November 5, 2014 - 6:34pm
troubleshooting boules
The Serious Eats website has recently been featuring a column on bread baking - of all things! Today's topic is troubleshooting the "workhorse loaf". And definitely worth a read. Invaluable pictures accompany the text.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/troubleshoot-bad-bread-messed-up-loaf.html
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is the one they calim is just right and for a white bread, it has tiny uniform holes and isn't sour. Guess their best, perfect loaf, wasn't even a half decent SD bread :-) Sorry....... couldn't resist but... commercial yeast bread isn't really a good test of what great bread baking should be.
The seriouseats.com website has some valuable food background, food deconstruction detail and general information as well as a lot of fluff stuff. I see this series about bread baking as an intro over the course of maybe six weekly installments, so far. According to the author:
"In our next post, we're going to start deconstructing the workhorse loaf, and talk about what it means to pre-ferment flour, which starts us on our path toward wild yeast, sourdough, and other weird stuff. Along the way, I'll be sure to talk a little more about the practice of salvaging goof ups..".
I particularly like the author's line: "Making bread is amazing because it's both very simple and very hard to do". And I like the photos of the crumb and him pointing out the issues with each. We don't see that very often in such detail.
We all had to start somewhere, and so this is a good intro series for the readers of that website who want to get going. So this first series of columns isn't about great bread baking, but instead about bread baking.
with what they presented - it all made sense except that bread shouldn't be sour and the flattest loaf was deemed the best. They probably tried to find a taller loaf but the crumb probably sucked which proves how hard bread is to make and the best and perfect is always just far enough away.