Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Highly hydrated doughs

Saturday, April 17th, 2010 | Cooking | 2 Comments

Since the time I started baking I have read copious amounts of information on baking, primarily perusing titles from master bakers here and there, and some successful owners of bakeries in Denmark, Sweden and the United States. Some give good advice, others not so good, but the main thing I’ve taken away from having read all this is… it’s food, experiment and find something you like (though do be accurate about what you do so you can recreate it).

In some peoples’ opinion (and mine too for that matter), you should try to master the plain bread before you start adding all sorts of extra things to it. In a basic bread there are four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast (or sourdough). That is it. No seeds, no additives, no lard, no herbs. Just four plain ingredients. I use organic flour and Maldon sea salt, mainly because I do not fancy eating flour with all kinds of remnants of artificial fertilisers, and Maldon sea salt because I like their salt taste the best (but do try a bunch of different salts and find the one you like best).

The amount of flour you put into this thing mainly controls how much bread you will have once the process is done (this is an over-simplification, each ingredient influences the final outcome in a lot of surprising and complex ways, so take the following with a grain of salt), the amount of salt will control the taste (and to some degree how well the gluten strands develop), and the yeast will control how quickly the fermentation process will happen (more yeast, faster bread and less taste, less yeast, slower bread and more taste), and finally there is the water. This is usually the ingredient you turn up and down to control the handling characteristics of the bread. The lower water rate, the more manageable the dough is, the higher it is, the more you will feel like you’re battling some sticky monster from hell as you try to shape everything up into loaves of bread.

So for a while I have been giving the breads very low amounts of yeast (around 1–5 grams), rather long time to ferment (from 5 to 18 hours depending on how busy our daily schedule is), and very high amounts of water (around 90% the weight of the flour) a try. This has given me a very open and creamy crumb with a soft crust the first few hours after baking, which hardens into a denser crust after 6–12 hours and a superb taste. In order for such a wet dough to stick together, it is necessary for the gluten to be able to keep it all together, which is what the long fermentation will help you achieve. For a brief few illustrations I have taken some photos of a 5 hour fermentation followed by 10 hours retardation (placing the dough in the fridge).

The lighting is a tad shoddy. It is surprisingly difficult to pour dough, handle a camera and get the lighting just right around 7 am after having stumbled out of bed. There is some nice gluten strands here, but without the retardation they are typically longer and tougher. You can tell how strong they are by how long they can get before they snap if you pull at the dough.

Next, there are more fun ways to influence the result of your bread: how you bake it. With steam? without steam? at what temperature? for how long? I usually pour a bit of water over the loaves just before I put them in the oven, which will create enough steam to keep the crust from setting too quickly. Since the dough is highly hydrated, the loaves need to bake for a good while (usually around 40 minutes in my oven), and I start out at the high end of the temperature range at 250°C for 15 minutes, then I vent the oven (open the hatch for a few seconds to let out the steam), then I finish baking over the next 25 minutes, slowly reducing the heat once in a while to keep the crust from scorching.

After baking, you will have a nice, creamy, open crumb and a wafer thin crust that flakes like it does with plain bread from a good bakery. Flour, water, salt, and yeast. That is it.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Chocolate cupcakes

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 | Cooking | 3 Comments

Recently, my youngest sister wanted to bake these ‘advanced’ cupcakes, so she asked whether I would bake them with her. Never avoiding a chance to bake with others, I immediately agreed, and we had a lot of fun preparing, decorating, and not least eating the cakes.

It’s a fairly standard chocolate cake with whipped egg whites carefully folded into the chocolate batter. After a good bake we piped butter frosting over the cupcakes and drizzled candied violet over it.

Looking closely we can see the small pieces of candied violet better:

Normally I don’t fancy cupcakes too much as I think they have a tendency to become a bit too dry, but these were very good. Yummy.

Tags: baking, cake

Slow durum bread

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

If one has better time, it is, of course, preferable to give the bread a slow rise, which brings out more flavour nuances in the bread. There isn’t that much difference in consistency to the quick durum bread, but it does have better flavour.

The ingredients are:

• 700 g wheat flour
• 300 g durum flour
• 10 g fresh yeast
• 20 g sea salt
• 700 g water

The ingredients are mixed together for 3 minutes at first speed to incorporate the ingredients, and then continuing on first speed for another 7–8 minutes to develop the gluten.

The dough ferments for 3 and a half hours with folds every 50 minutes and then the dough is shaped into pretty loaves.

After 1½–2 hours of proofing, the loaves are slashed and baked. Looking closely after the slashing we can see the bubbly activity inside the bread.

After baking they have a lovely golden durum crust.

And after cooling, the bread is ready for serving, perhaps with a nice variety of seafood.

Bon appetit!

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Quick durum bread

Friday, October 23rd, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

Ever since our daughter has started in a nursery, we have more or less been incapacitated with illness, one overtaking the next, so time and energy for baking has been rather scarce. I did, however, succeed in baking a quick bread this past weekend, before I succumbed to another illness (the joy).

I found myself without bread on saturday, and a lacklustre enthusiasm of having to eat the local bakery’s cardboard bread once again. Lunch was few hours away, and the only straight dough recipes that I really like takes at least six hours from start to finish. So what to do, what to do… let us try something crazy and just go with the flow. Let’s try to mix some of the techniques from the slower breads, and the theory of bread baking I’ve been reading up on, with the traditional way for Danish home bakers to bake: quickly and with lots of yeast.

For interested parties, I’ll present to you the ingredients here:

• 700 g wheat flour
• 300 g durum flour
• 28 g fresh yeast
• 24 g sea salt
• 650 g water

This is a bit high percentage of salt given my usual tastes, but the quick fermentation process will yield a rather non-tasty bread (i.e. without as much wheat flavour), so we compensate by adding salt (this is not necessarily a good way to compensate, but when in a rush and all that…).

The ingredients are all weighed into a mixing bowl and gets an improved mix (3 minutes at slow speed for incorporation, and 3 minutes at a higher speed for gluten development). In order to further improve the gluten structure (this was, perhaps, not really necessary as it wasn’t a terribly wet dough, all things considered), I decided to let it ferment 40 minutes, fold, ferment 40 minutes and then divide and shape into loaves.

After the first fermentation, the dough is slightly sticky, but it has a nice structure, a bit like a good Danish dough.

Folding it gives it a very nice, firm, and smooth texture.

And giving it another 40 minutes to divide the loaves and shaping them works nicely.

After this comes the proofing time, letting the loaves rise after you’ve removed a lot of the air when shaping the loaves. I let them proof for about an hour, enough to turn my oven up to 236°C. I let the loaves bake around 30 minutes, but they probably could’ve taken five minutes more.

We were rather in a rush, so waiting for the breads to cool entirely was not really an option either, so we dug into them a bit early, while the crumb was still a wee bit too moist (but that is, for some reason, what most people insist they prefer).

This bread will not win any taste rewards, but it’s a nice, quick(-ish) bread with a comfy feeling (kind of saturday morning, the rain is pouring down, you’ve got a cold and you just need a nice warm slice of bread with jam and a big cup of tea, your comfy chair and a good book and to whittle away the hours). It definitely beats the usual quick breads from the Danish bread cook books, if I have to say so myself. Also, the durum flour gives it that nice, rich yellow tint (although that may be a bit hard to pick up from the photos).

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Croissants

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

Between having taken up a new job and having a baby daughter there is practically no time left to do anything, and blogging has been prioritised rather low in the little time there has been, and baking only slightly more than that, so it has actually been several months since I have been able to find time to bake anything. So, the day that I actually found time to bake had to be used to its fullest with something non-trivial, and one of the things I have missed dearly has been some of the folded butter doughs like wienerbrød (Danish pastry) and croissants.

The dough has to be rolled out to a rectangle and be fairly thin, then you add a block of butter (or margarine in my case), fold the sides over the margarine, roll it out and make a single fold. Then you refrigerate it for 30 minutes, roll, fold, refrigerate, roll, fold, refrigerate, and then you shape. I would’ve liked to get some photos of the margarine work, but from previous experience everything gets easily ruined when working with margarine if you pause overly long, since it is a lot softer than the butter that is usually used. So we skip forward to shaping the croissants.

Since the margarine is so soft I have had to add more flour to keep it from leaking everywhere, making the dough a good deal firmer than it is supposed to be. At least they are croissant-shaped, but they will most likely be somewhat more dense than what I had hoped for.

Sure enough, not the light flaky croissant you get at a bakery, but a tad heavier, albeit still decent, croissant. They weren’t all bad, though, about 25 of these disappeared within a few hours.

Tags: baking, pastry

Apple medals

Sunday, February 8th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

In Denmark we have a range of cakes that are called something with ‘medal’ in them – these are typically shortcrust cake layers around… something. The most traditional ‘medals’ have whipped cream in a layer between two shortcrust layers and with icing on top of the top layer.

A few ‘medals’ are actually closed as in the two shortcrust layers are glued together, typically with egg, a bit like mini-cobblers. This blog post is about one of such ‘medals’, the apple ‘medal’ – I have been unable to find a traditional English name for these cakes, so if you know it, please let me know.

The apple filling in the apple medals are mashed apples that have been cooked for a while to remove the excess moisture. A small amount of this ‘cream’ is then added to each shortcrust bottom.

Using egg to weld each cake shut, a wash of egg is applied and nuts are drizzled on top – traditionally you use almonds, but we only had hazelnuts, so I used those instead.

After baking, the cake is a tad dry, as baked shortcrust often is, but the creaminess of the apple in the interior makes up for this… mostly. (They are still a tad too dry for my tastes).

To make up for the dryness, serve with a nice portion of whipped cream and a few berries.

Tags: baking, dessert, pastry

Sonnenblumenbrot – sunflower seed bread

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

Since I have started working full-time on a new job and have a longer commute, and I like to spend the hours when I am at home with my daughter, I have neglected both this blog and baking for a while.

With a child in the house both my wife and I tend to make recipes we know so they do not require so much focus, but by doing that we risk getting set in our habits, only eating the same kinds of bread, the same kinds of things for dinner, for the next many, many years. So in order to break free of that, we have agreed to make something new each week – my wife will make a new recipe for dinner, and I will bake something I do not usually bake.

For last week I delved into the ‘not entirely white bread’ recipes in Jeffrey Hamelman’s book ‘Bread’ and found this German recipe for sunflower seed bread. I am, personally, a bit so-so with sunflower seeds, but my wife absolutely loves them, so I figured why not. We will need lots and lots of sunflower seeds.

We will also need a rye chop soaker and a pâte fermentée to add to the final dough.

The mixed dough is fairly reminiscent of the white doughs from Hamelman’s book, just a bit less ‘extremely sticky’.

Now, the recipe calls for a good long bake of 40 minutes at 240°C, which seems to be a bit too much, so I would suggest turning the heat about 10–20°C down after 20 minutes (when I look at the recipe again, Hamelman actually also suggests this).

Traditionally, the Sonnenblumenbrot is moistened on top and dipped into non-roasted sunflower seeds, however since I am not too keen on too many sunflower seeds, I opted to skip this part. It is still, all in all, a very wholesome bread with a beautiful crust, and a nice crumb with bite, due to the sunflower seeds, and a slight sweetness, due to the rather large, in my opinion, amount of malt syrup that goes into the dough as well.

Very excellent with jam.

Tags: baking, bread

Cinnamon loaves

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

One of the glorious things from my childhood was the sunday trip to the bakery where we got to pick our Sunday morning treat. Normally this treat was to be a single item like a rum snail, a croissant, or the like, but just once in a while I managed to sweet-talk (read: emotionally bribe) my parents into buying a cinnamon loaf. For those unfortunate enough that they haven’t come across this wonderful bread before, it is a butter and egg enriched dough that is rolled around a cinnamon-enriched remonce cream (mix of butter and sugar). For quite a few years now, I have had to pass these things by in the bakery, along with most their other treats, since I’ve been ‘fortunate’ enough to pick up lactose intolerance on the course of my life. Furthermore, we have egg allergists in the family as well, so what else was there to do than replace the butter with milk-free shortening and replace the eggs with a mix of water, oil, flour and baking powder? (We have also prepared these loaves with the egg, but there is practically no difference between replacing the egg as well).

The first part is rolling the dough into a fairly thin square, however, I can never, ever, manage a square when rolling dough like that, so it gets to be square-ish. We smear the remonce over this and roll it up nicely.

For those of you who aren’t experienced remonce-smearers, this is what too much remonce looks like (you will see why in a bit).

These three rolls are then used to carefully braid the loaf (in most home-made versions of cinnamon loaves it is just rolled into a single roll, but that does not get the authentic bakery braid).

After some careful braining and a graceful finish at each end of the braid, you get this.

Now it just needs to be placed in a form and proofed until it’s nice and wiggly.

And after being baked for half an hour, this is the oozing goodness that meets the eye (ok, normally it doesn’t ooze quite that much, but we brought it upon ourselves by using a larger portion of remonce).

Or seen in a bit larger perspective.

Now comes the time to turn out the loaves from the forms.

This was also the time I suddenly realised that I was supposed to have greased the forms.

It’s not all bad, though, as it is still great to eat out of the form, but the loaf in the background, above, is collapsed a bit due to this.

Now we only need to add the final touch to complete the masterpiece: icing.

The best part is, you do not have to wait for these loaves to cool, you can eat them warm, oozing and savor their delectable creamy consistency that is punctuated by the sugary cinnamon and the crisp and sweet crust on the top of the loaf.

It’s still as good as I remember it from my childhood.

Tags: baking, bread, dessert, pastry, sweets

Pain rustique rolls

Monday, December 15th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Pain rustique is a wonderful savory bread that not only tastes great, but is also relatively fast to make (including the poolish it only takes like 15–18 hours from start to baked loaf). They are prepared much like regular pain rustique, just divided into smaller amounts of dough. Here I have prepared what would usually be four small loaves and each of these I have divided in four to create rolls. So, one or two rolls should be plenty to fill your appetite for a meal.

Since the buns are somewhat smaller than the regular loaves they don’t require entirely as long in the oven.

They look just like small pain rustique loaves.

The crust is crisp, thin and lovely, but the crumb is a bit denser than the regular pain rustique, but that is most likely due to me shaping the rolls a wee bit tighter than I normally shape the loaves (pain rustique requires no shaping, much like ciabatta, but I never get rectangular slices of dough, so I tend to tug in the odds and ends to make it appear rectangular).

This is, of course, not where the story usually ends when I bake, but it is usually where I stop depicting the process. However, my wife got inspired by the rolls and prepared extremely delicious sandwiches using them. In their full glory, I present to you a cucumber, tomato, salmon and avocado sandwich. Lovely.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Potato garlic bread

Thursday, December 11th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

While I really love and adore the French and Italian white breads, I was brought up on Danish rye bread, which, usually, uses more or less 100% rye. Now, I’m not really ready to consume rye bread again after having sworn it off once I moved away from my parents, however, I’m usually coaxed into trying different kinds of breads with whole meat wheat, maize, or in this instance, potatoes and garlic.

We oven-roasted the potatoes as per Hamelman’s directions for optimum taste in his book Bread. Now, if you make the usual metric-based recipe from Hamelman’s book, you’d wind up with 27 loaves of about 600 grams each, and while it sounds tempting I neither have space enough in my oven, nor am I able to eat all that bread before it goes stale. Now, if you did create 27 loaves, you’d be needing about 30 grams of oven roasted garlic, but when you create what corresponds to 2 loaves of 600 grams each (in reality I made 4, each being about 300 grams), you would only need 3 grams of garlic, which is about a single clove. That is just overkill to ovenroast! So I fried it in a generous amount of oil instead.

Furthermore, Hamelman makes the suggestion not to remove the peel from the potatoes when you mash them to add some colour to the consistency of the bread. I am much too lazy to hand-mash potatoes, so I tossed them into my blender along with the 3 grams of garlic and let it run for a bit. It is an extremely efficient blender, really, as there was no hint of the roughness of the peel once it had mashed everything up for a bit.

The dough is somewhat denser than for instance ciabatta dough, which is due both to the wholemeal wheat used in it, but certainly also the potatoes that don’t release their moisture until later in the process. It is, at least, a lot easier to work with than the ciabatta dough that has a tendency to try to escape from my grasp at all times.

The potatoes add a nice bit of colouring to the bread and the crumb is somewhat denser than the loose, airy crumbs that I usually prefer, but I will have to agree with Hamelman, it’s got a nice, comfy taste, and the garlic adds a nice bit of ‘kick’ to it.

What has amazed me most about this bread is its keeping time. Normally the ciabatta becomes slightly stale after just two or three days, but the potato garlic bread is still good after 4 days. Sure, the crust is getting slightly chewy, but with some liver paté (in case you are wrinkling your nose at this, it’s a Danish tradition to eat it, and unlike the rye bread, I haven’t sworn this one off just yet), the bread still has a nice taste. Good for the times where you don’t have time to bake during the week.

Tags: baking, bread