Full description to come…

We had a dinner party for my students last Friday night, and I thought it would be nice to give them all a loaf of bread to take home afterwards. More details about that in the next post (Loaves 43, 44), because this post is about the batch that failed.

I made two 4 kilogram batches of bread, one with the Reinhart’s Lean recipe, and one batch with my original 9 Grain recipe. I mixed the dough on Wednesday night, planning to retard the fermentation in the fridge until baking time Friday morning.

The problem was that I forgot to add the honey to the 9 Grain mix before blending it in with the 4 kilograms (almost 9 pounds) of mixed white and whole wheat dough.

Adding the 9 grain mash - oops, without the honey

I realized my mistake an hour later, after I had done a series of stretch and folds and built up a nice gluten structure in the dough. Hoping to remedy the problem, I mixed in the honey anyway. This broke down all the gluten structure that had developed, and it never really recovered.

I fretted about this all day Thursday, not knowing whether I had ruined it or not. Once I realized that I had time that night to mix a whole new batch properly and still have it ready for baking on Friday I was able to relax. But I was very curious about the impact of what I did.

After mixing the new batch (properly), I decided to bake four loaves of the bread Thursday night and if it came out okay I’d gift three of the loaves the next morning to friends.

Interior crumb, much denser than it should be for this loaf

Bottom line: four loaves and 2k of unbaked dough straight into the trash. The dough didn’t rise as much as it should have when proofed, and it experienced very little oven pop. It was shot. I’m very happy though that I was smart enough to start over, even before I was sure the first batch was a total loss.

Sometimes you just have to start over...

More sourdough using the SFBI starter which I’ve been feeding every 12 to 14 days but haven’t used in awhile. The starter needed to be fed twice to get a nice liquid levain going. I did this on a Saturday so I could bake on Sunday for dinner and for gifts at Sarah’s work on Monday. The second feeding was at 7:30pm, and I started baking at 9:45 the next morning. You can see from the picture that the levain had risen during the night, and then dropped again by morning – it started at 12 ounces, got up to 22 ounces, and was at 16 ounces when I used it.

Fed sourdough starter in the evening, the next morning it is higher with evidence that it rose even higher and fell overnight

The dough was mixed, went through a series of stretch and folds, and then rose for another hour. I then divided it, let it rest for a 1/2 hour, shaped it into baguettes and batards, and then proofed for another hour and a half. I think I timed the proofing about right, for the finger poke test the dough recovered very slowly.

Results

The loaves were beautiful. I scored the baguettes properly, and the batards developed nice crispy ears. I wasn’t completely happy with the crumb yet – in the batards there were a few large long holes, but most of it was much smaller.

The flavor was not ideal – there wasn’t a strong sour flavor, but what was there was more bitter or acidic than the tartness I would prefer. The flavor was right in line with the odor of the starter, though, so I know that is what I need to work on.

Lessons
I will read up more on sourdough, but I suspect that I let the liquid levain over-develop and should have used it near its peak rather than after it tired out.

My Seeded Whole Wheat Original bread (loaf 38) was almost excellent. The plan for this loaf was to make it again, but sweetened with honey (per my lesson from loaf 38) to tweak the flavor. When I was buying seeds at Whole Foods I decided to try this with their bulk 9 Grain mixture instead of blending seeds myself. I love multi-grain bread, and getting it already mixed makes life a lot easier. I believe their 9 grain is cracked wheat, barely, rye, corn, rice, flax, and a couple other seeds. I added a bit more flax seeds and poppy seeds for visual interest, so this is probably 10 or 11 grain bread.

The addition of honey this time, along with a longer proofing time (see loaf 39!), made this into an excellent bread. It has a fluffy crumb and just enough sweetness to make it addictive.

Last time I included the basic recipe with only baker’s percentages. I’m so happy with this modified recipe that I’ll include the whole process here.

The Recipe

This will make two large loaves (about 700g each) or four smaller ones. They will last a couple days in open air, but can be frozen. If you do freeze them, take them out of the freezer in the morning and heat for dinner at 300 to 350° for about ten minutes.

The dough is prepared the day before baking and ferments in the refrigerator over night.

Day 1

It’s important to soak the seeds and grain before mixing in with the flour, otherwise they will rob the moisture from the flour. The total weight here (310 grams) is 45% of the weight of the flour (680 grams). The exact amount of poppy and flax seeds is not critical, they are there to add a bit more visual interest to the loaf.

Mix the seeds with an equivalent weight of water and let sit for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Once the water is fully absorbed mix in the honey. The final mix will have the consistency of cream of wheat and taste like a ganola bar.

Mix the flours, salt, and yeast in a bowl to get everything evenly distributed. (Note: I use coarse Kosher salt, so 14g is about 4 tsp. The weight is more important than the volume! The yeast is instant, or ‘bread machine,’ yeast.) Mix in the water and blend everything until you have a shaggy dough. I mix by hand and it takes about 5 minutes. There shouldn’t be any dry flour visible, and the dough will be very sticky and uneven. Now let it sit for 5 minutes.

The dough will now feel pretty firm. Mix in the seed blend. I do this by hand on a granite slab, but it can be done in a large bowl or with a dough hook on a mixer. It takes about ten minutes of kneading to get everything thoroughly blended. During this time the dough will go from firm to almost dense rubbery, then it will start to break down and become a goopy mess. When you finally have this unmanageable glob let it rest for 10 minutes on your work surface or in a large wide bowl.

Mixed ingredients slop

After resting, do a stretch and fold. Use a scraper to lift the half of the dough farthest away from you and stretch it out, then fold it over back over the top. Now do the same thing on the side closest to you, then the right half followed by the left half. You’ve now helped the gluten start to align itself. Celebrate by taking a 10 minute break.

Do another stretch and fold, wait 10 minutes, and then do it again. At this point you should feel the dough start to fight back – the gluten is doing its thing! Long elastic strands are forming which will allow the yeast to make wonderful bubbles inside. If you don’t feel that elastic pull, let it rest and do another stretch and fold.

Now take the whole mass and gently transfer it into a large container, cover it, and put it in the refrigerator. The dough will rise overnight to almost 3 times it’s current size, so make sure your container is big enough. For the amounts listed here you’ll need about a 4 liter or quart container.

Some structure, and ready to ferment

Day 2

Remove the dough from the fridge about 2½ hours before you plan to bake. Note: you’ll bake for about 30 minutes, and then the bread needs to fully cool for an hour before you serve it, so it will be about 4 hours from when you take it out of the fridge until you’ll be able to eat it.

Now marvel at how busy the yeast has been.

3x expansion overnight

Gently transfer the dough onto your work surface. Divide it into the number of loaves you want to make with a knife or your dough scraper. Pre-shape each piece into a boule – this should be quick for each piece, you don’t want to overwork the dough or squeeze out too many bubbles. (Shaping help can be found here: Bread Shaping Demo with Ciril Hitz). Let the dough rest for about 10 minutes to warm up a bit.

While the dough is resting, prepare a handful of seeds to cover the loaf with. I used a mixture of chopped shelled pumpkin seeds and flax seeds. Sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, or anything else would work, too. They will add some visual interest and a bit of flavor to the finished loaves. Only use unsalted seeds! Spread out the mixture on your work surface or a plate.

Refine the shape into the type of loaf you want – I prefer to shape boules to put in bannetons, but you can make batards (torpedos), boules, or just about anything else. After shaping the loaf, rub water on the top of the loaf to make it sticky and roll it in whatever seeds you’d like to decorate the surface with.

Let the loafs proof covered for about 2 hours. This number will vary depending on your temperature, humidity and maybe some other factors I don’t understand. In my kitchen at 68° and 50% humidity in the Spring, 2 hours is about right. If  you’re using bannetons or a couche the loaves will be seam side up.

Shaped and ready to proof

45 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 500°. There are a variety of ways to simulate hearth baking, I use a pizza stone in my oven along with a pan sitting at the bottom; other people use inverted Dutch ovens, or real hearth ovens.

2 hours of proofing

When the loaves are ready to bake, score the tops and transfer them to a peel and into the oven. Most people use cornmeal to help the loaves slide around, I use parchment paper. Carefully pour a cup of water into the hot pan at the bottom of the oven and lower the oven temperature to 450°.

The loaves will need about 30 minutes (less if you’re doing smaller loaves instead of two large ones). Check on them after twenty minutes and then pay attention. You want the internal temperature to be 200°. These two loaves went from 180° to 206° quickly in the last 10 minutes, turning the tops way too dark. I should have taken them out about 2 minutes sooner.

When they’re done, transfer them to a wire rack and let cool for at least an hour. It’s tempting to eat them hot, but there’s still a lot of cooking going on while they cool off. Let it be.

Now enjoy your reward. Eat about half the loaf as research to examine the nuances of the crumb, crust and flavor. Try some with butter, but it’s just a good without it. Then have more as toast the next morning. Yum.

Internal crumb

I haven’t yet mastered how long to proof my breads before baking, so I decided to do a test to understand what happens when a loaf is over-proofed. The results from this experiment weren’t at all what I expected. But before the punchline, here’s some background information.

Proofing is the rising stage right before baking. The yeast is busy eating and creating carbon dioxide, which is what creates the holes inside the loaf. The gluten in the dough allows it to stretch like a balloon around the bubbles without breaking. If the bread is allowed to rise for too long, the yeast runs out of food and can’t recover and the loaf collapses upon itself.

The common way to test to see if the bread has proofed enough is to gently poke your finger into it. If the dough quickly bounces back it isn’t ready, if it doesn’t recover at all you’re too late, and if it comes back slowly the bread is ready to bake.

You also get some additional “oven pop” in the first five minutes of baking. During this time the heat gets the yeast highly activated, until they reach 140° and instantly die.

I’m sure I haven’t been proofing enough, as I’ve been going by what the recipes recommend, and my kitchen is generally cold.

For my experiment, I decided to make a batch of dough, divide it into four loaves, and bake each loaf a half hour after the prior one.  The goal was to have a range of loaves to compare from under-proofed to over-proofed. The shortest proofing time in my recipes is 1½ hours,  so I decided to start there. The fourth loaf would proof for 3 hours – plenty of time to over-proof.

I used Reinhart’s French bread recipe because I am very comfortable with it, and because the crumb has small holes so the result of the test will be easier to see. My kitchen was between 68° and 70° during the experiment.

The image below is a time-lapse of the 3 hour boule, showing it at the beginning and at the time each loaf was baked.

Proofing times

The loaves continued to rise through the entire time, and the “finger test” on the 3 hour loaf still sprung back slowly. Despite the fact I proofed that loaf twice as long as normal, it didn’t appear to reach the over-proofed stage.

The visible results on the external crust told a very definite story. Each loaf had less oven pop than the loaf before it. Most of the loaves I’ve made at home resemble the first loaf – a lot of separation and tearing at the scores. This makes for really nice ears, good crusty bits to crunch on, and is very visually appealing. The third and fourth loaves barely had any oven pop – the fourth loaf was barely able to keep the score stretched open, making it look flat and dead.

The oven pop seemed to tell a definitive story… until I cut them open.

1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 hours proofing

Much to my surprise, the internal crumb of each loaf was progressively nicer. The first loaf (1½ hour proofing) had a tight and uneven distribution of holes. The center was more dense than the sides. It was under-proofed. The last loaf (3 hours) had an even distribution of larger holes. Even though the first loaf seemed to have a larger cross-section, the fourth loaf looked and felt lighter, airier and springier. The difference can be seen clearly in this picture comparing the two:

Crumb from 1.5 and 3 hours proofing

Conclusions

• I didn’t achieve my goal of over-proofing. I assume that’s because my kitchen was just too cold to do it in three hours. I wasn’t able to experience a failing finger test, which was one of my goals.
• I did proof it far enough to not get a reasonable oven pop, though, so I assume I was pretty close. If I had to choose a right time on this batch I’d probably go around the 2½ hour mark – a compromise between best crumb and best crust.
• I’m pretty sure many of my loaves have been under-proofed. They get extreme oven pop, and the yeast then dies before it has created all the open pockets that it’s capable of doing.

Loaves 9 and 10 were Seeded Whole Wheat loaves using a recipe from the first bread class I took at Sur La Table. They were terrible failures, though the one we made in class was excellent. I still don’t know what we did in class that wasn’t reflected in the recipe.

Now that I have basic breads down I decided it was time to revisit that loaf and see if I could get it right. The first thing I did was to translate the recipe to weights instead of volumes and figure out the baker’s percentages. There were a couple of things that stood out to me:

• It has a low hydration at 43%, which is lower than most other recipes I have.
• There is very little salt in it – most recipes end up around 2% (of the weight of the flour), but this recipe has 1%.

We made a nice seeded sourdough wheat bread in my SFBI class, and a book called “The Tassajara Bread Book” given to me by a friend also had a similar recipe in it. I decided to take the best of each recipe and make my own version. My first original recipe!

Here’s what I decided to do:

I used the seed mixture from the original recipe, but varied the portions a bit. I settled on:

And finally, the total weight of the seeds was set at 33% the weight of the combined flours. You can do the math from there (I used my Excel Bread Calculator!).

An important step was to soak the seeds in an equivalent weight of water for 45 minutes before mixing the dough. The seeds will absorb a lot of water, effectively stealing it from the flour. I ran through the math, and to give the seeds this much water is equivalent to hydrating the flour to 84%. I think one of the issues with my original recipe is that the dough was already not heavily hydrated and the seeds soaked out even more of the water – perhaps in class the seeds were soaked first (like they were in my SFBI class).

A mix of dry seeds

Hydrated seeds

After the seeds were soaked I mixed the dough (without the seeds) and let it rest for five minutes. It was a pretty stiff dough at 67% hydration. I then kneaded in the seeds, which took about five more minutes to get them evenly incorporated. The extra liquid softened up the dough quite a bit, so I let it rest for 10 minutes and then did a stretch and fold. This pulled everything together beautifully and I put it in the refrigerator overnight.

As a side note here, I’m really happy that I’m starting to develop a real feel for the dough. I knew what it was supposed to look and feel like, and when it didn’t I knew what to do. Very cool. That took about 35 batches of bread to develop.

The next morning I removed the dough, which had risen between 2x and 3x overnight, and preshaped two boules. I let those rest for about five minutes and then shaped them a bit more to get a stiff coating, wetted them, rolled them in chopped pumpkin seeds, and banished them to bannetons. They proofed for 1 1/2 hours, and then headed to the oven. I baked them hearth-style with steam at 450°. It took 30 minutes to reach 200° internally, then I turned off the oven and cracked the door, leaving them in for another 10 minutes.

The final loaves were very good. Two of us ate them both in two days with every meal.

Lessons

• The only change I would make to the recipe is to add some honey to it, like the original recipe had. For this amount of bread the recipe used 3 ounces, so that’s what I’d start with. The extra sweetness to balance the whole wheat would have been nice.
• The loaves also seemed a bit undercooked in the middle bottom, even though the internal temperature was at 200°. I think the size of the loaves and their higher density than the artisan loaves I’ve been making keep them from baking as quickly. Next time I’ll try baking them longer at a lower temp (maybe 400° instead of 450°) so the crust doesn’t brown as fast.

It’s nice to be to the point where I can confidently make delicious bread for purely utilitarian reasons. We were planning our dinner menu for the week and thought that BBQ beef sandwiches would be good one night. And, they’d be extra good on ciabatta rolls. I mixed up the dough Sunday night and baked them after work on Monday. We had a couple of them for dinner that night.

As my experiment this time I tried out different ways of shaping the rolls, which with the very wet ciabatta dough is more about cutting than actually shaping. The dough was removed from the refrigerator and (almost) poured onto my floured granite slab, where I shaped it gently into about a 10″ square. After letting it proof for an hour I sliced off three strips about 1 1/2″ wide to bake as long rolls. You can see from the picture that they suffered some shape shifting as I moved them onto parchment paper on a peel to move them to the preheated oven. After they were done baking (about 20 minutes) I moved them to a second heated oven to do the equivalent of venting. (I turn the second oven off and leave the door open with the loaves in it. This gives them hot dry air to suck any remaining moisture out of the crust as they begin to cool down.)

I cut the remaining dough into squares about 3 to 4″ on a side, transferred them as gently as possible to the peel and then to the oven. They made very nice sandwich size rolls.

Lessons

• My simple lesson this time is to flour the granite slab much more liberally. Even though there was a dusting of flour on the granite I had to use the dough scraper to coax the dough loose, leading to some severe mis-shaping.

My Mom’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to show up with bread in hand for her and my sister. I hadn’t made Reinhart’s French bread since Loaves 11 and 14. I had a few minor issues with those, but I’ve learned so much since then that it seemed pretty easy now (and it was). To try something new I decided to make Epis, which begins as a baguette and is then snipped to form a wheat stalk shape; plus two boules as gifts.

I’ve spent so much time calculating ingredients that I made a spreadsheet to help. I can put in the formula for the recipe (in percentages) and the total weight that I want to make and it spits out the amounts. Fun!

My Bread Calculator

A shaggy mix of ingredients

After a 5 minute rest and a couple minutes of kneading

The dough spent the night in the fridge the raised about 3x. The next morning I shaped two boules that went into bannetons and two more as baguettes. After proofing for about two hours I snipped the baguettes to make Epis. They didn’t come out as glorious as I had expected, so next time I will snip them at a greater angle and spread the pieces apart more – that should help them not rise back into a single piece like they did this time.

Apart from the shape of the Epis, the flavor was wonderful, and between a midnight snack and breakfast we managed to eat both of the epi loaves.

Oh, and the boules made a great little gifts.

The “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” (ABin5) recipe says the dough will last up to 14 days in the fridge. It’s been eight since I made Loaf 33, so I thought it would be a good idea to see how the remainder of the dough is surviving.

I’ve been smelling it every few days to judge the changes. After three or four days it was smelling very strong of alcohol (from the bacteria doing their thing), but after eight days that had changed. It still smelled of alcohol, but with some flavors added to it – in fact, it smelled like a nice (but strong) white wine. Go figure.

I used the remaining 750g to make two boules. I shaped them, let them sit for 40 minutes, preheated the oven to 450°, and finally baked them with some steam (making sure to score deep enough this time!). They took a bit longer than before at 35 minutes, plus I let them sit in the oven for another 10 minutes with it off and the door cracked. As a point of reference, my 5 minutes today was spread across 1 hour and 40 minutes.

The resulting loaves are nice but a bit indistinct. They have a pleasant somewhat sweet flavor, but nowhere near as interesting as the lean bread I’ve been making from Reinhart’s book. I think it would be a nice sandwich bread.

As I chewed up more of the loaf trying to identify a flavor characteristic (which I’m not terribly good at yet), I realized that this would be a great bread to use with appetizers and white wine. The flavor would complement brie well (I can’t really speak to other cheeses, and they just aren’t my thing).

It was time to feed my SFBI sourdough starter, so I used that as an excuse to try a new batch and see if I can improve the crumb that I’ve been getting. The recipe and process was the same as Loaf 29 until the final shaping step. I did the first sourdough feeding on Wednesday evening, the second on Thursday morning, and mixed the dough and baked Thursday night (until late!).

These loaves are 400g each rather than the usual 500g. I forget what my reasoning was there.

This time I was very comfortable with the shaping process. I was pretty aggressive at knocking out the bigger bubbles for both the pre-shaping and final shaping. I used a couche (linen cloth) this time for the resting and proofing steps, as can be seen in the images below. Two of the loaves I shaped into batards, and two were made into boules and put into the round bannetons.

I’m happy with the two batards. I should have angled the lame more when I scored – I think the loaves would have formed better “ears” like they did for Loaf 29. The interior is the nicest yet for the sourdough loaves. This time I didn’t have the longer bubbles from the shaping process that I had last time.

The two round loaves were another issue. The biggest problem is that I didn’t score them properly. This time I was way too shallow – the result is that the very top of the crust split, but not enough to allow for the expansion of the bread in the oven. Rather than tearing along the seam and rising up in that direction, the pressure found an easier way out along the bottoms of the two loaves, creating very ugly rips around the sides. I think this also contributed to the bubbles in the crumb being heavily lopsided towards the tearing.

I can only bake two loaves at a time in our oven; for Loaf 29 I retarded the proofing of the second two loaves by putting them in the fridge for 30 minutes. I didn’t do that this time, and I think the round loaves also over-proofed. They didn’t pop back hardly at all from the “finger test” right before I turned them out of the bannetons.

I left each of the loaves venting in the oven for 10 minutes before removing them to cool. For the first two I actually moved them to another 425° oven that I then turned off so that I wouldn’t lose any of the heat in my main oven for the second loaves. This worked very well to keep the crusts crispy.

Taste Tests

The flavor was better than Loaf 29, I think I balanced the salt better this time. But there still isn’t much of a sourness to the flavor. It’s expected that it shouldn’t be different as I haven’t done anything that would affect the starter in that manner. The sour flavor is a bit more noticeable the next day.

Lessons

• Still working on that scoring skill. There really is a “too deep” and “too shallow.” Today I learned about “too shallow.”
• Leaving the loaves in a vented oven for 10 minutes does help to keep the crust crispy.