is Peter Reinhart's whole wheat bread recipe close to sourdough?
I'm sharing its reply here as I'm curious to know what members here think:
Peter Reinhart's whole wheat bread recipe is not inherently a sourdough recipe. However, with certain modifications and techniques, you can adapt it to have a more sourdough-like flavor. Here are a few suggestions:
Incorporate a sourdough starter: Instead of using commercial yeast, you can use a portion of your active sourdough starter as a leavening agent. Adjust the recipe accordingly, reducing the amount of yeast and adding the sourdough starter. Keep in mind that this will require longer fermentation times.
Extend the fermentation period: Allowing the dough to ferment for a longer duration, such as overnight or up to 12-24 hours, will give it more time to develop a tangy flavor similar to sourdough. This can be done by using less yeast or adjusting the temperature to encourage slower fermentation.
Use a preferment: A preferment, such as a poolish or a biga, can add depth of flavor to the bread. Create a preferment with flour, water, and a small amount of yeast, and let it ferment for several hours or overnight before incorporating it into the final dough.
Adjust hydration levels: Sourdough bread tends to have a higher hydration level, which results in a more open crumb structure. You can increase the water content slightly in Reinhart's recipe to achieve a similar effect.
Remember that these modifications may require some experimentation and adjustments based on your specific sourdough starter and environmental conditions. It's always a good idea to consult specific sourdough bread recipes or resources for more detailed instructions on sourdough baking.
I am sure that baking is a hands on business, the knowledge comes from the baking itself, and chatGPT never baked a loaf in its life.
Maybe you and chatGPT were referring to different breads when chatting about "PR's whole wheat bread" but Peter's whole wheal sandwich bread formula from Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads does include 50% prefermented flour, prefermented in biga for up to 3days (!!!), so the AI answer is not entirely correct.
Sourdoughs are not always sour tasting or tangy flavored breads or even breads with "deeper flavors" even if a starter is used.
Hi,
The next step is to feed the "answers" into a machine and the bread will come out. I wonder how satisfied this "eater" will be.
No more self-learning of the great miraculous elements of fermentation (especially water's role) to bring out features that one learns to appreciate about the bread they personally like. No more taking the extra effort to develop (and with trial and error) a gift for someone with considerations of its purpose. No more knowing the effects of productiveness through one's hands by way of one's own analysis and searching for how others have learned.
I am for learning with others and for others!
Exactly. Ask chatGPT how the finished loaf tastes. Will it give an honest answer like "I cannot taste bread" or will it give a phony made-up answer?
Ask chatGPT how the finished loaf tastes. Will it give an honest answer like "I cannot taste bread" or will it give a phony made-up answer?
Apparently neither. A few weeks ago I experimented with asking ChatGPT about oat breads. My original prompt was:
Me
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with historical accuracy, and a concise response, give a recipe for traditional irish oat bread.
Just now I went back to that dialog and asked about the taste:
Me
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briefly, what will these oat breads taste like?
ChatGPT
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Traditional Irish oat bread, whether made with or without added wheat flour, has a hearty and nutty flavor. The oats contribute a distinct earthiness and a slightly chewy texture, while the buttermilk adds a subtle tanginess. The bread is often dense and moist, with a crusty exterior. The overall taste is wholesome and rustic, making it a comforting and satisfying choice. The absence of wheat flour in some recipes can result in a bread with a more pronounced oat flavor and a denser texture. Overall, it's a simple and flavorful bread, perfect when served with butter or other spreads.
This is not a bad answer, I think. Basically, LLM systems like this give responses where the next word or phrase is much like other words or phrases (across the training set) that are used in the prompt, or earlier in the response. If the training set has decent consistent word usage and you can set the context with a good prompt, you may get a decent response because it will represent a sort of average of what was in the training set.
Or maybe not - no guarantees! You might get into a situation like the game where each person in turn has to add to the story by speaking a sentence. That can wander way off the original path.
TomP
Chatgpt's answers will often be very general if you do not provide enough information
It’s true that ChatGPT, while knowledgeable, can’t fully grasp the nuances of baking like we can through hands-on experience. As someone who’s tinkered with Peter Reinhart’s recipes, I’ve found that the modifications ChatGPT suggests (in geometry dash, for example), like incorporating a sourdough starter or adjusting hydration, can be a good starting point but often need tweaking based on your environment and personal taste preferences.
For example, using a sourdough starter can definitely impart a more complex flavor to Reinhart’s whole wheat bread, but it might require a bit of trial and error to get the tanginess just right. Similarly, the hydration adjustments can help mimic the texture of sourdough, but you’ll need to balance it with your own observations on dough consistency and baking results.
In the end, while AI can offer useful suggestions, it’s the hands-on experimentation and personal experience that truly refine our baking skills and recipes. I’d encourage everyone to try out these suggestions and adjust based on their own results!
I smell a chatbot here.
gives the whole wheat bread a deep and rich flavor, which I tried to duplicate in my SD. But I could not get that result. It was the flavor of the sourdough that took over. So now I am consistently making only SD and there is no going back to Peter Reinhart's for health reasons. SD does not need long fermentation to develop its health-giving properties. Two hours are good enough, according to a study.
It depends on what you regard as "health-giving properties". If you mean neutralizing phytates, it appears that much longer times than that are needed to do much phytate reduction.
Do you mean that the bread got much more sour than you like? A long sourdough fermentation does tend to have that effect but it can be mild enough just to bring a little extra savory character to the bread. It depends on a lot of things including your starter and its development history, the flours, the amount of starter, how well-aged the dough is before it gets retarded, and so on. Most of my retarded sourdough breads are either not sour or just a bit sour.
TomP
sourness is about right, only slightly sour. I bake once a week, so the starter is always refreshed and the levain is stiff.
Other than the sourness, it lacks the traditional aroma of instant yeast bread of Peter Reinhart.
Use both - simple. Enjoy!