clas in a thermos
Quick and easy clas!
Mariana wrote that one could just use a thermos for making flas (liquidy relative of clas). It worked and so I found clas in a thermos works too (Nissan stainless steel).
To get it in and out of the thermos easily, I just changed the hydration from 190% to 300%.
The recipe is 25g rye malt flour, 75 gr whole rye flour, 10 g vinegar, 290 gr water (45C).
Warm up the thermos first with some 50C water - 15 min.
Empty that water from the thermos and pour in the "diluted" version (300% not 190% hydration) of clas with a funnel. There is no need for plastic film - Mariana suggested that giving the thermos a shake every few hours would help to avoid mold growth.
Initial temp inside the thermos of this clas was 42-43C; after 24 hr, it was around 37C (pH4).
I froze portions of 200g (50 gr rye flour and 150 g water). This amount will contribute 10% flour in a loaf of 500 total gr (100%) whole grain flour.
I saw no difference in the mixing of the dough and the rise (using 1/2 tsp dry yeast) during bulk was really good.
Being able to freeze clas makes it worthwhile to make a large amount of clas. Then it is ready on demand (after thawing).
This is the loaf just baked (4.5 hr total for prep and bake time). I hope the crumb will be ok but it does feel soft.
PS The final read temp out of the oven was 202.5F. I sliced this morning. The lower part of the bread is missing bubbles but overall so soft ...I'm still working for Yippee's beautiful crumb!
PSS Vinegar above is "white distilled vinegar" - 5% acidity (check product labels).
I love this kind of thing. Freezing batches could really improve convenience.
When you say 200g (50g rye flour and 150g water) did you mean CLAS rather than water?
I'd love to get the formula for your loaf.
Why did you add the rye flour for freezing? Why freeze the higher hydration CLAS?
Hi,
Sorry about the confusion-I did not mean to say that anything was added to the clas when freezing portions. The clas was just made in the thermos and I portioned it in 200 gr amounts. The comment was only parenthetical.
I made the higher hydration clas for 2 reasons:
1- to see if clas in a thermos (which is 300% hydr) worked like the regular clas (190% hydr) in bread (adjusting of course for the difference in water). I increased the hydration because the more water, the better the mixture would hold the temp in the thermos, not to mention that it is would be easier to pour the clas out from rather than scrap it out of the thermos.
2- to see if clas could be made without electric devices-ie without a temp controller/or proofer. It seems that just making clas was an obstacle for some.
Diluted clas has its advantages since the proportions are simpler ones to remember: 25% of diluted clas is flour; 75% of it is water.
If you need to make a recipe where the total flour contributed by clas is 8% of 500 gr total flour, then 8% of 500 = 40gr and so you need 4 times that amount for clas, ie 160 gr of clas. (with 190% hydr clas, you multiply by 2.9 instead of 4).
Well, I am just rambling now!
Hi,
You are right , experiments are really fun!
I froze 200 gr portions of the just made clas from the thermos. [It's made of 50 gr (rye flour in clas) +150 gr (water in clas)]. I let it cool down over a few hours before freezing-someone has mentioned that flas improved through cooling down before refrigerating.
I will work on the recipe for I made some process and temp changes, and they seemed to help.
Thanks for your interest!
Hi Gary,
This is the link at foodgeek. I hope there are no mistakes!
https://fgbc.dk/2ogu
I noticed that you bake in a 1 liter pan. I think mine is around 1500ml- I'll have to fill with water to be sure.
For my pan I usually bake with 500 gr total flour.
I would sure like to get your flas crumb someday.
Thanks for sharing!
Yippee
Hi Yippee,
I will keep trying to get your wonderful crumb in the 100% whole wheat breads. I especially like the chock full of raisins one in the pullman loaf.
Thanks for all the tips you've given. I am still going through the old posts and looking for a detail I am missing. I suspect it is in the dough development. I got an improvement with mixing 2 - 6 min mixes with the Zoji on flour, water, clas, yeast. Then I waited 30 min and did an 8 min mix when I added salt and a bit of water. The max water I add is around 80%.
A question: When you use the vitamixer to grind the flour, are the batches in about 250 gr for say 20-30 sec? Is the temp quite high on the flour afterwards? I usually don't worry about flour temp because the dough temp needs to end at around 30C anyways.
Am waiting for your next creation!
Hi, Jn.
If I remember correctly, the flour reaches ~ high 50C immediately after grinding. After mixing, the dough almost always reaches the perfect temperature for bulk fermentation. So, no complaints from me!
I usually mix the dough in three 10-minute phases with no rest in between. Are you sure your bread is thoroughly baked? I would unmold it near the end of baking and bake it directly on the stone until it taps hollow to see if that helps. Maybe Mariana will give you some other advice. She has solutions for every bread problem we encounter!
Yippee
Yes I get a nice thump! The dough looks and feels smooth and bouncy before the 2hr bulk ferment.
But I will give the direct bake a try. I noticed that if I bake in a couple of smaller pans, then the crumb is better throughout.
Thanks again!!
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/71297/20221020-simple-100-wholewheat-bread-clas
Yippee
What a beautiful loaf :).
Thank you for all the details!! I will certainly work on it.
Can I use pullman lid for steaming?
Spray the dough before putting the lid on. Adjust the dough weight to avoid the "mountain" top being pressed down by the cover after proofing.
Yippee
Well done, Joe! Thank you for reporting your results, beautifully written.👍👍👍
Please, indicate acetic acid % of your vinegar.
Normally, CLAS has pH 3.5-3.8, so you got very close to that value in just 24 hours. Amazing.
Freezing it is ok if you use it as a bread dough acidifier, but to use CLAS in a preferment or in any rye bread baking where its bacteria must work for many hours, add a spoon of maltose (dry or liquid malt extract, rice syrup, barley malt syrup, etc.) and keep it refrigerated for up to two weeks, to make sure its microflora is active.
The next batch might be seeded with a portion of previous CLAS in proportion of 1:9. It will be ready in 8-12 hrs. See if you like it better then.
Hi Mariana,
After thinking about it, are flas and this diluted clas that different?
There are both around 300% hydr.
The differences are:
flas is made totally with rye malt and clas has more reg whole rye.
The temps are 43.5C vs 40C.
The times to make a batch differ by a factor of 2.
I bake usually with 85%+ whole wheat in a recipe so that is in the range for using frozen clas.
(I edited the post above to add that the vinegar is 5% acidity.)
Thanks for the thermos idea-it is handy to make "wireless" clas!
Joe, we do not know. We would have to take both to the lab to compare their microbial composition.
Chemically, they are as different as day and night, or as apples and plums, since one has a strong apple aroma (due to malt, to the enormous % of maltose sugar in it) and another smells like ripe honey plums (due to rye flour), or, in case of Rusbrot's CLAS - as yogurt (according to those who made it, I have never tried one day vinegar acidified CLAS in baking myself. I tried vinegar acidified CLAS method once and it took me over a week to develop a bona fide CLAS).
So, in essence, your question comes down to another question. How powerful is the influence of maltose in lactic acid starter development and, later on, how does that affect bread? Compare your FLAS and your CLAS in bread and you will know.
Another question is that of hydration. Does going from 150-200% hydration to 300% hydration make a difference (in starter or, more importantly, in bread)? I simply do not know. But I do know that stiff and soft rye starters, for example, i.e. 60% and 90% hydration, are very different. Hydration is a powerful factor of selection, it selects different microbes in starters, favoring some and suppressing the development of other species.
I tend to use either sour whey (instead of FLAS) or a small amount of a regular sourdough starter as yeasted bread improvers. They are both full of lactic acid and lactic acid bacteria and shorten the time needed to prepare the bread dough, improve bread flavor and its keeping qualities. But I like FLAS, definitely a great lactic acidifier tested by German brewers for decades.
CLAS is totally not my thing, very tricky, I had only intermittent success with it and I struggled with it for a year trying to master that starter and baking with it (a full year!!!). Other folks have a nice and easy time with it but not me. It's a gorgeous starter, but simply not my thing.
I like that bread that you made, Joe. It's a very good looking loaf! If you do not add dry gluten to the mix, I would suggest to knead it less to reduce crumbleness. It looks a tiny bit overkneaded.
Vinegar is only used to pre-acidity the solution in order to provide an optimal environment for LAB to develop. It’s not used in refreshment. It’s not actually essential to use vinegar to start CLAS, it just increases your likelihood of success. Any actively fermenting vegetative matter that has acidified can also be used accelerate the process.
I agree with everything you said except the "increases your likelihood of success" line. I failed so miserably with vinegar spiked preparations for starters so many times, I cannot even tell. It's like a voodoo for me.
No vinegar ever worked in my starters. Any other acidifier or no acidifier is fine. Works like a charm, starters never fail to develop w/o vinegar 😂 I know it must be a fluke, other people succeed just fine using vinegar in their first step. But no, no vinegar for me.
When I use vinegar in a preferment I always use organic apple cider vinegar with active lab in the bottle. I shake the bottle to get some of the mother mixed in. If you used distilled white vinegar that might have contributed to your issues,
I use just any vinegar I have, and it's never some kind of "real" thing with live cultures. Still works, you don't need the acetic acid bacteria for CLAS. They shouldn't really grow at such high temperatures, actually, anyway, unless you have special thermally adapted strains.
used anything else to prepare a preferment I can only offer what I have known to work for me against what is not working for someone else. As for the fitness of the LAB in ACV, who knows, I just know I'm not alone in it's use.
Unless you are using 5% distilled vinegar you may very well be using a vinegar with a live culture.
I am sure there are some LABs in live vinegars, but generally vinegar is made by acetic acid bacteria, not LABs.
Since ACV is the result of a two stage fermentation process I can't help but wonder if it doesn't have more structure to support additional fermentations than pure acetic acid. Unpasturized ACV is composed of cellulose, yeast and bacteria. While true the primary bacteria is AAB, it's not alone in the mix. ACV has acetic, malic and lactic acids as well as a host of minerals and nutrients.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5620630/
But as I said, all I know is that it has worked for me on the few occasions I used it on the advice of others I thought would offer good advice.
.
mariana,
When you use sourdough starter in a yeasted dough, how much do you add and when do you add it? Do you also reduce the amount of yeast in the recipe?
I like the idea of improving keeping quality of yeasted bread without the sour flavor. It would also be another use for the starter,
Thanks!
Hi!
5-10% of all flour is introduced with the ripe starter, alcophile. No yeast adjustment is necessary.
Rose Levi Beranbaum adds 10% of prefermented flour (2-3oz of ripe stiff starter to 425g of flour for challah) to her straight yeasted dough, for example.
https://www.realbakingwithrose.com/blog/2006/03/27/my_new_favorite_traditional_ch
Lionel Vatinet adds 5-10% of prefermented flour to his yeasted baguette dough.
My own method is different, similar to what Chad Robertson does in his Tartine dough. I mix 50% of all flour with a bit of a ripe starter and water, DDT 30C, and let it sit for 1.5-2 hrs at 25-30C until intensely fragrant but not risen yet, no more than 5-10% increase in volume. Then I mix in the remaining ingredients and yeast. So, I also do 10% of all flour in form of a ripe starter and 50% of all flour in form of a young sd preferment. This allows me to cut total bulk fermentation time of my yeasted doughs from about 2-4 hours to only 20 min. Very suitable for bread machine cycles.
m.
You drop these great nuggets and I'm trying to pick them up! You said:
Thanks! I'm learning about so many great possibilities.
Hi Gary,
1) 50% hydration, I will give an example below.
Young levain
50g ripe sourdough starter
100g flour
100g warm water
mix, let it sit, covered, for 1.5-2hrs at 25-30C until it smells strongly like yogurt (or non-soured milk/cream in case of Tartine starter).
Bread dough
250g young sourdough levain
125 flour
4 g salt
4 g compressed yeast (2g ADY)
10g sugar
9g butter/margarine
35-50g water to dissolve and activate yeast
Knead until smooth (6 min in a bread machine, for example). DDT 32C. Let it rest for 20 min, punch down/knead thoroughly and preshape, 10-20 min bench rest, shape, 30 min proof, 22 min bake at 225C with steam.
2) Ripe starter is defined for each starter or baking tradition (or maybe by every baker) differently. I always use someone else's starters or recipes for starters, so the rules of maturity and ripeness come with that starter or that recipe.
Sorry, I cannot give any better answer than that. Some starters are ripe once they reach target acidity values (pH and TTA) and leavening power. Others are judged simply by time at certain temp. Yet others are judged by their looks. Once they look a certain way, the baker knows that this is a ripe starter.
For example, Modernist Bread gives this table to judge the degree of maturity of a liquid sourdough levain:
Another example is from Chad Robertson's rules for his Tartine starter/levain. It is fed with a 50:50 blend of bread flour and whole wheat flour, 100% hydration, 35C water, kept at 18-20C. Your have to knead it rather well*, to develop some gluten.
It is ripe once it triples or quadruples in volume, stands still at that level for a while which might take hours if the flour is strong with good fermentation tolerance, and begins to recede. Remember its aroma at that point, it's the aroma of a ripe Tartine starter. Contrast it with the aroma of young starter/levain which has a swseet milky/creamy/buttery aroma 2-4 hours after feeding it 1:4 or 4-8 hours after feeding it 1:20 (10g ripe sourdough, 100g 35C water, 100g flour blend).
*If it is not kneaded rather well, then it would fall right away, not stand tall for a while, so it is different.
3) There is no bulk fermentation time in this method, because the dough is fully acidified (to the level of TTA of the ripe yeasted dough) by the addition of the levain before its yeast is even added. It's basically a no-time dough. It needs a bit of a resting time after kneading it to before we can start dividing it, preshaping it and shaping it, so I called it a 20 min bulk, but it is simply a period of short (15-20min) rest after mixing that any dough needs, even a zero time dough to let the freshly admixed flour particles to hydrate and form gluten.
I baked your example loaf today using my newly activated Finland starter from Sourdoughs International. I declared the starter fully active on Saturday morning and refrigerated it because I couldn't bake until today.
This morning I used 50g of the starter straight from the fridge and followed your plan. When I checked it after about 2 hours it had already risen 25% and the pH was 4.8. I mixed the remaining ingredients and baked it in my 1L pan. The final pH is 5.2.
The resulting loaf looks great and tastes good with a mild flavor. The crust is chewier than I prefer but I'll tweak that.
Using your method I went from start to baked loaf in less than 5 hours.
Your instruction is greatly appreciated.
Gary
I will have to study this method!
Pictures? Do you always bake a 1 liter pan loaf?
Do you always devote an hour to preheat the oven for a small loaf? I am trying think of how to save energy but still get oven spring!
Looking forward to any further comments on how to shorten a bake!!
My 1 liter pan (4x4x4 pullman) is for experimental bakes. I can bake about every other day when I use this pan which is great for tweaking.
No, I always start with the oven cold. It works fine for me. The loaf above was at the top of the pan when I started the bake. You can see that it jumped up.
You can find great info on cold oven baking here on the site. I'm with you, the idea of heating my oven super hot for an hour before starting has never appealed to me. Also, it is so humid here that a crispy crust never stays that way so I decided I like soft crusts better.
You could start another thread on low energy baking and likely get more comments. When the thread takes a turn many people don't notice. I plan to repost Mariana's comments in another thread so folks can find them. She is a treasure!
Gary
You are so right on all the great personalized info here from the experts!
And it is neat to bake in 4-5 hr-just like clas laoves.
Hi Mariana,
Ok I will hold back on the kneading! I think I will look for a different loaf pan too because the one I have has a thick stainless steel bottom. It may not be heating through quickly enough. Does that sound like why the bottom of the bread would have a thickened layer? Whenever I use a thinner and smaller aluminum loaf pan (half the volume) the bubble distribution is throughout the loaf.
I overlooked that hydration (from 190 to 300%) would give rise to different reactions. Thank you for pointing that out. The "diluted" thermos clas (and frozen several weeks) did give about the same characteristics of dough as I would get with a fresh same day clas.
Sorry for pestering you about clas!! But a big thanks for all the lessons I get each time I write.
I like the idea recently written on the use of rye sour starter and sourwort (2 sours in 1 bread):
The whole wheat flour was bolted (sifted). Then the sifted large particles of bran were mixed into the 2 starters and set at 28C for 2 hrs. before mixing the dough. What might be going on besides softening the bran?
My solod arrived (6 weeks?) from Ukraine but I haven't used it yet - I might try a bit of it in whole wheat bread to get an idea of the flavor.
Joe,
First, thanks for posting this. Very interesting.
I wonder if you've tried using only the liquid portion of the CLAS? I'm just wondering if the flour component of it contributes much to the final loaf or if you could make the CLAS just like you did and then use only the fluid portion.
Gary
Hi Gary,
The water in clas at 190% hydration does not separate out for me. (10/29 of the total weight of clas is flour; so 19/29 of clas is fluid at the start of tje process)
After I read, "Dual Starter 100% Whole Wheat" (penemetcircenses)
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/71286/dual-starter-100-whole-wheat
I soaked bran (sifted from freshly milled flour) in rye sour/ap starter about 60% on the way to peaking. It seemed to improve the crumb. This type of loaf is made of "bolted flour" except the bran has been fermented for 2 hrs and added back to the dough..
So, I think my next test bake will be with sifting and soaking the bran in the watery "300% clas in a thermos". That would be an approximation to penemetcircenses' method where he soaks bran in flas and a rye starter.
Mariana said that she likes the results of flas but not clas so it could be the flour component degrading (that is my unscientific comment!).
For me fresh same day made clas or clas frozen fresh do not give off flavors.
These are just my newly made ideas!
Adds a chocolaty slightly bitter/sour taste to bread. I've never tried it with whole wheat, only rye/wheat blends where it is my wife's favorite. I keep keep thinking it would be great in a sweet bread, something I've read is not uncommon in eastern Europe. I may add it to my no sugar added 6 banana bread tomorrow with sprouted whole wheat and oat bran as a test.
From rusbrot:
"Different varieties of flour react to solod differently. For example, hard wheat needs more solod than soft wheat. Also, solod significantly improves taste in whole grain bread, and contributes to higher dough elasticity."
Added 3 tbl of solod to my banana bread.... YUM!
Hi,
Would you know if solod is used primarliy in a scald (rusbrot video shows color of solod after boiling water is poured on it)?
If you come across uses of it as a powder mixed with dried whole wheat ingredients please send links.
Thanks!
I just added the solod to my mix. When I make the rye bread for my wife I use a scald. Pretty sure it can be used both ways since it has a LOT of flavor and aroma right out of the jar. Should work great as a scald for whole wheat. I'd use about 3oz scald with malt in 8oz of water.
I think scalding the solod would do a better job extracting its flavour and also colour (if you want that), and I've seen recipes that just pour boiling water over the solod without any flour. But indeed it's not necessary.
this will likely be the first and last time I will be making my own solod. But I just had to try. I'm making it in my basement, and I am 12 hrs into the 36 hrs@ 140 and my whole house is starting to smell like chocolate!