The Fresh Loaf

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Isand66's picture
Isand66

    This was going to be bread for my wife's stuffing this weekend, but the impending snow storm has postponed our family dinner and the need for stuffing.  Not to mention she informed me she wanted a simple white bread and challah bread anyway, so I will be happy to eat this tasty cheesy, eggy bread all by myself.  No complaints here as this turned out excellent.  This bread tastes like cheese since I mixed both cheddar and Asiago cheese into the dough before it went for its overnight slumber in the fridge.  I think this method really distributes the cheese flavor throughout the entire bread.

I have to say the crust came out nice and chewy and the crumb was open and soft.  This bread is a keeper and is good enough to eat without any additional toppings.

I used my standard trusty AP starter at 65% hydration refreshed per below.

AP Starter

227 grams AP Flour

71 grams AP Seed Starter

151 grams Water at Room Temperature (80-90 degrees F.)

Mix ingredients in a bowl until thoroughly combined.  Cover the bowl and let it sit at room temperature for around 8 hours.  The starter should almost double when ready to proceed.  You can either mix in final dough or put in refrigerator for at most 1 day before using.

Main Dough Ingredients

425 grams AP Starter from above

130 grams First Clear Flour

290 grams European Style Flour (KAF--you can substitute AP or Bread Flour)

100 grams Durum Flour

25 grams Potato Flour

80 grams Grated Cheddar Cheese

40 grams Grated Asiago Cheese

142 grams Whole Egg Beaten (3 large eggs)

262 grams Water at Room Temperature

15  grams Olive Oil

18 grams Seas Salt or Table Salt

Directions

Mix the flours, oil, water (hold back 50 grams for later) and eggs in your mixer or by hand for 1 minute. Let it rest covered in your bowl for 10 minutes.   Next cut the starter into small pieces and put into the bowl on top of the dough and let it rest another 10 minutes covered.  After the autolyse is complete add the salt and the rest of the water as needed and mix for 3 minutes on low to incorporate all the ingredients.  The dough should form a sticky ball at the end of 3 minutes mixing.  Now add the cheese and mix for 1 additional minute to incorporate all of the cheese throughout the dough.  the dough will be rather sticky but resist the urge to add more flour.

Next take the dough out of the bowl and place it a well oiled bowl.  Do several stretch and folds in the bowl and rest the dough uncovered for 10 minutes.  After the rest do several more stretch and folds in the bowl and cover the bowl and let it rest for 10 minutes.  Do one more stretch and fold and let it sit at room temperature covered for 2 hours.  Feel free to do some additional S&F''s to build up more gluten strength.  After 2 hours you can put the dough into the refrigerator for 24 hours or up to 2 days before baking.  I baked the bread about 14 hours later.

The next day (or when ready to bake) let the dough sit out at room temperature for 1.5 - 2  hours.

Next, form the dough into your desired shape and put it in a floured basket  or bowl and let it rise covered for 1.5 to 2 hours or until it passes the poke test.

Score the loaves as desired and prepare your oven for baking with steam.

Set your oven for 500 degrees F. at least 30 minutes before ready to bake.  When ready to bake place the loaves into your on  your oven stone with steam and lower the temperature immediately to 450 degrees.    When the loaf is golden brown and reached an internal temperature of 205 degrees F. you can remove it from the oven.

Let it cool on a wire rack for at least 2 hours before digging in if you can wait that long.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM CLEO, COSMO, LUCY, MISTY AND MOOKIE!

browndog's picture
browndog

 

This is a lovely sourdough, my current favorite. I found the recipe on the now-defunct Dan Lepard forums,  and unfortunately cannot credit the original baker who posted it.  Beautiful golden yellow and with just a bit of a kick from the chilies, you can also add a teaspoon or so of cardamom and fennel for added flavor and interest, but it is utterly charming without. I have assumed in the instructions that you have a basic knowledge of sourdough technique--if not I am happy to field any questions.

I never have got the beautiful open airy crumb that many bakers seem able to produce, but nevertheless this is a tender loaf with an excellent texture, just enough chewiness for your teeth to feel as though they were being useful. I use store brand unbleached or a mix of regular unbleached and one of the higher protein all-purpose flours like King Arthur.

starter {twice refreshed} 240g
water 264g
pumpkin (cooked weight) 320g
strong white flour 840g
salt 18g
sunflower seed 100g
crushed chili

Called Pumpkin Sourdough but any winter squash will do and butternut
squash is particularly nice. Because squash can vary a lot in water content you have to be
prepared to juggle the amount of water in the recipe. Halve and seed squash.
Splash with olive oil, sprinkle with crushed  chili to taste and bake til soft.
Cool. Puree with the water.

Mix and knead using your preferred method. I fold twice at fifty-minute intervals. Bulk fermentation about 4 hours, although it can be a bit lively.
Form into two boules or batards, let rest 15 minutes, shape and set in proofing baskets.
A few sunflower seeds and a sprinkle of crushed chili in the bottom of the basket looks pretty
on the baked loaf.
Prove 3-4 hours or in the refrigerator overnight.
Carefully turn out onto a floured baking sheet. Slash and bake using preferred steaming method. I bake under rinsed stainless steel bowls for 20 minutes, then remove the bowls and another 20 minutes does the trick.
Bake in preheated 440 degree oven for about 40 minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

ars pistorica's picture
ars pistorica

Timing is everything.

Good timing makes a joke work, as bad timing does the same for tragedy.

For bread, though, it means nothing.  Bakers who brag about using long fermentation times puzzle me.  I mean, I know what they mean, but do they?  I, too, am guilty of using this idea when discussing bread.  Why?  It's convenient.  Everybody knows it.  It's an available reference point.

And yet it all means nothing.

Handmade things that take a long time to make are usually thought of as being of a higher quality than a similar product made fast and cheaply on an industrial scale.  Why?  The answer to this question will help us a bit further on.

First, let's talk about time.  What is it?  For our purposes, it's the same thing as dough rheology, the progression from one physical state of being into another, with the possibility of never returning to the previous state.  The tricky thing to pin down, though, is the rate of change, which is consequently affected by the hows and whys of the physical transformation attempting to be measured.

For us, as bakers, time is merely a very long string connecting together a series of snapshots of a dough's state of being.  And, no, I am not about to get Heideggerian.  For me, this offers a better framework by which to understand time.

Some bakers view time as an ingredient.  This is silly.  It is okay to have one cup of thyme, but not one cup of time.  Others, still, insist it is a procedural parameter, which it certainly is.  In a real-world environment, we all have busy lives.  There are only so many hours in the day, and this might dictate our baking schedule.  It is much easier to control time when it is viewed as an outcome, and not as an independent variable.

Fermentation is the change in the physical state of being from a dough and into bread.  There are simply so many controllable variables available to a diligent baker that she might be able to make two loaves of bread, both with nearly identical results, but with vastly different times it took to achieve that end result.  This tells us that time is irrelevant to understanding fermentation.

So, how to we better measure the physical state of our would-be bread?  What tools are available to us to better understand and measure the rate of metabolic activity, the degradation of the dough?  There are many methods already available to the baker (e.g., measuring pH, CO2 production, and so on).  What other data points can we find to build a better, more robust model?

And why does taking a long time by hand necessarily make something better?  Because:  there's simply more time to interact with the substance to be measured, and thus more available data points for an astute baker to collect (with or without her consciously knowing).  Good bread is not about time; it's about doing the right thing at the right time.  It is in our, the baker's, interaction, when and how we handle the dough, from which good bread emerges.

So, let's take our time and find more reference points.  Answer why and we discover how and when.

varda's picture
varda

I didn't do much holiday baking this year mostly because I have had my focus firmly on bread and flour, and the infinite variety that flour, water, salt, and yeast can create.   For my last post of the year, back to my learning bread - the bread that I made over and over and over again for a year before I went on to other things.   Of course what's the fun without variation.   This one is made with a mix of KA AP flour, White Rye, and High Extraction flour.  

The White Rye for reasons I don't understand gives oven spring a boost.  

The High Extraction flour, while containing a fair amount of bran, does nothing to reduce the lightness of the crumb.  

The crust is crisp and crackly.

I thank all of you out there for helping me to learn how to bake, and also for sharing all your wonderful creations.   Here's to a happy new year of baking in 2013!

 

Starter

     

Seed

52

1st feed

2nd feed

Total

Percent

KAAP

30

48

95

173

95%

Whole Rye

1

2

5

8

5%

Water

20

35

69

124

69%

    

306

5.8

      
 

Final

Starter

 

Total

Percent

KAAP

116

158

 

274

43%

Whole Rye

 

8

 

8

1%

High Ex

250

  

250

40%

White Rye

100

  

100

16%

Water

320

114

 

434

69%

Salt

11

  

11

1.7%

Starter

280

   

26%

    

1077

 

Starter factor

0.92

    
      
      

Mix all but salt and starter by hand

   

Autolyse 30 minutes

    

Add starter and salt

    

Mix various speeds in mixer for around half hour

 

note that 16g of KAAP were added during the mix

 

S&F on counter immediately after mix

  

Rest 10 minutes

    

S&F on counter  

    

Rest 10 minutes

    

S&F on counter

    

BF 1.5 hours

     

Cut and preshape

    

Rest 15 minutes

    

Shape into batards and place in couche

  

Proof for 3 hours

    

Slash and bake at 450 for 20 minutes with steam

 

20 minutes without

    

 

SylviaH's picture
SylviaH

Maggie Glezer - Tomcat's Semolina Filone 

 

 

 

I baked with family and friends for the holidays

German Christmas Biscuits/Cookies

These are soooo delicious, full of spicey goodness, coated with two different glazes and topped with sugar crystals for a little extra holiday shine.  I used my candied orange peel finely chopped instead of orange grated, which made a nice touch.  I will definately make more of these.  

 

Think Almond Roca

Took me a while to find this resized photo...sorry for the delay posting :)

May this New Year Coming be blessed for all.  

Sylvia 

 

 

rossnroller's picture
rossnroller

Hi folks. Long time between blog posts for me. Been baking as much as ever but got lazy with taking pics and doing write-ups. I've fallen into a comfortable 3-bake-per-week rhythm cycling through our favourites, which these days are mostly variations on my pain de campagne. I like this rhythm after 3 years of working through scores of different breads. I've found it's a different type of learning, focusing on just a few breads - an incremental progression towards quality and consistency. Nice after all the experimenting, but perhaps not so conducive to regular posting, for me at least.

It's not really bread that has prompted this post. It's jam! Our backyard mulberry tree has delivered us a bumper crop this year, which my partner has turned into the most glorious jams (and cobblers!). Sensational on fresh-baked SD pain de campagne, and what a colour! Thought this was worth sharing:

 

 

 

 

Season's greetings to all.

Ross

JMonkey's picture
JMonkey

Made a loaf of Laurel's Buttermilk Bread today and, as is typical, I simply did two bulk rises before shaping, and then did the final rise in a cooler with a cup of boiling water inside. I also reduced the liquid to about 170g water and 170g buttermilk. The difference, however, is that I completely forgot about it  after shaping and didn't remember that the bread was rising at all until it had proofed for more than 2 hours! Much longer than I ususually let it go.  If my nine-year-old had not reminded me, I'd have let it go until after I got back from the new Corvallis brew pub with my buddy, at which point it would have been an over-risen, imploded mess. 

That said, it actually turned out pretty well! Maybe I should proof it for 2+ hours every time!

 

krasnyja's picture
krasnyja

Decided to start with one of Ken Forkish's easier recipes and made the Saturday Bread.  It turned out pretty good and I would say it is probably the nicest looking bread that I have made on my short journey to bread geekdom.  Finally got the nice rings from my wicker basket (you should have seen some of my past disasters).  I used a czech flour to flour the basket - it was a coarse wheat and I think that made it less sticky than the previous AP I was using (didnt have to add rice flour). 

dmsnyder's picture
dmsnyder

I can't help it. I'm so proud of my son's first bread. A month ago, I visited them for Thanksgiving and left him with some of my sourdough starter. I baked once while there, with Joel watching. Yesterday, he made his first on his own San Joaquin Sourdough.

I aske Joel how it tasted. He said, "Kind of like yours. Great."

Not too shabby, eh?

It's not quite like having another grandchild, but sort of like. 

David

Our Crumb's picture
Our Crumb

According to Floyd's clock, it has been exactly a year since I emerged from lurkdom @ TFL.  So it's a good day to thank our gracious and attentive host for his hospitality at The Loafers' Inn, and as well to thank Floyd's far-flung guests who have enlivened and enriched my bread journey so generously over the past twelve months.

We are pilgrims on separate paths to our uniquely personal leavened Canterburys, all intersecting at Floyd's Inn.  Some arrived long ago yet linger, lurk or share, while others have wandered away leaving rich legacies on the TFL server.  For many, the journey continues, stopping over to trade millers', bolters' and bakers' tales of crust and crumb, lending support in the passing of fellow travelers or their kin, through work changes, retirements, medical challenges, sundry personal crises or merely a distressingly dense crumb or moribund starter.   To paraphrase a poet: You can get almost anything you want at Floyd's TFL Inn.

To my fellow and former travelers on this unexpected but rewarding pilgrimage, from Brisbane to British Columbia, Fresno to Ft Bragg, Arizona to Seattle, Dubai to Newcastle, Massachusetts to Montana, and all points in between....

Thank you all,
     Happy New Year
               Happy Baking in 2013
                              and don't forget the salt.

-Tom

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