something and I'd like some of you guys to maybe try it out and see if it works as well for someon else as it does for me.

I maintain two starters...a 100% hydration white and 100% hydration whole wheat.  I used Gold Medal AP Flour for everything, both refreshing the starter and making the dough.  If I want a wheat bread I use the wheat starter in the recipe, the same a white bread.  All ingredients are measured in grams for simplicity's sake.  So here's the formula:

1. part ripe starter

1. part water

2. parts flour

2% salt

Here's my technique.  I take a nice ripe starter and measure out the first part.  Normally I use 150g as a base.  Then I stir in 1 part water (150g) to make a slurry.  To this I add the 2 parts flour (300g) and mix in to incorporate.  I use a fork and my fingers to get everything mixed completely.  After everything is mixed I let it sit for about 20 minutes to autolyse.

After the autolyse I sprinkle in the 2% salt (12g) and give the dough a quick 5 minute knead in the bowl.  Part of this experiment was to cut down on the amount of crap I had to wash and clean up.  After the knead I let rise until doubled.  This could take anywhere from 1-3 hours.

After the dough has doubled, I flour a work surface and scrape out the dough.  It's should be a little on the sticky side but easily workable on the bench.  I've only made batards and baguettes so far, but the dough could probably hold other shapes.  I shape it into a rough oblong, give it a flatten, then do a quick letter fold and let it rest about 10 minutes.  Now a stretch, flatten and make either the baguette or batard.  I have a makeshift couche (read: old napkin) that sometimes doesn't work so well, so I tend to place the formed loaf right onto parchment with a little cornmeal on it.

After the loaf is formed you can do two things,  cover it and let it rise to about doubled.  I use spray oil to lubricate a piece of saran wrap so it won't stick to the loaf.  Again, this takes about 1-3 hours for me, your mileage may vary.  About halfway through the second rise preheat oven to 450.  Steam the oven, slash the loaf and put bread on a stone or cookie sheet.  After five minutes I give the oven another spray for more steam.  After another five minutes I give the bread a turn for even browning and reduce heat to 425 for another 15 minutes or so.  Here's how the white bread turns out...

and here's the wheat...

I've also formed the loaves and retarded overnight in the fridge.  This really brings out the sourdough twang.  I'm also experiemting with the salt percentage, 2% feels too high in some loaves. 

I would appreciate it if someone else could validate this recipe and let me know if it worked out as well for them.  Thanks!

Today I made my first sourdough bread! The starter had been bubbling for almost 11 days now, so I decided to give it a try. At first it didn't rise much. I guess I simply didn't knead it properly in the beginning, but by the time it came out of the oven there was a queue waiting to take a bite out of it. I got the recipe from here.

Here's the loaf when it came out:

And this is the crumb:

My starter is slightly thicker than pancake-batter. Does anyone know any other good recipes that will work with a starter such as mine?

Thanks

Fence

Just a couple of pics of yesterday's loaf.