Trying again after the salt fiasco
Today I baked four pan loaves of Vermont Sourdough with whole wheat. This time I just mixed the levain, flours and water to they were well mixed and looked like mashed potatoes. After a one hour autolyse at 70F I added fine salt and kneaded for about ten minutes. I noticed more strength in this dough. It is possible that the whole wheat was a bit coarser than usual since I had it apart a couple to clean out the rye. My wife is not a rye fan. The dough could possibly used more water but not much.
I folded the dough twice at 50 minute intervals per the instructions in the book. I used wet hands to help with the sticky dough and to help a bit with moisture. At the end of 2 1/2 hours the dough looked good. I divided it into four 20+ oz loaves and shaped them for the pans. They did their final fermentation for 2 1/2 hours in the pans.
I preheated the oven to 425F this time and misted water on the loaves and into the oven. This was not a serious attempt at steaming but just to see if I could make the crust a bit darker and crisper.
The recipe was modified to provided about 84 ounces of dough, reduce the salt content to 1.75% and to bake in pans I used the last of a starter I was discontinuing and the rest was from a AP flour culture I have. I now just have rye and AP cultures but they all shared a common source. The whole wheat was hard red turkey wheat that I milled right before using it.
Impression. Salt content is correct for my wife and I but perhaps too light for some. Almost no sour flavor. The crumb feels like sourdough but the bread is lightly flavored. Good for sandwiches of all types.
I'll see if I can post a picture of the crust. Thanks again for the help.
levain or salt in it. Just dough flour and water. If you put levain in.... it ia a ferment not an autolyse. Why are these loaves so pale? Is it the light? It's like they were under baked or at too low a temperature or both ? Think boldly baked where no baker has gone before - and get the levain out of the autolyse:-) Well done otherwise and getting better all the time.
Happy baking
This appears to be one of those baking terms with an ephemeral meaning.
On page 155 of Bread by J. Hamelman he says "Add all ingredients to the mixing bowl, including the levain, but not the salt......Cover the bowl with plastic and let stand for an autolyse of 20 to 60 minutes. At the end of the autolyse, sprinkle the salt..."
I will not claim that I know the book definition. But J. Hamelman used the term, it was his recipe I was using, so I used it the way he did. Update: I looked up the term in PR's book Whole Grain Breads and he says no preferment. So I'll stop using the term. It's not the first time author's have given different meanings to the same word.
The crust? That's a work in progress. I usually bake in pans and like thinner crusts than is typical in free standing artisan loaves. This is crispier than my previous attempt and it's still thin enough for the bread we eat here at home. I bumped the oven temp up this time and will probably do it again next time.
Agree with DA about "autolyse" - the term existed before Calvel first applied it to bread dough, but in that context I think his definition should be the accepted one since it has a particular meaning that is *distinct* from the fermentation that occurs when levain is included. But if that is a direct quote from Hamelman, there is something else to be sad about here. I don't have the book (yet). Does he REALLY say "add all ingredients to the mixing bowl"? If so... AAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGHHHH! SOLECISM!!!! HURTS MY HEAD! Quick, somebody, get me a copy editor! I adore and revere Hamelman, and I want to weep when my idols turn out to have feet of clay. I know this usage is increasingly prevalent, alas, but that doesn't stop me from cringing every time I see it. I'm a Recipes Into Type girl myself, and to me it is just WRONG to add [ingredient] to [vessel]. You add ingredients to ingredients. If you can't mix 'em together, you can't add 'em to each other. You can't mix flour and bowls together! You can PLACE ingredients in a vessel, or put them in it, or pile them in it, or pour them into it, but you can't ADD them to anything but other ingredients. Every time somebody adds an ingredient to a vessel, kittens and puppies and baby unicorns get stomped on by dinosaurs.
Sigh. Sorry, rant and threadjack over... for now.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/157678#comment-157678
As usual, Pat (Proth5) clears the air.
Also check out the King Arthur Flour baker's formula for Semolina Bread. Again, the liquid levain is added to the autolyse. http://www.kingarthurflour.com/professional/formulas.html
Not to worry. Mr. Hamelman is a Master Baker whose feet are most certainly not made of clay.
... not the technique thing. "Autolyse" is a bit of a hot button and there will never be perfect consensus about it, but that won't stop those of us with opinions from making our noises on the subject. This one verges on Humpty-Dumpty territory - it's about communicating a specific meaning, but it's also a question of "which is to be master."
As for Mr. Hamelman, he is a true artist as well as craftsman, and I could watch his shaping videos on auto-loop for hours on end and never stop learning from them, never get tired of his enormous calm intelligence, his deep intimate understanding of bread, and his quiet charm. (See above re adore and revere.)
The usage I decry obviously doesn't affect the actual content of the recipe, just as a split infinitive doesn't affect meaning (and in fact is not actually WRONG... just clumsy and UGLY). That said, some of the best writers I know benefit greatly from the occasional copy-edit - indeed, the better the writer, the greater the benefit. ;-)
These things let humour into play. He could have written "into the mixing bowl" but you could rant over that too. Maybe just left the bowl out of the sentence. But the mixing bowl appears suddenly in the imagination with the word. There are those who mix on the table top too but they usually mix by hand. So...a mixing machine is involved. :)
My mother told me last night they went out to watch shooting stars. My reply? "Hope you wear some armour."
... is kind of like Athena, right? It just suddenly appears fully-formed, bursting exuberantly out of Zeus's brain. Poof!
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird... it's a plane... it's a FLYING BOWL FULL OF INGREDIENTS!
Yes. I like the way you think. :)
the amount of dough in each pan too. Fill out the pan a bit more. You're getting there! :)
and I need to boldly go into hotter temperatures.
I'll probably do another batch on Sunday. It will most likely be a two loaf batch. I'm thinking of 26 ounces each so that I get a finished 1 1/2 lb loaf from each pan.
Most recipes for artisan breads seem to like about 450-460F. Pan loaves don't seem to bake that hot. My regular bread bakes at 375F. Would 450 be too hot? I'm using the KAF USA pans.
Try it. For a bold bake, you need bold temps.
Don't lump "pan loaves" into one category, it is just a container for shaping. And the colour of a pan does make a difference darker pans will heat the dough faster as will glass pans. If you mean sweetened loaves, yes, loaves containing sugar in the dough and other easily burnable ingredients do need a lower temperature so that they bake through before getting too much crust colour.
Your recipe ingredients should tell you the baking temperature of your loaf. Lean loaves w/o added sugar and fats tend to be baked higher.
that when I used Pyrex a few years back I baked at a lower temperature. I now use either the USA Pans or Bakedeco pans. Both of which are silver in color. I have noticed that when I make a light whole wheat loaf without sugar the rust is lighter in color than when sugar is added. I'm trying to keep the crust thin and chewable. I and a lot of my co-workers are older and some crusts are just too hard to enjoy in sandwiches.
I'm thinking of doing the rye version again Sunday if I have time. I will increase the amount of dough in the pan and increase the heat to see what I get. I may even add steam. I'm not sure if these loaves will benefit from it or not.
Thanks for the advice.
If you really want to confuse things, I came from a wine/beer fermenting background before I got into bread. Autolysis is a term for when you let the beer/wine sit on the yeast (which floats to the bottom) post fermentation, sometimes causing faults. This is especally disilked in beer, and wine it can sometimes be a fault, other times desirable.