Blog posts

Hamburger buns, finally; again

My last journey into the recesses of my memories of pride and egotism brought out many a story of my declarations with respect to hamburger buns. “White bread is easy,” I declared to the world, but my heart having been shattered into a million pieces I return here to accomplish now what I could not then! That subsequent attempt resulting in a consecutive shattering of my heart, I return again undaunted in my quest for a good hamburger bun!

Reinhardts Ciabatta

Ciabatta- 3 small loaves or 2 large

3 1/4 cups of Mature Poolish ready for final dough

3  cups of bread flour

1 3/4 tsps of salt

1 1/2 tsp of instant yeast

6 tab to 3/4 cup of water room temp

In mixing bowl add poolish with all of the ingredients.  Blend well til flour is hydrated well. Continue to mix for 5 minutes with paddle, til dough comes away from the sides.  This is very sticky dough, if it isn’t you need more water.  They suggest starting with 6 tab and up to 3/4 cup of water.  I used it all.

Last night brought the fourth in this series of attempts to bake a proper loaf of this wonderful tasting bread.  In short, this bake offered only incremental improvement over previous efforts, but the essential problem still remains unresolved.  In this bake one of the two loaves promptly caved in upon removal from the baking pans for cooling.  This happened within 60 to 90 seconds of removing the loaves from the pan.  It happens quickly enough that you can watch the sides pull in.  In this bake, however, only one of the loaves did this.  That might be progress

Sending this to Yeastspotting.

Index for my blog entries

Been clearing up old files on my PC and found photos of breads I baked ages ago and had comletely forgotten about….. One of them was Tartine’s Basic Country Bread.

I baked this recipe for the third time tonight, and I am still scratching my head.   For this iteration I made the following adjustments:

1)  Reduced the malt to 10 grams, based on Eric Hanner's parallel bake comments and results here.
2)  Reduced my mixing time to 10 minutes to reduce the level of dough development.
3)  Added a wire rack to the middle of my oven to avoid baking directly on my quarry tiles.

Here is the fourth (!) installment of my breadmaking tutorials. As always, your input is appreciated! Please see Ovenmitts Blog at www.ovenmittsblog.wordpress.com for the whole post!

Breadmaking 104 - Bakers' Percentages

So many people ask, “What’s up with these bakers’ percentages?? How does one loaf of bread make 175%?!”

“Rossisky” using the Three Stage Auerman Process; Pain au Levain using Rye Sour and Wheat Leavens; Panned “Wholewheat-style” Loaves with mixed leavens.