I When mixing recipes that use motherdough I usually:

1.  Break motherdough into ~.5 oz pieces and combine with water

2.  Mix for a minute or two until the dough dissolves a little bit

3.  Add the rest of the ingredients

It occured to me today that perhaps mixing the motherdough with water until it dissolveds could be a mistake.  I am not sure why, but it just seemed wrong.  I have no complaint about the bread I have been making with the motherdough, but it can always be betters.

This recipe is a pretty simple 100% overnight refrigerated preferment, 75% hydration French bread. I've been working on it for awhile... However I am getting this annoying crumb problem, where it develops a nice open crumb around the edges but isn't so good in the middle. Attached is a picture. Any ideas?

JUST A REMINDER

Subject: Asheville Bread Festival March 24th, 2012 

Please be sure to check out the announcement of the Asheville Bread Festival at www.ashevillebreadfestival.com ! 

This year's workshop calendar is posted at the site along with pictures from past festivals and a link to make advance purchases of tickets to the workshop events.  

This will be my third year to attend and my second year as webmaster for the festival.  We have 73 new members on the site since last festival and if you are one of those new members this will be your first email from me.  I don't send out many, maybe one or two a year.  Those emails will let you know when something interesting has been posted, especially news about the next festival. 

Please stop by my table, Bread Technique Inc., and say hello. 

Many Thanks,

Mark Witt

Bread Technique, Inc

Hi,

This is my first post in this forum. I have been following it silently for quite a while and I was impressed with the quality of bread other forum members post here. I also recently bough a Kenwood Major KM020 and I wanted to try it out with a baguette dough.

While I have been living in Dublin for more than 10 years, I am originally from Italy, where there is a long artisan bread tradition, which means I am kind of found of good bread.

I followed the Hamelmann baguette with poolish recipe , with a final round shape

I must admit that I tried to do my best to get a good result

1) Poolish was 100% Flour, 100% Water, 0.2% Fresh yeast, 21 degree fermentation

2) Bulk fermentaion around 23-24 degree

This is a video of the poolish after 12hrs

However the final bread texture did not come up well, as you can see from this picture.

Dou you have any idea of what went wrong?

Many thanks

arguros

How do Bagel shops make onion bagels without burning onion toppings

To date I've come across two recipes that I really like from the bread bakers apprentice, the French bread recipe, and the pain ancienne. The French bread has decent flavor and holds shape wonderfully so it's really easy to make into nice little bagettes (sp?). My only complaint is that the crumb is too fine. The pain ancienne is perfect in every way-amazing flavor, outstanding big crumb, crust is great too- but it's so wet that it would be really hard to form into bagettes so it has a pretty thin cross section as it spreads out a lot. Has anyone done some kind of hybrid? I was thinking of doing a 73% hydration all preferment spin on the French bread recipe. My ideal loaf would have the crumb and taste of the pain ancienne, but have the shape of a traditional French bread bagette.

Hi, i've mentioned before about experiencing some difficulties with baking bread in my new oven, particularly no knead doughs in pots. they always stick to the bottom, and i don't get the same oven spring i used in my previous smaller oven. both are electric with fan. but with the other i could only fit one pot at a time, and baking from cool oven got great results, even with pot breads and never had the problem of loaves sticking.

now, i could fit three pots easy if i wanted to in this oven (im not complaining bout that obviously, lol), but have never achieved results like in my old place.

im wandering if size is the issue?

does anybody have a similar experience? is it only possible to do a bake from a cool oven, if the oven is relatively small?

thanks in advance for any advice, happy baking :)

p.s., i mentioned on another thread recently of an experiment i've got going on, with two mixed up batches of no knead dough to be baked in pots tomorrow. im not sure whether i should rise not preheating the oven, or stick to preheating oven but not DO

How can I stop onion toppings on my bagels from burning. I rehydrate minced onions in boiling water let them sit for a while drain them and place on top of bagel. but they still burn  Should I refrigerate or freeze them. Or maybe its the brand I buy, I just can seem to stop them from burning

Today I did my first high hydration % dough, as I made Peter Reinhard's pain ancienne. This is about 80% water to flour... He says you are better off using a stand mixer, and kind of leaves it at that aside from the same explanation for kneading dough that he gives for the regular French bread. This dough however was a totally different animal! Weighing it out carefully, it hardly resembled the 70% French bread I've made several times... Very sticky and pretty much UN knead able. I just did my best for about 6 minutes by flouring my hands constantly, then threw it in the fridge. Am I doing it wrong or is the gluten going to develop itself through autolysis or something? I love rustic breads with large crumb so I can see myself running into this problem frequently... And I do have a stand mixer its just 8000 miles away, so I'm not going to buy another one.

Hi there

I have been baking sourdough breads on a weekly basis for the last 4 month after a long break from using soudough.

I pretty much like the results (and also my wife...)

I only have one big problem - in the last few bakes, the breas is always torn on it's buttom part.

Today, for example, i baked an 70% hydration of 50% wholw wheat and 50% dark wheat flour(high gluten).

The steps where:

1. Kneading the bread by hand for about 12 minutes until it passed the windowpane test

2. Bulf fermentation at around 21C for 8 hours.

3. Retarding for 11 hours in the fridge

4. Moved the dough to room temp (23c) for 1.5 hours

5. Shaped a batard and proofed in a benneton for 2.5 hours

6. Started baking with steam (poured hot water to baking pan located in the bottom of my over right after puttong thr bread in the oven) at 210c for 15 minutes

7. Removed steam and baked another 25 minutes.

From what i understand, the problem could be:

A. under proofing

B. Maybe i'm not closing the seems good enough on final shaping 

C. maybe i steaming too much/not steaming enough?

Here is a picture of the dough after shaping with the seems up:

From Bread

And this was taken after baking:

From Bread

Do you have any advise? thanks