Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Just plain bread

Sunday, October 24th, 2010 | Cooking | No Comments

Once in a while I find myself in the rather annoying situation of waking up and realising that we are out of bread, there’s no real good alternative for lunch, there is no poolish ready for use, and the stand mixer is in the dishwasher and not at all ready for use. At that point, I could, of course, do a bunch of kneading myself, but that gets rather gooey and unwieldy with the highly hydrated doughs I prefer to make, so, enter the no-knead process…

The basic process is this: mix everything and incorporate the ingredients, then walk away from it for a while. You could just leave it like this for a good 16–18 hours and the dough will magically have kneaded itself, but from waking up until lunch, 16 hours seems a bit unrealistic. Instead, you can gradually strengthen the gluten strands by folding the bread, say, every 30–40 minutes or so for 2–3 hours. After that, we can shape the bread, let the loaf proof for about five quarters of an hour, then stuff it into the oven at a good 240°C for 30–35 minutes, and finally let it cool completely before slicing the bread. That last part is usually the most difficult part of them all, but like a good roast, you will not get a full, rich flavour unless you let it rest (unfortunately bread usually takes more than 20 minutes to rest, it’s more like 40–60 minutes).

That is what 500 g flour, 10 g salt, 14 g fresh yeast, and 360 g of water will give you when folded every 30 minutes for 2½ hours, and otherwise following the procedure above.

A lovely creamy crumb, and a wafer-thin, flaky crust. In a professional bakery, the ovens are able to take in water and turn into steam in certain intervals inside the oven, which keeps the bread moist and prevents the crust from forming prematurely—home bakers are, typically, not as fortunate, so we have to make do with alternative methods of getting those thin crusts. A lot has been written on the topic: people throw in ice cubes when they load the loaves, they put in wet towels that give off steam, they put a pan of cold water below the plate with the breads on, etc., etc.; In my opinion, this is all much too much work (plus the ice cube thing might damage the oven, crack the glass in the oven front and whatnot, plus it interferes with the bottom heat for my baking stone). Instead, I take some cold water from the tap, and place it in the cup of my hand and slowly drizzle it across the unbaked loaves between my fingers, then bake it just like that. This, of course, keeps me from doing fancy flour-patterns on top of the bread, but I didn’t really plan on doing those in the first place.

At any rate, for a fairly quick bread (yes, my quick breads take in the vicinity of 6 hours), it has a nice taste, but not as pronounced a taste of wheat as the 12+ hour breads do. But, at least, there was bread for lunch.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

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

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 | 2 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

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

If Salvador Dali baked bread

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Panmarino

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

For a while I have had Carol Field’s ‘The Italian baker’ standing in my bookcase without it seeing any much use at all. There are two primary reasons for this. First, the breads from Jeffrey Hamelman’s ‘Bread’ are simply so good it’s hard to motivate myself to bake from another book, and secondly, the recipes in Field’s book are simply annoying in their measurements. Who in their right mind measures ‘a cup of olive oil less a tablespoon’?

Like most people, I have a tendency to get stuck in just making the same few recipes over and over and over and… again, and I must admit that the pain rustique and french bread recipes are superb. However, it does nicely to experiment with what you eat once in a while. So, I forced myself to put Hamelman’s book back on the shelf and take a look at some breads from Field’s book, diligently trying to convert the measurements to metric weights before starting on them.

My first try was panmarino, or rosemary bread, where finely chopped rosemary is mixed into the dough.

Distinctive to this bread is the way that it is scored, namely in the shape of an asterisk, and the incisions are then lightly drizzled with coarse flakes of sea salt, but I only had fine flakes so they had to make do. After a good long bake the crust turns out lovely crisp.

When I think italian bread my foremost thought is usually a solid crust and a crumb with lots of holes, but this bread is nothing like that. On the contrary, it has a fairly dense, soft crumb, but with the rosemary aroma in the bread it goes very nicely with lamb.

Ciao!

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Retarded filone bread

Sunday, October 5th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

While the filone bread is a description of the shape of a traditional bread from Toscana (Tuscany) where it is made without salt due to an old salt feud, filone has come to mean a special kind of white, rustic bread here in Denmark, made slightly different from the ciabatta (another shape description for the saltless Toscana bread). In the Danish bakeries the filone is a rustic bread, with salt, that is slightly elongated, typically with pointy ends (which makes it fairly impractical to cut in regular slices, but nevermind that).

Now, most recipe books in Denmark are written by enthusiasts rather than professionals, and there is a tendency to an extreme overuse of fresh yeast (this is available in any store, really, whereas instant and dry yeast is slightly more rare). Thus, it was with ill-hid enthusiasm I threw myself at a recipe released from one of our bakery chains for retarded filone bread—it has been released as part of a yearly event that some people and stores are having in the fall break called The Great Baking Day, which is a moment for the busy families to pause and bake, father, mother, and children. It has been launched by a reknowned Danish chef and a child psychologist and seems to be a wild success (although the companies backing it seem to exploit it a tad by insinuating that you should use special brand flour for the optimal product, etc.).

Irrespective of it not being fall break just yet and that Hannah isn’t nearly old enough to participate, I wanted to give the retarded filone bread a try. The recipe calls for a 24 hour retarding, but I only gave it about 18 hours, fearing that it would have a too acidic taste otherwise. Shaping the cold dough is a whole lot easier than trying to shape some of the equal wet poolish-based doughs I usually make.

The shaped loaves are rolled in durum flour, and after proofing and a somewhat lengthy bake—almost 40 minutes—the breads have gained a lovely golden and rustic look.

Unlike the breads I usually bake, this method of making the breads yielded a somewhat denser crumb (which is consistent with the filone breads from most bakeries around these parts).

Its taste is markedly acidic, and I think having let it retard for another six hours would’ve been too much. It’s a solid bread that is good for a varied amount of toppings, particularly considering that it’s very easy to make. It’s basically made just by mixing the dough on a stand mixer, stuffing it in the fridge, waiting 18 hours, shaping, proofing, slashing, and baking the loaves. I still prefer the breads that require all the folding and other work—the crumb is simply better in those loaves. Still, an altogether decent bread.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Rehabilitating from thesis writing

Thursday, August 14th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

There has been a lot of silence on this blog during the past two months. Too much silence, really. However, all has not been lost as I have now finished my master’s thesis and handed it in. Only the defense remains. However, after scarcely having had time to bake, let alone writing about it, there is only one solution for rehabilitation: bake a lot of bread and make some awesome food. So I did just that, or, rather, I provided the bread, my wife provided the awesome food.

What we did was take a bunch of very lovely and delicate chantarelle mushrooms…

and we throw them on a frying pan together with a few regular champignons, some thyme, a bit of parsley and some thinly sliced garlic. They make for a very lovely photo if I have to say so myself.

To this we add a bit of oat-based cream (since I am lactose intolerant) that the mushrooms absorb fairly quickly.

Now all we need is a bit of my freshly baked french bread…

and the fried mushrooms are placed on the bread…

et voilà. Delicious as an appetiser or a night snack.

Tags: appetisers, baking, bread, food, mushroom, white bread

Pain rustique

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

While baking alone has a certain meditative quality, baking with others can be a lot of fun as you talk over the ingredients, help each other measure and fold and generally just have a good time creating food. So I took the chance when I had my sisters visiting to help my youngest sister try out one of the breads from Hamelman’s book, Pain Rustique. This bread, which requires a poolish, is very easy to make, and you do not have to wait 5 or 6 hours until it is completed (ignoring the activation time of the poolish, of course, which we left to sit overnight), but only require short 25 minute breaks, which is a lot nicer to have when you are focused on cooking. And lastly, it does not require any shaping, just like the ciabatta bread, making it very easy to handle for kids.

We did not get to take a lot of photos as we were making the poolish and folding the bread (there’s too much sticky dough everywhere when you’re two about baking the same bread), we did take some photos before loading the breads into the oven and after they were completely baked.

And once these beauties have finished baking, we get some nice, lovely breads.

The general consensus between my sisters, my wife and I: mmmmmmmmmmm.

The bread has a lovely, subtle taste without any overpowering sensations. It’s a good bread to be used as the basis for any food, and it is about as good as my straight dough French bread (the first poolish bread that has really succeeded for me). If you do not have the time to wait the seven or so hours for the French bread, this is a good choice. I will most likely be utilising this more heavily once we have a child.

Photography and great taste, courtesy of my youngest sister (with a bit of aid).

Tags: baking, bread, white bread