varda's blog

After struggling with several formulae which never seem to come out right, I decided to change things up a bit.   First, I completely changed my starter routine.   Second I found myself at the counter with an empty mixing bowl and no idea of what I was going to make, so I made something up.   I'm not that good at computing percentages in my head, so I kept it simple, basically going with a fairly simple sourdough, but swapping in some white rye.   The results were less than stellar - the loaf exploded in the oven - basically jumping to around three times its unbaked height.  The second time all seemed well in the oven but halfway through, suddenly it slipped a gasket and a huge cancerous growth leaped out the side, almost as big as the mother loaf.    The third time, I could probably have waited another half hour on the final proof but it was way past my bedtime.   It may have opened too much but it didn't explode, so I call that a victory. 

The addition of white rye (which incidentally Hamelman says is not fit for bread baking) makes some pretty interesting but subtle changes in taste an texture.   My husband, who generally will only eat a slice or so of my more obviously rye breads eats this as if it were an all white bread which I guess it is.  The crumb is denser than a lower percentage rye sourdough, you can cut extremely thin slices without tearing the loaf, but still quite open.  

In general, the taste is such that I wouldn't mind having this as my everyday loaf.  

One of the things I've been working really hard at is trying to control the temperature of my dough.   I came upon a very simple method.   I take a pot and fill it with very hot water directly from the sink, and put the lid on upside down.   Then set the bowl or proofing basket on top of it.   I replace the water after the second stretch and fold as by then it has cooled down a bit.   I have found that I can maintain dough temperature in the mid 70s F by using this method.    Even so I still underproofed because it just seems to take so long to ferment this dough all the way through.   Here is my set up:

Finally the formula - simple but good if you throw in a little patience:

Instructions:

Autolyse flour and water for 20 minutes.   Mix in salt and starter.   Bulk Ferment for 3 hours with three stretch and folds.  Proof for AS LONG AS IT TAKES.   Bake at 450F with steam for first 15 minutes, without for 17 minutes.

When I first joined TFL over a year ago, I was completely blown away by a post by Shiao Ping.   Perhaps you remember it - a Gérard Rubaud miche stenciled with his initials and photographed with Japanese maple leaves floating around in the frame:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/15778/g%C3%A9rard-rubaud-miche. I read the post over several times and just shook my head.   Maybe in another life...  That other life may be closer but it isn't here yet.    A few weeks ago I suddenly remembered this post and looked it up and tried it.   I tried to follow Shiao Ping's instructions to the letter.   I added tiny amounts of spelt and rye to the starter - in fact so tiny that they are not really measurable in my kitchen.   I mixed up the dough, and religiously did the 5 in the bowl stretch and folds every half hour.   I retarded overnight because she did even though she said that GR doesn't do it that way.   And what did I find the next morning?   Soup.   I poured it out onto my peel and it flowed over the edge.   I flipped up the overflow and slid it as best as I could onto the stone and it flowed over the edges of the stone.   Not a happy thing.   But I baked it, and pulled it out and cooled it down and cut off the overflow lips, and tasted, and oh man.   Ugly but delicious.   Here is the ugly.  

I can't show you the delicious.  I tried to figure out what I could do differently.   I decided to do away with some of the tiny measurements by only adding rye to one elaboration and spelt to another (it's a three stage starter) and I decided not to retard overnight, and to do two stretch and folds on the counter every 50 minutes a la Hamelman.   I also cut the total from around 4 pounds to 2.5 (is it still a miche?) And finally I moved around the times of the starter stages.   Instead of having the first tiny amount ferment overnight which I thought would just dry out since it was so small, I had the first stage go for 3 hours, and the second overnight.   So again.   This time the dough seemed a bit more manageable, but even when it would come together on a stretch and fold, it would seem to liquify immediately thereafter.   This is an 80% hydration loaf, and that's high, but I've made other formulas at 80% and something else seemed to be going on than high hydration.    Here is outcome number 2.   Not much better.  

but still really delicious and motivating me to figure out how to make this thing properly.    On my third attempt, I decided the main issue is that the starter was the culprit that was causing severe liquification of the dough.    This is a crazy starter.   You start out with a tiny amount and build up the flour by a factor of 40 over three stages.   It has a high percentage of whole grains which I thought might be the problem.   You also add such tiny amounts of rye and spelt in the first two elaborations that you end up asking yourself, why am I doing this?   So I decided that in the hands of an artist like Shiao Ping this might be doable but for a peasant like me, no way.   I decided to take my regular starter and build it up as I normally do in two stages, building up the flour by a factor of around 5 rather than 40 with white flour only leaving out the whole grains.   I compensated for this by adding the whole grains to the final dough and kept all the percentages the same as the original formula.   I felt that only by working with a starter that I understood could I have any chance of getting this bread made properly.   Here is the starter build and formula that I ended up using:

This seemed a lot better behaved in the bowl coming together on the stretch and folds and not liquifying immediately thereafter.   Imagine my surprise when I tried to remove it from the bowl it was proofing in when it again flowed over the edges of the peel.   Again I quickly flipped up the overflow so the whole thing looked like a bialy and slid it into the oven without slashing (as if you can slash liquid.)   In the oven it expanded nicely and the sunken center filled out.   Again not a thing of beauty.   The crumb this time seemed more or less proper without the big caves of the first two at the top of the loaf.   But now I'm feeling tapped out.   I don't know where to go from here.   I don't understand the tendency of this dough to liquify at a moments notice.   Any ideas?   In other words - help!

The third try:

Yesterday I very assertively backed my car into a snowdrift and my long-suffering neighbor came out and helped dig me out, yet again.   (My husband came out in the middle of all this and dug too but that's his job so no more about that.)   Anyhow, a situation like this calls for bread, and I didn't want to make some pointy-headed thing that only a bread enthusiast would enjoy so I searched through Hamelman and (drum roll please) found his Golden Raisin Bread.  

Now who said good bread needs an open crumb?  (Ok.   No one.   I read the whole discussion.   Absolutely no one said that.)

(Oh.  My neighbor got the round one.)

Varda

First I should say that this bread is around as Russian as I am, which is maybe some.  Months ago, I bookmarked Lief's interpretaton of Breadnik's interpretation of Russian Coriander Rye.   This is my interpretation.   Original posts are here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/18561/breadnik039s-russian-coriander-rye-levain and here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/keyword/russian-corianderrye.    I followed Lief in going with a purely levain version, and used the same ingredients (mostly) albeit in different proportions.   And also modified the times by a lot.   It's cooling on the counter now, so I don't know how it will taste, but the smell (as always with rye) is heavenly.   It's also a treat to cook with coriander, which fills the kitchen with a marvelous aroma when it's crushed.  This dough is very high hydration (95%) and fairly high proportion of rye (60%) but actually quite easy to work with.   Here is my formula and method:

A few notes about this:   I don't really understand what dark rye is.   Is it  just another way to say whole rye, or actually a different grain?  I've never baked with this before.    I used Sir Lancelot for the high gluten flour.   I wonder if this is what made the dough so easy to work with, even with the high hydration and the high rye content.   I fermented the first build of the starter overnight, and then the second for 6 hours.   Four hours after the second elaboration it looked like this:  

This looked plenty fermented but it still had what I would term a fresh grassy smell.   Two hours later, the fresh smell was gone, but it hadn't really switched to a ripe sour one either.   So I probably could have let this go a little longer, but it did seem to have plenty of rising power.    I baked in a Dutch Oven which I don't usually do, not because the dough was so slack (it wasn't) but just because I was baking a boule, and it's a little easier to skip all the steaming and so forth.   Now I'm just waiting for breakfast.

And the crumb:

This is a very highly flavored bread.   The coriander alone makes you sit up and notice. I thought with 7 grams it would be hardly perceptible.  Crust is crunchy and overall bread texture is substantial but not heavy.    This is quite delicious and certainly a change from the ryes I've been making.    Next time I might decrease the sweeteners.   

Today was another snowday, so I again canceled a variety of plans to stay home with my son.   Amazing how nicely baking bread fits into that routine.   I had already planned to bake, but had no idea how I was going to fit it in, since I always manage to be out of the house at the exact moment that some essential step has to happen.   No such worries today.   I made Hamelman's 5 grain sourdough for the first time, as well as yet another iteration on my own elusive sourdough.  Actually I made Hamelman's 5 minus 1 plus replacements sourdough.  Since I don't like sunflower seeds, I upped the flax seeds and oats.  I don't have cracked rye (or know what it is) and had just bought a tiny bag of wheat berries, having no idea what to do with them, so I threw them into a coffee grinder and gave them a whirl, and voila - cracked something.   The resulting bread is just awesomely tasty.   Only after I tasted it did I run to this site and search, and see how them as come before me have raved about it.   Absolutely delicious, and compared to what I've been trying to make lately, like a walk in the park.   What other jewels is Hamelman hiding up his sleeve?   Not that he has any duds as far as I can tell.  But some are better than others, and this is just amazing.  

and rye and white sourdoughs side by side:

I'm a simple person and I'm driven by simple hopes and desires.   So while I may drool over the pictures of impossibly gorgeous pastries that get posted with alarming regularity on this site, I have no inclination to emulate those bakers.   All I want is to master bread with essentially three ingredients:   flour, water, and salt.   And that's not so simple.  For the last several weeks I've been cranking out alarming quantities of the stuff and slowly tweaking the few parameters available when the ingredient list is so short: dough hydration, starter hydration, and percentage of flour in the starter.    (Oh and also mix of flour and proofing strategies.)    I finally put together a decent spreadsheet to help me with this tinkering.    And now I can just put in the hydrations, and percentage starter (and flour mix of course) and I'm off to the races.    While I started down this road with Hamelman's formulae, I find I'm unwilling to go back to that right now, as I find I prefer higher hydrations and starter percentages.  

The first loaf baked after 1.5 hours final proof.   The second which retarded overnight, had a bit more spring. 

Second loaf: 

Slices from first loaf:

In trying to digest all the helpful advice I received from this list on managing fermenting, shaping, scoring, proper sourdough culture and so forth, I found myself in areas of Hamelman where I had never wandered before.   I looked with some amazement at the instructions for Three stage 90% Sourdough Rye.  This uses the Detmolder method of rye bread production.   What struck me as altogether improbable, is that you start with a teaspoon - yes that is .1 oz, or less than 3 grams - of ripe starter and build it up to a pound and a half (672g) over the course of around 24 hours, in three stages with each stage oriented to developing a different characteristic of the starter.   I admit, I wondered if this would work for a mortal baker such as myself, but I happened to have the necessary ingredients around (more or less) so I set off to see if an actual bread could be produced.   The instructions in Hamelman (page 201 in my version of Bread) are quite clear.   I followed his three stages carefully - and starting with a teaspoon of starter, produced a very pitted and expanded rye starter by the time it was ready to bake.   The final dough calls for medium rye, which I didn't have so I used 60% white rye, and 40% whole rye.   The instructions call for a bulk ferment time of 20 minutes, and final proof of around an hour.   I had to call off the latter after 40 minutes because it had almost tripled in size  was getting too big for my stone.   The instructions called for scoring with a dough docker, which I don't have, so instead I stippled with a skewer.   The dough also seemed to stipple itself, so it was very holey by the time it was ready to go into the oven.   Finally the house filled with an almost overwhelming scent of toasted rye.   And an improbable loaf is now resting on my counter soon to be wrapped up in linen and cut and tasted tomorrow. 

The stippling:

and profile:

and finally the crumb:

It's hard to assess this, since I've never actually eaten this type of bread before, and I don't know either what it's supposed to look like or what it should taste like.   But just as a lay opinion on the matter, and after only a couple of bites, I would say yum!  

Over the last year I have been trying to make a Rye bread called Tzitzel, which I remember from a bakery in my home town - University City, Missouri.  The bakery is still there and still makes Tzitzel, but as I don't have much (any) reason to go back to U. City, I figured I'd better learn how to make it myself.  After many attempts, I finally felt that I managed to make a respectable Jewish Rye with a nice crust and flavor http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20506/jewish-corn-rye but it still didn't taste anything like the Tzitzel I remembered.   Recently I took advantage of the brief free shipping period at King Arthur, and ordered White Rye and Sir Lancelot flour, neither of which I'd baked with before.   I tried making Jewish Rye with these two flours instead of Hodgson's Mill Stone Ground Rye and King Arthur Bread Flour.   I started to feel I was onto something despite the fact that the white rye flavor was much too mild, and the loaves puffed up like a white flour wheat loaf, which is very un-Tzitzel-like.   Today I tried again with a rye sour made with 2/3 white rye and 1/3 Arrowhead Mills organic rye, which is a whole rye flour, but much less gritty than Hodgson's Mills.   This time, the shape (broad and squat) flavor and texture were much more on target.   So now I have one more thing to add to my long list of baking lessons that I've learned this year - the flour matters.   If I want to get any closer to the original Pratzel's tzitzel, I am going to have to find out what kind of flour they use, and that's that.

Over the past few weeks I have been trying to "take it up a level."   I had hit the wall on getting properly shaped and slashed naturally leavened loaves.    LindyD's recent post http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21045/fire-and-ice-great-oven-steam on generating steam set off a lightbulb in my head.  The symptoms I have been trying to cure are cuts that open a little and then seal over, and a split side.   I had been convinced that this was caused by underproofing even though I was doing my best with the poke test, rise times and so on.   When I read her post I started to wonder if I was having trouble with steam.   I had been preheating a dry jelly roll pan on the base of the oven and pouring in cold water at the same time as loading the loaves.  This sets off a cloud of steam and then the water continues to boil for around 15 minutes before it evaporates completely so I thought I was all set.   But I do have a brand new gas oven and after reading Lindy's post, I began to suspect that it was efficiently venting out steam as fast as I could generate it.   After surfing around a bit, I found the following excellent comment in a post on side splitting  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10363/my-bread-keeps-quotsplittingquot-side#comment-54369.   So I surfed around some more for steaming methods that didn't involve going out and buying rocks and I found the following:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20162/oven-steaming-my-new-favorite-way and I tried it and dramatic improvement.    But it involved a little too much mucking around with steaming hot towels so I experimented some more and came up with a similar, but what seemed to me like a simpler and safer method.   I placed some soaked towels into bread pans half filled with unheated tap water on each side of my stone half an hour before loading the loaves, and let them preheat with everything else.   By the time I loaded the loaves, I got hit in the face with a cloud of steam.   Then fifteen minutes later, I removed the bread pans (with a long tongs) and once again got hit in the face with a cloud of steam, so I figured that the oven had been steamy enough in the interim.    The bottom line is the cuts opened, and the sides did not.   In fact they opened too much.   I have overdone it.   Too much steam?   Something else?   By the way, this site is just fantastic.   I would still be baking out of Clayton using speed em up 70s methods if it hadn't been for all of you.

Awhile ago, I tried making Tunisian Flatbread from a sketchy set of instructions, and while the result was delicious it was also a total mess.  I got some extremely helpful comments in the forum, and decided to try again.   This is a lot prettier than last time.   And certainly a quick and easy bread to make if you haven't gotten around to planning the day before.   The loaves are a bit less than 8 inches in diameter and over an inch tall.   I'll serve with lamb this evening for dinner.

250g semolina flour

250g bread flour (I used King Arthur All Purpose)

1 tsp salt

2 tsp instant yeast

250 ml warm water

125 ml olive oil

egg yolk for glazing

sesame seeds

Mix flour, water, salt, olive oil, yeast until dough adheres and cleans the bowl - two to four minutes in a stand up mixer at high speed with a dough hook.   Let rise for around an hour until double.   Preheat oven to 400 deg F.  (Around 200 deg C)  Divide and shape into two disks on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper.   Brush with egg yolk.   Sprinkle with sesame seeds.    Bake for 40 minutes.   (I turned down oven to 300 after 25 minutes.)    Other version of this type of bread used all white flour, milk instead of water, and an egg thrown in, but I wanted to try to preserve as much of the taste of my last try before moving on to other variations.