kendal roll artisan loaves 2 videos with notes
The Kendal Roll – a new bread making technique that makes it easy to make artisan bread
Your hands can handle the dough without sticking themselves up.
You can easily give the dough the strength to hold its shape without the need for a tin or a banneton.
You can make big volume light weight open soft ‘melt in the mouth’ crumb loaves.
Your loaves will have the thin crisp crusts that cloches, dutch ovens, steam systems etc produce.
You can do all this with the very wet dough used to make artisan bread.
Equipment list: An ordinary oven and an ordinary oven tray
Two small silicon mats
A small bowl of vegetable oil
A weighing scale
A pastry cutter
A roll of kitchen towel
A silicon spatula
A pair of oiled hands
Either a mixer with a dough hook or a bread maker
There are two videos on YouTube:
basicskendalroll shows the power of the kendal roll and goes through the making of two simple kendal rolled cumbrian loaves.
kendalcumbrianloaf shows how to make a range of cumbrian loaves.
The YouTube titles are:
basicskendalroll kendalcumbrianloaf
My contact address is alexredhead42@gmail.com.
My background: site, The Fresh Loaf search: kendalman
Basicskendalroll Notes
The party trick:
I had checked out the camera angle by doing the trick unrecorded. I left the dough for 30 minutes after the trick thinking I would have a totally relaxed piece of dough. I was amazed to find it was not and it ‘froze’ on me on the second kendal roll not the third in the recorded clip. I still do not know what the ‘relaxation’ time is. The dough was a 14% protein supermarket white at 70% hydration just water flour and butter, 400g flour 275g water 24g butter.
The cloche etc:
I make clear that my technique is in addition to current proving techniques, not a replacement. I like the simplicity of the grain style loaves and the pleasure of making them especially the ease with which the dough can be handled to make the round loaves and rough buns
The breadmaker:
The great asset is its repeatability. I know its fixed program routine and notice the very small differences between doughs at the different stages. I could not do this with my mixer. The bread maker does the soak mix and knead with no fuss. If you miss the butter out of the recipe it does get harder to take the dough out of the pan.
I deliberately have just one general recipe, the only thing I change is the hydration and the flour mix.
400g flour 2.5% instant yeast 2% salt 6% butter 2.5% honey (I keep bees). The hydration is in the range 75 to 95%. The butter is in my recipe for keeping purposes, it just happens to be of great non-stick help in the pan.
The mat and vegetable oil:
A silicon surface by itself is insufficient. Handling the dough using oil films is so easy and satisfying. I know the dough will do what I want. I tried to find out how much oil went into the dough. I think it is less than a gramme. I cannot tell it is there. I use either sunflower oil or rice bran oil.
Initial dough spread:
The initial rough log shape on the work surface will spread out a lot over the half hour rising. Very rarely you may need to fold it to keep it on the surface. Do not be tempted to do a kendal roll on the log until the rising period of 30 minutes is reached. There can be crumb problems.
Kendal rolling the dough:
As the hydration increases not only does the gain in strength of the dough fall but the oil film starts to become stickier from the leakage of ‘gluten with water’ into the film. There is no need to work with this high hydration. The open crumb typically occurs around 80% for my doughs. A problem dough shows up in the bread maker pan. Thin dough strips stick to the pan sides and transparent patches of shiny ‘gluten with water’ appear on the bottom of the pan. The dough is sticky to handle.... You can do it but its not worth the effort in terms of crumb quality. If you start at 75% hydration at first then go up by 5%. You are unlikely to have problems
The first loaf:
I had no idea when I first played with kendal rolling that I would end up with a technique that would provide me with light weight big volume loaves with soft open crumbs and crisp crusts. It has taken much longer than I expected to feel secure with what I have done. So my deadline to keep you informed drifted by eight months.
kendalcumbrianloaf notes
All the examples in this video start at the end of the rise after the first kendal roll, so it is a gassy log waiting for the second roll or set of rolls and cuts needed to shape the loaf/bun.
As already mentioned the universal recipe for all my loaves is:
200g to 500g of flour 75 to 90% water 2% salt 6% butter 2% honey 10.5% instant yeast
My bread maker will take 600g of flour. So in theory I could work with over a kilogramme of dough. I would not want to make a single loaf using this much dough since it literally would be more than a handful once all the logs were combined. I can handle a 500g of flour loaf, just. I can easily handle 600g of flour dough as two 300g of flour loaves. I might have a job baking them together in my oven though. I usually work with 400g of flour.
My preferred loaves are granary/ seed/ malt/ wholemeal usually either as the flour comes out of the packet or cut 50:50 with a strong white flour. By strong I mean 13% protein upwards.
I automatically make the first loaf of a new flour at 75% water and 50:50 with a strong white flour then make changes in hydration in 5% steps. As a rough guide ‘out of the packet’ granary grain seed malt dough 75% water, wholemeal (whole wheat) 85% water strong white 80% water french white at 9.7% protein 75% water....the supermarket ‘plain’ flour at 9.7% protein 75% water. I have deliberately not included spelt rye flours etc I have not worked enough with them.
Timeline for loaf preparation and baking:
Add water yeast and flour to pan, operate dough program for 1 minute and use silicon spatula to scrape down pan sides. Leave to soak for 30 minutes.
Add salt honey and butter to surface of dough in pan, restart dough program and wait till dough balls round paddle, 10 to 20 minutes.
Switch off program remove dough from pan onto work surface, squeeze dough into rough log shape in centre of work space. Leave to rise for 30 minutes the dough will spread out a lot.
Refold into log shape and kendal roll, leave for 30 minutes
See the kendalcumbrianloaf video to follow the steps for your bake.
Oven temperature is 200C, all times 50 minutes except for rough buns for 25 minutes.
50 +/- 10 minutes gives you crust thickness control.
