The Fresh Loaf

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May 2, 2020 - 6:16am
Benito's picture
Benito

Purple Sweet Potato Pecan Einkorn Sourdough No. 2

I baked this bread a second time and adjusted what I was doing based on some comments and suggestions I received here and elsewhere.  Because the sweet potato should already be adding sugars to the dough I skipped the diastatic malt.  I also did bulk fermentation at a slightly lower temperature because I thought the last bake could have been a bit overproofed.  I also baked the bread differently based on an idea that Kirsten of FullProofBaking posted.  On the lowest rack I placed a roasting pan with rack and then baked the bread in my Dutch oven on this rack.  This helped shield the bottom while keeping the top of the bread further away from the top of the oven.  As of result of this I didn’t need to shield the top of the bread from burning by covering it and then achieved a more even bake.  I think I will be doing this now going forward.

Before baking I tried to more thoroughly brush off the rice flour and the brushed on a fair amount of water, I hoping to achieve a shinier crust with better blisters.  I didn’t get a shiny crust but I did get better blisters so I will probably do this again in the future.

I will post photos of the crumb once we cut this open but I’m hoping that the crumb will be an improvement from my first bake of this recipe.  Oh another thing I changed, I recently had been wetting the counter when doing final shaping rather than using flour.  I decided to go back to using flour as I thought perhaps the use of water on the counter contributed to a wetter outer skin of the bread which would then decrease the tension achieved when final shaping.  I think that using flour for me works better, because I was able to get better tension this time so I think I’ll go back to this shaping going forward.

 






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May 1, 2020 - 8:30pm
seasidejess's picture
seasidejess

100% Whole Wheat Kamut with Raisin Yeast Water

This is my first venture into baking with Kamut in a while. In the past, I have found this flour challenging, as the gluten needs a lot of time to hydrate, and once hydrated it's a bit weak and very extensible. I adapted this recipe from AnnieT's Semolina Bread recipe here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20044/semolina-bread#comment-138273

I am delighted with this bread: it has a very thin, very crisp, delicate crust, a moist, tender interior, and a nice clean gentle wheat flavor.

I was concerned about the possibility of the gluten breaking down so I chilled the autolyse immediately in hopes of preventing too much early yeast and enzymatic action during the autolyse. This worked really well.

Here's what I did:  

Poolish/Pre-Ferment:

  • 100 grams yeast water,
  • 100 grams hard red whole wheat flour

Mix, leave covered on the counter overnight, refrigerate until needed.

Autolyse

  • 1 cup chilled yeast water,
  • 115 grams fine-milled hard red whole wheat flour, sifted, bran discarded
  • 190 grams fine-milled (twice milled) Kamut flour, plus more to dust

Dough:

  • All of the pre-ferment
  • All of the autolyse
  • 9 grams salt
  • 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Method:

  1. Mix flour, yeast water, and oil together to make a soft, sticky dough. Add more water if the dough isn't soft. Put immediately in the fridge to soak (autolyse) overnight. 
  2. Take dough out of fridge, combine with pre-ferment and salt, and knead for about 5 minutes, until smooth and elastic. Add a little warm water while kneading if needed.  Gently round, place into a lightly oiled bowl and let rise in a warm location until ripe, about an hour and a half.
  3. Turn out, top down, onto a lightly floured surface. Slide your lightly-floured hands, palm down, under dough and lift and gently stretch the dough out, like a pizza dough. Lay the stretched dough down on counter and stretch the edges out too, into a square-ish shape. Press out any large air bubbles. Fold in thirds from the sides, and then again from the top and bottom (letter fold.)
  4. Place back in bowl, seam down, and let rise 20 minutes or so. Repeat step 3 and let rise again for 20 minutes.   
  5. Preheat oven to 425. Shape dough into a batard. Let dough rise until visibly expanded, about a half hour. Don't let it get all the way to the very tender quivery, fully-inflated stage. Place in clay baker, brush off excess flour, score, spray heavily, cover, and place in oven.
  6. After 20 minutes, remove cover and bake another 20 minutes or so, until loaf is browning at edges and the internal temperature registers around 210 Fahrenheit. 

 

Pictures show the hole the thermometer made, alas. 

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May 1, 2020 - 2:57pm
isidore1's picture
isidore1

Sourdough dough too runny after kneading and no rise during cooking.

Hello everyone,

I'm new to making bread and the baking as a whole. With the quarantine i decided to try my luck and make sourdouh bread. After feeding my sourdough for days it was finally ready to be used. I followed the recipe from this video on youtube : 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJpIzr2sCDE&t=228s

 

The ingredients are: 

Ingredients you'll need: Levain- 35g mature sourdough starter (just a little bit from your mother starter) 35g whole wheat flour 35g all purpose flour 70g room temperature water Dough- 804g good bread flour 75g whole wheat flour 740g water @90F/32C 18g fine sea salt

The bread was meant to go to my grandma and i decided to not put salt inside ash she has blood pressure. In the video the guy kneads the dought wit the startes after the autolyse, lets it rest for 30 mintures and then adds the salt and remaining water. At that stage is simply took out the dough and did a few more slap and fold for a few more minutes. The more i did it the glossy surface became stickier and stickier. The dough would stick to my hands and become impossible to remove and as i put it on the table and tried to remove my hands from underneath it, it would stick and stretch all over the place. Eventually i managed to get it in the bowl, let it rise, did the folds and proceeded as intended. The remining process went smoothly. The dough rose, i separated it into 2 loaves and let it rise in the fridge overnight. (~12-14 hours give or take). I did the poke test and the dough was springy to the touch. I preheated my oven and placed them in my dough oven at ~ 250 C (the highest my oven can go). The loaves were well shaped and everything seemed normal. The loaf spread out instead of springing upwards and had a very mild crust inside.

What could have gone wrong ? Is there a way that i over-did the slap and fold ? can that damage the final result ?

 

Tl;dr : i followed this recipe and i can't seem to get what i did wrong. I did autlyse + slap and fold (2 time separated by 2 mintures ) + folds +resting + shaping + rising + dutch oven cooking at 250C. There was no real rise and the the bread just spread out insted of having a nice oven spring.

Thank you for your help :)

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April 30, 2020 - 10:34am
AlisonKay's picture
AlisonKay

Freezing/storing, berries/flour

Having to buy in bulk means I have a lot more flour around than usual and I also got myself a hand mill so bought some berries.

I am planning on freezing the berries for 2 weeks to kill anything in them. I have normal freezer bags with wire ties. Would one be OK, or should I double-wrap them? After that, I plan to bring them to room temp and then transfer to a lock and lock plastic sealed food container (yet to buy, hopefully will arrive in time!). Any thing wrong there?

Re the flour, I'm worrying about bugs there too as I'm storing it for longer than normal. Is the ideal to just keep it in the freezer until I'm ready to use it? I've read a lot of people here do that. If so, are the freezer bags OK for these too? If I don't have room for it all in the freezer, I'm thinking the best solution is tightly sealed containers. Is that right?

Thanks!

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April 29, 2020 - 11:40am
pul's picture
pul

Sourdough using stiff levain

Just wanted to register the results using a stiff levain. I took some of my 100% hydration starter and built the levain in two steps. The first build was also 100% hydration while the second build was a stiff version with hydration around 50%. I think the results have been better than expected based on using AP flour, since it does not have very strong gluten. Let me walk you through the method used:

Ingredients

60 gr stiff levain @ 50% hydration (20 gr water; 40 gr flour)

30 gr whole wheat stone ground flour

30 gr rye

180 gr AP flour

184 gr water

3 gr malt

splash of honey and olive oil

5 gr salt

 

Levain build 1

15 gr water

10 gr starter @ 100% hydration

15 gr flour

Ferment around 8 ~10 hrs (at 21C temperature)

 

Levain build 2

All levain from build 1 (40 gr)

20 gr flour, all mixed well and light kneaded

Ferment for another 8 hours

 

Method

1) cut the stiff levain into small pieces, add water and leave it for 10 min to dissolve and smooth out some of it

2) add all flour, malt, honey, and olive oil. Mix all together and "fermentolize" for 30 min without salt

3) add salt and knead for 1 min; rest for 10 min

4) knead again for a min or two; and rest for another 10 min

5) stretch and fold three times every 30 min apart. In my case I used the double hand method

6) bulk ferment for few hours (about 4 hours or so) until some bubbles show up

7) pre-shape dough and rest for 30 min on the counter

8) final shape, place it in the brot form, and cold proof for few hours (8 hrs in my case) at 6C ~ 7C

9) pre-heat the oven to 250C, load the loaf, steam the oven and bake at 230 C for 15 min, and then remove steam to bake until golden (i baked on a stone and it took about 27 min to reach the point)

Cool down and enjoy. Considering it is not a strong flour with apparent lack of decent gluten, I am quite happy with the results, including oven spring and airy crumb. I believe the stiff levain has contributed to the results and for this reason I wanted to log the results. I plan on building levain in two stages from now on, and use the stiff version to bake.


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April 28, 2020 - 7:44pm
bread1965's picture
bread1965

Fermented Chickpea Bread

A few months ago Hotbake posted this bread: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/61806/fermented-chickpea-sourdough. It looked amazing and it's been bookmarked since. I had some chickpeas and thought to give it a try this week. I didn't have enough chickpeas so I scaled the recipe down a bit and think I used much less water than the original post.

For my records I used : 146g overnight soaked chickpeas, 20g starter and 221g water. I also only have AP flour given quarantine and the run on flours so I tried to make up my own whole wheat flour. I read that whole wheat flour has 14.5% bran, 2.5% germ and 83% endosperm. Lucky for me I had some bran and germ in the freezer so I made up my own whole wheat. So no whole spelt nor dark rye per the original. So I used 328.4g ap flour, 9.2g germ and 26.4g bran to make up a 1/2 AP and 1/2 whole wheat blend total of 365g flour. I added 79g water in addition to the soaker water. 24 hours after the soaker was made (5pm) I made the dough, bulked for 4 hours at 74 and then shaped it into a basket. Into the fridge and baked the next morning about 12 hours later. I think I could have pushed hydration as this was a stiffer dough.

But this turned out to probably be one of the most moist crumbs I've ever made - in a good way, not gummy at all. And very very soft. The crust was nice with a bite but also soft as well. The bread wasn't as aromatic as I was hoping and I felt I could have increased the chickpea content. I think having the rye and spelt with proper bread flour will really dial this in. When life eventually gets back to normal and I can get the right flour I'm definitely making this again. Very nice bread! If you've read this far you really need to give this a try!

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April 28, 2020 - 2:09pm
Our Crumb's picture
Our Crumb

Bulk dress code

I humbly submit this week's baking epiphany: 

The optimal length for bulk fermentation of our house miche can be conveniently reduced to the following dress code:

• When wearing a sweater (UK: "jumper"), then 3 hours @ 78˚F (25˚C)
• When wearing a T-shirt (UK: Arsenal or Chelsea but not ManU), then 2 hours @ 78˚F (25˚C)

The foregoing code applies only to domiciles in which interior temperature varies strongly with the seasons: as low as 53˚F in Winter (sweater temperature) and as high as 85˚F in Summer (Premier League temperature).  We do not subscribe to the belief that a house temperature of, say, 72˚F is a divinely ordained right.  YMMV.

You can Brød & Taylor them all you want, but those bugs know the score, and the kitchen temperature.  So watch the wardrobe, and the dough, then maybe the clock.

Tom

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April 27, 2020 - 3:03pm
rmpc's picture
rmpc

Tips on potential upgrades for better sourdough results

Hi there,

I run a restaurant in Portugal with the current set up for sourdough bread baking:

– Unox Convection Oven XEVC-0711-EPRM (7 trays) with stainless steel baking sheets (no baking stones)
– Ankarsrum Assistent Mixer
– Komo Duett 200 mill

All grains are milled in-house on a daily basis. For our sourdough bread, we use 'barbela', an ancient variety of wheat known to have a much lower gluten content. All flour is sifted, with an extraction rate of around 90%. We don't autolyse, since from our experience the dough seemed to deteriorate right away, becoming really slack. So flour, water, salt and levain are mixed all together in the beginning. Currently, hydration is at around 75% and we bulk ferment for about 4 hours, proofing overnight in the fridge.

Right now we're baking 9-12 loaves per day, scaled at 815 g before shaping.

Some issues we're facing:

  • The Ankarsrum can't really handle more than 5 kg of dough, which means we always need to run two batches of the same dough every day. We feel like this is becoming a cumbersome task (due to repetition), so I'd love to get feedback on this. Is this routine something common to a lot of bakers (split same dough mixing in two or more batches)? Or do most bakers at this level just get a bigger mixer to avoid this? I'd obviously be happy to get a bigger mixer, but this is not the ideal moment for new investments.
  • Our Unox convection oven is driving us crazy. If we bake at 200ºC or above, the dough surface will dry too soon, not allowing for a good oven spring. If we go at 190ºC or less, we get a better oven spring but the crust will come out poor. In both cases, the bottoms are always coming out soft and quite often cracked – probably due to baking on baking sheets (with Teflon-like liners) or to the fact that the dough surface has dried too soon. Also, after a couple of hours, the crust becomes soft, as if the bread had been sitting on the counter for a day or two. What have we tried so far:
    • Pre-heat the baking sheets prior to loading the loaves. Didn't really seem to make a difference. I even took a baking steel from home to test it with the Unox, but the results weren't exactly much better.
    • Cover the loaves with a sheet pan turned upside down to counter the airflow generated by the fan (it's always at the minimum setting, but we can't really switch it off). Didn't make a difference.
    • Place a pan on the bottom of the oven and fill it with boiling water upon loading the loaves. Helps with oven spring, but probably too much (softer crust in the end). Tried this with both 0% and 100% humidity, with similar outcomes.

I know that convection ovens (with an always-on fan) aren't really ideal for bread baking, but this is becoming more and more frustrating every day. We can't really get consistently good results, even when nailing everything else (starter activity, mixing, shaping, etc.). Is there someone working with the same type of oven who can give us tips on how to improve this? (In case you're wondering, the oven was already at the restaurant when we came in)

 

We have analysed several options:

– Getting a proper oven for bread baking. The Rofco B40 would be the main candidate, though it's a costly investment. Are there alternatives to Rofco you would recommend (knowing we're based in Europe)? Space is limited in our kitchen and the Unox is needed for other tasks, so a deck oven isn't really feasible.

– Fitting 3/4 custom-made baking stones to fit our Unox (and help with the broken bottoms)

– Trying to sell the Ankarsrum for a good price and buy a commercial mixer

 

Any other suggestions?

 

All input is appreciated! Thanks.

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April 27, 2020 - 8:45am
OsoOndoBread's picture
OsoOndoBread

Homebrew Store

Hi all,

 

Wondering what type of grains I could use, (I imagine any) from the homebrew store? Lots of wheat of course of varying types, color, flavor and malts as well. Anyone ever done this?

 

Thanks

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April 27, 2020 - 1:33am
Ashy's picture
Ashy

Feed sourdough starter with lime?

Hey everyone ?

 

I watch Birote bread in mexico yesterday and they feed the sourdough starter with Eggs, Suger, Beer and Lime, i looooooooooooove lime so i have my own starter and i wanna feed it with lemons can i? I hope someone help me, im sorry if my English is bad but i try my best ? thank you. 

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