Paul bakes bread

The end of the blog

2010-02-07T17:38:00.002-05:00

This is the end of this blog. I'm going to continue blogging here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/blog/cpc because it's more of a community thing.

Two bakes today

2010-01-31T19:21:00.003-05:00

Today I baked two breads.

First up, whole wheat pain a l'ancienne mini baguettes from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. These guys are pretty easy. Mix the ingredients, do a few stretch-and-folds, and then throw it in the fridge over night. Then in the morning pull it out of the fridge, wait a bit, chop into strips, and toss in the oven.

The one on the right turned out quite nicely. I used a dough scraper to chop the bulk dough into the individual loaves. This left a nice straight slit on each piece of dough. This is a super high hydration dough, so scoring with a knife or lame is quite challenging (i.e., almost impossible). I baked these loaves slit up and they opened up nicely, as if they had been scored! I tried to score another loaf in the traditional baguette style, but it really didn't work very well. (I ate it before I took the photos...)

They taste great! The crumb is quite dense, as you'd expect for a 100% whole wheat loaf, but not gummy (which is challenging to get around in whole wheat breads). I ate the loaf not photographed here for lunch with gorgonzola cheese and some pickled beets.

Next up: Miche Pointe-a-Calliere from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread. I've tried to bake the Vermont Sourdough--what seems to be the most popular formula from this book--a couple of times without success. (I just can't get it to rise. I think there are two problems, it's fairly cool in our apartment about 70F, which is well below the recommended 76F, and I was using all purpose flour instead of bread flour, which I've had good results with in the past, but perhaps this formula can't handle that substitution. I'll try it again soon.) So I decided to try something different. Hannah got me some red fife flour at a farmer's market last week. Based on Hannah's description of the vendor's description of the flour--and what it looks like--it appears to be high extraction flour, so I thought I'd try the Miche Pointe-a-Calliere.

I halved the formula because I didn't want to bake an almost 4lb loaf since it's just me eating it. I also took one shortcut: I used a 100% hydration levain, instead of the suggested 60% hydration, because that's what I had on hand. (I should have thought ahead by about 6 hours, oh well.) To compensate for the cooler temperature in our apartment I slightly extended the bulk fermentation, and extended the proofing by about an hour. (And it still might have been a bit under-proofed.) I still baked it for the recommended hour even though it was half the size of the standard size (a bold bake!) and it seems like that was a good call.

It's still cooling...

I've been baking not blogging!

2010-01-16T17:54:00.003-05:00

I got a couple of books for Christmas: PR's Artisan Breads Every Day and Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread. Both are great books, but I'm especially excited about the low-knead sour dough formulas in Hamelman's book.

I made Hamelman's straight dough French bread. It had terrific flavour (remarkably so for a straight dough) and looks pretty good too!

Stretch and fold and a bit of rye

2009-11-29T23:03:00.003-05:00

I've heard about 'stretch and fold', a method which allows you to develop dough without having to knead it. I came across a tutorial on it and decided to give it a shot.

I made PR's BBA basic sourdough, straight from (whole wheat) starter/"barm" (no firm starter) using mostly white flour and a bit of rye. I leant my scale to a friend, so I was working by volume; consequently I'm not really sure what the hydration was, but I think it was a bit on the high side.

Stretch and fold is definitely way less work than kneading! Unfortunately, I don't think the three stretch and folds mixed the dough well enough. You can still see some streaks in the crumb where the starter isn't fully incorporated with the flours. I also think it's a bit under-baked. But whatever. It tastes pretty good and I really like the addition of the rye!

Potato, cheddar, and chives

2009-11-22T21:54:00.004-05:00

Today I tried the potato, cheddar, and chives bread from PR's BBA. I was a bit unsure about some parts of this recipe. The potatoes were supposed to be chopped coarsely, which made for a very odd kneading experience as the bits of potato sometimes got squeezed out of the dough... Also, I only used about 1/4 to 1/3 of the recommended amount of chives, because the recipe seemed to be calling for too many.

The loaves came out bigger than I expected. So big in fact, that they didn't fit on my baking stone! So the ends of one of the loaves were falling off the edge of the stone. (You can kind of see the problem in the loaf on the left; it droops down and is burnt on the end. I think I'll cut those bits off...)

Thanksgiving bread

2009-10-15T23:02:00.002-04:00

I made a big loaf of bread for Thanksgiving. It's my typical sourdough loaf: a lean dough with in this case a mix of sifted whole wheat and white flour. This is by far my biggest loaf, at about three pounds of dough. I think it was a bit too big for my banneton (the dough was cresting well above the top of the banneton while proofing).

S. demonstrated that she is in fact white by purchasing some ornamental gourds. We demonstrated we're white by having dinner with a brown girl.

The bread got lots of oohs and ahhs but not much of it got eaten because sooooooomebody made a turkey...

Banneton!

2009-09-22T23:46:00.004-04:00

Hannah got me a banneton for my birthday!

It's 9 inches, which is supposed to be appropriate for a 1-2 pound loaf.

I tried it out tonight. The bread is nothing special. It's kind of PR's BBA French bread, without the pre-ferment, but with some whole wheat flour, and with some adjustments to the salt and yeast that might not have been the best idea. Whatever. It's a reasonable mixture of flour, salt, yeast, and water.

I'm really pleased with the look of this loaf. The ridges of the banneton came through nicely. And my scoring opened up well. I haven't baked a hearth bread with commercial yeast in ages; it really seems to give a dough that's so much easier to work with, which is I think why the scoring is better.

Hannah also got me a dough scraper, which is super useful. She's the best!

BBA Light Wheat

2009-08-30T17:32:00.005-04:00

I haven't posted for a while because I've been baking mostly-whole wheat sour dough loafs similar to the last one I posted about. Today I wanted to do something a bit different.

I tried Peter Reinhart's light wheat bread from the Bread Baker's Apprentice. It's 33% whole wheat flour, the rest being white flour. The recipe gives the option of sugar or honey; I went with sugar because I don't think I have any honey.

It's a pretty easy one day recipe: mix, knead, wait, shape, wait, bake. And this is the result.

Edit:

And after letting it cool for a little over two hours... I'm a bit disappointed with the result. The flavour isn't terribly exciting, but maybe that's just what you get with a one-day bread. In fact, this loaf reminds me a lot of the rather blah whole wheat loaf I used to buy at a nearby bakery. In the future, for sandwich-style loafs, I think I'm going to stick with 100% whole wheat formulas.

Poilane

2009-07-27T00:12:00.003-04:00

I tried making the Poilane style miche from BBA this weekend. Except I thirded the recipe because I just don't need such a huge loaf!

I refreshed my starter on Saturday morning and the made the firm starter Saturday evening. The firm starter needed to rise for 4-6ish hours, but unfortunately I forgot about it and left it out over night. Oh well. Then this afternoon I made the final dough. I used sifted whole wheat flour from Mountain Path, a small flour mill near Ottawa. The dough had much more strength than the sourdough I've made in the past directly from the mother starter, although I'm not quite sure why this is. As you can see in the photos below, my scoring actually worked this time, although I might have gone a bit far...

Also, we made pickles and strawberry jam.

BBA Challenge: Ciabatta

2009-06-29T23:51:00.004-04:00

I'm back on the BBA Challenge! This week: Ciabatta. I made the poolish version, because poolish is just such an easy pre-ferment. This bread is very high hydration, which means it's not super easy to work with. As a result, you don't knead it in the traditional sense. Rather, after some initial mixing, you put it through a series of "stretch and folds". (Basically, you fold the dough over itself a couple of times.)

The end result looks like this:

I'm not super happy with the crumb structure. I was hoping for something more open, like the pictures in BBA that are more hole than crumb. Oh well, it still tastes great!

Sourdough

2009-06-21T19:16:00.004-04:00

I haven't been keeping up with the BBA Challenge lately. The bread this week, challah, just didn't excite me. And I missed the casatiello last week, which I'm quite looking forward to. But today I just felt like making a regular loaf of bread.

I kind of followed the basic sourdough recipe in PR's BBA. I used 5 oz of my firm, whole wheat starter (I've created a white flour 100% hydration starter too, but it doesn't seem to be doing as well as the whole wheat one...), 10 (ish) oz of really nice white flour (from Mountain Path which I picked up yesterday), a teaspoon of salt, and about 6.5 oz of water. Mix, knead a bunch, wait 3ish hours, shape, wait 2ish hours, bake for 20ish minutes at 450F, steam at the beginning (although I lowered the temperature to about 375F after about 15 minutes because it was starting to get pretty dark). And here's what I got:

In just a few minutes I'm off to a Summer solstice picnic in Trinity Bellwoods Park, so I'll find out how it tastes then!

BBA Challenge: Brioche

2009-06-07T23:28:00.004-04:00

I made the "rich man's" version of brioche. It has a lot of butter in it. 87ish percent of the weight of the flour! I made this in one day. After mixing the dough, I retarded it for about four hours, which is the minimum recommended time (it can also be left over night). I also didn't do a very good job of shaping it. The dough is super greasy and not much fun to work with. I ended up with a loaf that was a bit bigger on one end than the other (see Figure 1 below). Oh well...

It smells overpoweringly like pastry in the apartment right now, but we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what it tastes like.

In other news, the sourdough starter didn't get so much to eat while I was out of town... I fed it this afternoon, and there were some signs of life. I fed it again tonight; if it's bigger by morning we might have saved it!

BBA Challenge: No bagels for you!

2009-05-31T12:16:00.004-04:00

This week's challenge is bagels! But I'm not going to be able to bake them. I'm writing this from the Indianapolis airport, which is remarkably comfortable and has wireless, but I can't bake here.

I've been in Bloomington for the past few days, and I'm off to Boulder until next Saturday. Hopefully I'll be able to bake next week's challenge---brioche---when I get home.

Sourdough attempt number 1

2009-05-26T01:52:00.004-04:00

I decided I wanted to get serious about artisan bread baking, and that means growing my own sourdough starter!

I followed the instructions for growing a seed culture and mother starter in Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads using the pineapple juice solution. Everything seemed to go pretty much how the book said it would.

For my first sourdough I used the Basic Sourdough Bread from the Bread Baker's Apprentice. The formula notes that you can skip the firm starter and build the final dough straight from the mohter starter, which I did because I was a bit pressed for time. I was also using a whole wheat starter instead of a white flour starter. That can't possibly make much of a difference, right? Umm...

The primary fermentation probably lasted about 5 hours, which was almost certainly too long, but also understandable because I was at the Crooked Star. When I pulled the dough out of the bowl, it totally de-gassed! But I hardly touched it! This has happened to me a couple of times before, particularly trying to bake PR's whole wheat hearth bread. I'm not sure why it happens, but I need to figure it out...

Anyways, I didn't proof it for very long because I wanted to go to bed at a reasonable hour. I didn't have much hope when I put it in the oven; the loaf looked pretty flat and deflated. Surprisingly it went spring in the oven and here's what I got:

I really need to work on my scoring. I think I need to cut deeper.

Well see how it tastes tomorrow morning!

Update: Delicious! It's a bit dense, probably due to the crazy degassing that happened after fermentation, but way less dense than I thought it would be. It's got a nice, mild, sourdough flavour. I'm pretty happy with this for a first sourdough loaf, especially with all the shortcuts I took.

BBA Challenge: Artos Greek Celebration Bread

2009-05-24T23:04:00.005-04:00

Oh man...

I made my *first* one of these this afternoon. Unfortunately, I tossed it in the oven with the plastic wrap from the proofing stage still on it. Oops. I wasn't so upset because I'd also forgotten to put the almond extract in...

Round two!

I remade the poolish, but didn't let it sit overnight, I just used it after letting it do its thing for about 4 hours. I made the dough with *all* the ingredients including the lemon extract, removed the plastic wrap before baking, tossed on some glaze after it came out of the oven, and ended up with this:

You can see my "collection" in the background...

I don't know how it tastes yet, it's still cooling. I'll let you know.

In other news: My starter grew! I now have a whole wheat mother starter (made using the pineapple juice solution from PR's Whole Grain Breads). I might try and make something with it tomorrow.

Update:

It tastes pretty good! As Hannah pointed out, it kind of tastes like a hot cross bun. I don't think I'll be in a rush to make this bread again though. I'm just not that into enriched white flour breads. I don't like making them because they have so many freaking ingredients that I feel like I'm baking a cake. And they do taste great! But it's just not my favourite type of bread to eat. But that's the point of this challenge, right? Try it and see if it's awesome.

The magic of the Internet

2009-05-24T13:38:00.002-04:00

Ever wanted to half a recipe and convert all the measurements from, say, ounces to grams? So many fractions, so much division...

Just type something like this into Google: 3.5/2 ounces in grams

The search result?

(3.5/2) ounce = 49.6116655 grams

Super rad.

Google: This makes up for not wanting to hire me, so we're cool again.

Bread baking vocabulary

2009-05-21T11:05:00.003-04:00

Johnson's Dictionary has an interesting entry today.

KI’SSINGCRUST. n.s. [kissing and crust.] Crust formed where one loaf in the oven touches another.
These bak’d him kissingcrusts, and those brought him small beer. King’s Cookery.

No bread because I ran out of flour. I've started growing a sourdough starter; so far it smells funny but hasn't done much...

Kaiser Rolls

2009-05-17T02:47:00.001-04:00

I've been thinking about making these for a while. I'm not really sure why. I have some sort of fantasy about eating a really good sandwich?

Anyways, yeah, I made these tonight. The formula is from the Bread Baker's Apprentice. The dough made six buns, but by the time I got around to photographing them there were ONLY FIVE LEFT. They are even more delicious than they look. I just ate another one.

Comments about actually making this bread... It's fairly straight-forward. The dough is just an enriched white bread that you cut up into bits and shape like buns. And the shaping is super easy: roll about 4 ounces of dough into a long strip (I had to roll it out a bit, let it relax for a few minutes, and then roll again, but that's not a big deal.), then tie the strip into a knot and poke the ends in towards the middle so it kind of looks like a bun. The only problem I ran into is that my baking sheet wasn't big enough for all six. So I baked four and tossed the other two in the fridge to avoid over proofing them. Then after the first batch was done, I let the second batch warm up at room temperature for about ten minutes before baking them. I have no idea if this was actually a good idea or not, but the results are delicious, so, whatever.

Can you spot the other deliciousness...?

Done!

Molasses fail

2009-05-15T10:58:00.001-04:00

So I think I might have figured out what went wrong with my Anadama bread. I bought black strap molasses, which I thought was a brand, but apparently that's not the case. It turns out there are three grades of molasses, light (first), dark (second), and black strap. Oops...

BBA Challenge: Anadama

2009-05-13T18:52:00.001-04:00

So the folks over at pinchmysalt are organizing a little challenge to bake all the breads in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice. Sounds easy enough, so I signed up (but I haven't heard anything else about it yet... Oh well.) Assuming that we're rocking this alphabetical styles, I baked Anadama bread last night.

This was some efficient bread baking. After kneading the dough, I went longboarding. I rode some mellowish hills and worked on toe side stand ups and early grabs. I knew I'd be out for longer than the expected rise time, so I opened the window and left it on the window sill; it was a cool night. When I got home it had risen about the right amount. Then during proofing I went out for a pint of Mill Street Cobblestone Stout at the Communist's Daughter. As usual, the hipsters were out in full force. I came home, baked it, and pulled this out of the oven a while later.

I have no idea what Anadama bread is supposed to taste like, so I don't really know how this bread turned out... I don't really like it though. The flavour of the molasses is kind of over-powering. Peter does mention in the recipe that you want to go for a lighter-flavoured molasses for this bread, so maybe that's why it doesn't taste super fantastic? (This was the first time I had ever bought molasses, so I may or may not have purchased one with a lighter flavour...) Also, I halved the recipe, so maybe that screwed things up?

Next!

Whole wheat sandwich bread

2009-05-11T20:38:00.000-04:00

This is my second attempt at Peter Reinhart's whole wheat sandwich bread. I'm pretty pleased with it, but I think it was a bit under baked. (I baked it for 40 minutes at 350F and it registered 197F at the middle of the middle when I pulled it out.)

First post

2009-05-07T23:05:00.001-04:00

Now let's go bake some bread!