The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

#4 coffee filter banneton

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

#4 coffee filter banneton

Works great for a 200g of flour mini loaf.   A little flour dusting of a filter (not much sticks to it) and rolling the shaped dough into flour and bottoms up!  

Had accidental yeast water (strawberry) and came out with a nice textured tasty but pale crust.  For the first time in a long long time, the crumb was darker than the crust.   YW-FS in two steps.  First a dough with YW and 100g ap wheat flour,  an little ferment (confession: smelled very fermented) then addition of 3.2g salt plus another 100g flour and water to make a soft medium dough.   A good kneading and short rest.  Shaping and straight into the coffee filter.  Cover with an inverted bowl.

 

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

 

Lechem's picture
Lechem (not verified)

Very innovative. How did you have an accidental yeast water?

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

smelling more like wine than jam.  So....   I added water to it whipping it well and let it sit out to ferment for a few days more.  It did.  When it was smelling nice and yeasty, effervescent and a fine foam collecting on top, I popped it into the fridge For a few more days until I had some time to play.  

I filtered out the seeds and pulp and decided to use the pulp to make the bread above.  Adding more of the thinner yeast water as needed.  I had no idea how long it would take to start rising and so I left it to "autolyse" (normally not done with yeast) a bit too long.  It wasn't flat or sunken upon my return to it but I didn't think it would give me a second rise if I reshaped it.   So I chucked in the salt I had sitting nearby and gave a second measure salt for the next 100g AP flour.  I wanted to see what the yeast would do and taste so I refrained from any additional sugar, oil, malt  or other flours.

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

the crust unless the dough residual sugars were all used up?  450 F with residual sugar and no water present = browning by through caramelization...... one or more of those things was missing?

For a small loaf the coffee filter idea is great - did you dust it with rice flour?

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

resembles the white cloudy dusty crust (for lack of a better word) "burning" we see once in a while.  I baked with no steam and loaded before oven pre-heating was finished.  The whiteness seems concentrated on the upper side and included the exposed scores.  That makes me think it has something to do with the evaporation of alcohol on the surface during baking a particular heat temperature (speed) at which it happens.  The fact that the scores were also white casts little suspicion toward the filter paper.  Perhaps the solid plastic holder prevents some ambient gas exchange with the dough surface that might be more than skin deep.  The white surface does darken a little with application of butter or oil (seen where a buttery finger mark or knife cut the surface) so reflection of light off the surface may be due to flakiness at or just under the surface.  

The bottom of the loaf didn't impress me with browning either.  I remember that after the spring I just kept waiting to see more crust colour adding an extra ten minutes to the 30 minute 225°C bake.  And then more time, eventually removing it.  I didn't want a dried brick.    I set it on a rack and covered it with a bowl to trap in some lost moisture.  Wasn't much left to it by the time hubby and Dolly got to it.  They both were crazy about it.   Did comment on the strange colour.

Dusted the filter with AP wheat flour, same used in the loaf.  Eating this little wedge for breakfast. 

gary.turner's picture
gary.turner

Do you think that the drunken jam might have contributed to the extreme lightness of the bread?

gary

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

I've always wondered how folks got their loaves stuck on the wall and ceiling and now it's happened to me.  This would be a light loaf!  Funny, been using my iPad for this post and now back on the Mac, only the one pic is weightlessly up-side-down.  :)  

Edit:  So, I've turned the photo around.  Things to add...  the loaf was baked in a 28 ltr. mini oven (which gets hot fast, preheats in 12 minutes) on an upside down black enamelled baking sheet (edge of sheet then traps heat under the sheet)  with parchment and no added steam or cover.  Upper and lower coil heat.

Although the loaf was in the oven for what seemed like a total of 45 minutes at 225°C, the crumb and crust were not dried out too hard to eat.  The crumb moist and springy.

gary.turner's picture
gary.turner

Harrumph! There's always the spoilsport that takes flights of fancy and brings them down to earth. :grin:

gary

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

adds flakiness.  I will try a repeat and change something.  Any suggestions?  Maybe try instant  yeast in half and let them rise in the filter holder together side by side.  

Doc.Dough's picture
Doc.Dough

I would check the real temperature of the oven. If it was really at 225°C the bottom surface should toast unless it is 100% rice flour, and even then I would expect to see an edge that was turning.  The fact that it is more dense on the bottom than at the top of the loaf suggests that the baking surface might have been cool (you said you didn't wait for full pre-heat and that may be the root of the problem as the heating element may not keep up with the evaporative cooling).

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

but the odd thing is that the spring occurred within reasonable time so I figured it was hot enough not to add preheat time to the baking time. I often pull up a chair to watch.  The more sprung part of the loaf is not shown but the same whitish surface.  The only browning on the bottom is a small circle that touched the baking sheet after I removed the parchment when rotating the loaf half way thru the bake.  I usually see a bit of browning at that time.  My parchment paper is still light with no markings from the loaf.  The loaf smelled done at the time and tastes like it browned some, I just can't see it.  (It doesn't taste of strawberries in case anyone was wondering, or wine.  I didn't expect it to.)    

I'm going to try to repeat everything the same but wait for the preheat to finish.  ...and check the temps as the oven preheats and bakes.  

Tell me more about "evaporative cooling," please.    

Doc.Dough's picture
Doc.Dough

You have a loaf that weighs about 320g at oven entry and loses 15% of that during the bake.

That is a total of 48g of water that evaporates from the loaf during the time it is in the oven.

It takes 970 BTU/lb or 2.13 BTU/gm to evaporate the water so you expend a little over 100 BTU of energy in the process. That converts to about 30 watt hrs which you can allocate over the oven time to reduce the effective power consumption of the oven (30 min bake = reduce the rated oven power by 60 watts).  If you fully preheat, you store more energy in the oven which you get back during the bake or at least don't have to make up during the bake.

I don't know if that is enough to account for what appears to be a very cool oven, but it is something to think about as a contributing factor.

Another factor to consider is the loss of radiant heat transfer that results from a cooler oven wall.

The Stefan-Boltzmann law governs heat transfer from the oven to the bread and in the differential form looks like this:

Where T1 is oven wall temperature and T2 is the bread temperature.  Note that the heat transfer rate (q) is proportional to the difference between the fourth powers of the absolute temperatures.  It is not (T1-T2)^4!  It is T1^4 - T2^4 which is a really big number when T1 is 250°C (523°K) and T2 is 15°C (288°K). So you are very sensitive to even small reductions in oven wall temperature (which is what pre-heat is all about).

Note - at these temperatures, a 30°C reduction in oven temp produces about a 20% reduction in radiant heat transfer rate and about a 13% reduction in convective heat transfer rate.

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

and it was only 180°C.  Dropped to 150°C after loading. Took ten minutes with this next identical loaf to reach 200°C (setting at 250°C) and the loaf has the same whiteness happening.  The parchment is darker than the loaf.  :-)

Managed to get to 210°C and a little browner.  Removed after 30 min baking.  Rubbed crust with butter to darken.

So it looks like oven temp is a major concern.  Now to study the formula.   Might take me longer than making the loaf or drop kicking the mini oven into the Mekong.  :)