Breaking Bread, an exploration of bread and its many facets.

Hello, Diane, all the breads I have, and will be, baking and sharing on this blog will be baked under identical circumstances to most of the home-baker members of this forum.  This particular loaf was made using one bowl, one digital scale, a below-average electric home oven, a pound-cake tin lined with a dusted tea-towel, a quarter sheet-tray with soaked towels, and two baking stones stacked one atop the other.  Although much of the content I will soon be sharing may get very technical on this blog, all of it will be distilled.  My goal is to show the home baker there is nothing intimidating about bread, and, with some very basic understanding, he or she can began to make bread that tastes exactly as he or she wants without reference to anything other than what he or she has imagined.  It's not terribly hard.

I started as a home baker, too, and I remain one today.

So, I ask you this question:  What kind of bread do you want to make, and what is stopping you from making it, whatever the impediment may be?

"Like Poujauran on crack."

There are numerous ways to achieve blistering, but they all can be best summarised by saying:  use lots of water when mixing, and use as little flour when handling.  High enzymatic (especially proteolytic) and acid activity in the dough both help as well, as does using as whole a grain as possible.  A well-developed and/or well-fermented dough (is there a difference?) really increases your chances.  Most bakers will mistakenly tell you the blisters result from retardation, but this is simply not true.  What they are confusing is that blistering is more common in retarded loaves than in straight, room-temperature doughs because the water activity increases viscosity as the temperature lowers; that is, water becomes thicker and denser as temperatures decrease.  If a dough behaves as though it has less water, then less flour is required to handle it.  Hence, perfect conditions for blistering.  

The doughs I use are extraordinarily wet by commercial standards.  I have had stagiaires from Kayser in Paris struggle and not ever get the hang of these kinds of dough.  Understand, though, that blistering is overrated.  It means nothing about the way a dough was fermented, and that's ultimately what good bread's about.

My salt percentages depend upon the dough-type and function, and the highest amount I use is 2.4% (total flour weight).  Despite what most people on here say, that level is still well within what most humans consider to be "acceptable."  I use very wet, somewhat underdeveloped doughs, and you'll understand why very soon (I'm putting together a massive post on a bread I make, from start to finish with both photographs and explanations, and it will give you a better sense of my approach.)  Salt, being hygroscopic, allows my doughs to "tighten" somewhat, making them somewhat more manageable at room temperature, as I like to use the minimal amount of flour necessary when dividing and shaping.

The only bad thing about this salt-level is that it inhibits lactobacilli activity more than I would like, so I usually aim for a much higher final dough temperature than normal (it also comes from the way I build my leavens, and what temperatures they are at, too).

Please also note that there are some corrections that should be made to the formula above.

Final dough temperature for the starter is 28 degrees Celsius.

I'd prefer this dough to have a bulk-fermentation temperature of 26 degrees Celsius, and for the bulk to take place at an ambient temperature.

Final dough temperature is somewhat irrelevant, as I autolyse all my doughs (with full flour and water) before adding any thing else.  For the way I make this dough in real-life, I usually use a lot longer autolyse (< 12h), all at room temperature.  This is perhaps the biggest key to increased flavour that no one talks about (I just discovered this processing parameter myself while re-reading Claudia Thiele's 2003 dissertation; the implications are enormous).  I have to do some calculations for different flour-types, as well as figure out the desirable thresholds of the related flavour-compounds released, but I suspect that, once done, most bakers on this site will be astounded by the results, flavour-wise.  The only problem with this method is, there are a completely different set of procedures necessary to handle and realise such a "weak," extensible dough, especially in lower-protein flours.

I will, eventually, be doing a how-to for my City loaf, too.  That'll be way-off in the future, though, after I have moved house.

I want to get one up for starters first.

The 23.5°C mentioned above is sort of random, but good eye for detail (please see my reply to Varda's questions about this dough above).  I would prefer an ambient bulk temperature of 25 - 26°C.  If you want the loaf to be higher, dial back the water by 10 - 14%.  For tinier holes, decrease autolyse time to no more than 1h (or just skip it), and shape very tightly coming out of bulk.

I normally use "optimal" temperatures for my leavens, and ambient temperature for my base starter and my bulk-fermentation stages.  I do not retard every dough, either.

But when you say six hours for an autolyse, I'm thinking way longer than that, all at ambient temperature.  I don't have a terrific amount of time, so here's the skinny:

Flavour in bread comes down to the amount of total volatile aromatic compounds present.  These would be anything with odour, i.e., perceived in your nose (versus non-volatile aromatic compounds, some of which can be sensed through other means, like texture or via taste-bud receptors in the mouth).

The types of compounds humans associate with, and also find most desirable in, bread mostly originate as free amino acids endogenous to cereal substrates and cereal enzymatic processes (there are other contributors, but these are the principal ones).  The more free amino acids there are, the greater the total end-amount of volatile aromatic compounds, quite literally as a substance that can be expressed in mg / kg of flour.

Now, Thiele's work is top-notch.  Her stuff is up there with top in this rather limited field, and her dissertation was exploring the effects of sourdough fermentation on proteolytic action, if any, as well as any potential implications for flavour.  So, she set up a bunch of control doughs to determine where certain amino acids originate from, and there's something really interesting buried in her figures:  not only do these flavour-contributing amino acids originate from sources native to the grain, but the highest total amounts of amino acids came from a dough of just flour and water.  More than that, there is a correlative, linear relationship between time and total amino acids produced, with an upward trend continuing and reaching their highest amounts for almost all the amino-acid types produced at the 40-hour mark.

Understand that amino acids are only the seeds of flavour.  They are expressed as flavour via various enzymatic processes; as sourdough microflora metabolic by-products; and, most influentially, during baking.  So, this does in no way provide us a means with "expressing" the flavour potential, but it does give bakers a very easy way to build up total amino-acid counts simply by autolysing for a really, really, really long time.

Just in my experiments in the last week, I have found that a minimum of 12-hours for all doughs pretty much makes bread made with sourdough, like, ridiculously good, by an order of magnitude.  It makes a much bigger difference than six-hours.  Blistering occurs more easily, as does getting that burnished, glossy reddish-brown we all love.  There are downsides to autolysing too long (i.e., much, much longer than 12-hours):  too weak a dough; no fermentation vigor or tolerance; and, most importantly, the build-up of amino-acid counts that are too high.  Many of these amino-acids are precursors for flavours expressed in the crust, and too much of them automatically makes any bake taste of burnt caramel.  I just need to figure out what that maximum-time would be, where we reach the critical level of amino acids and still maintain desirable rheological characteristics.  It's above twelve hours and it's before forty.  We know that much.

(As a side note, I know Malineau's baguettes (in the Marais in Paris) are autolysed for twelve-hours, but I never found them particularly compelling myself.)

(Second side note:  This technique won't work too well with sourdough cultures maintained with an inoculation above about 25%, as native-cereal lactobacilli tend to dominate these sorts of cultures.  A couple of them take abundant amounts of ornithine, one of the amino acids released via this method, and make 'em tasty incredibly and predominantly burnt.  I say this from personal experience as well.)

i am now mixing my autolyse at or before all my levains as well at the same time as my base starter. all mixing at once.

yes it could. it would be negligible.