Loaves 43, 44 – 28 Loaves for a Party
You would think that 28 loaves of bread would get me pretty far along on my mission of baking 100 loaves of bread, but these 28 loaves only count as TWO – one white and one nine grain. They are all made from two huge 4kg batches of dough.
Every semester we have all the ETC-SV students over for dinner. I’ve been bragging to them about my evolving bread skills, so I thought it would be appropriate (and necessary) to serve homemade bread as part of dinner – that’s the six big loaves. I also thought it would be nice to send them each home with a loaf of bread – that’s the 22 smaller loaves.
28 loaves (6 big, 22 small) of 9 Grain and Lean bread
The party was Friday night, so I mixed all the dough on Wednesday night and left it in the fridge until bake time on Friday morning. It was lucky that I did this, as I forgot to add the honey to the nine grain bread – see Loaf 42 for an account of that experiment. I ended up making a new batch of nine grain dough Thursday night.
8kg of bread doing a slow fermentation in the fridge
This was a learning exercise in math and logistics. First, the math: 1) Up to 21 people to feed * six servings per 500g loaf = six loaves (three white, three nine grain) = 3kg. 2) 19 “souvenir” loaves at half size (250g) ~= 5kg (half white, half nine grain). 3) That’s 8kg of dough, 4kg each of white and nine grain. I actually ended up with 22 smaller loaves because I forgot to add the weight of the nine grain grains to my calculation and ended up with a bit more dough that I expected (much better than erring in the other direction).
The logistics were more challenging. Once removed from the fridge the dough needed two hours and fifteen minutes to be shaped and proofed before baking. Baking would take about 30 minutes, and with two ovens I can bake either 4 large or 6 small loaves at a time. Starting at 9:45am I would remove one baking batch worth of dough from the fridge each half hour. The dough would be divided and shaped and left to proof for two hours. This gave me a pipeline of loaves to bake every half hour starting at 11:45am. This was all timed out on a spreadsheet and printed as my work schedule for the morning.
22 250g loaves rising - each row of 6 is offset in the process by 1/2 hour
Happily, everything went according to plan, minus about 10 minutes of slop time. The last loaves came out of the oven at about 2:15pm. That gave me enough time to clean up and then prepare for BBQing six whole salmon filets and eight flank steaks. Sarah took care of the salads and veggies, and Jiyoung brought her amazing home made desserts.
Lessons:
- This was really fun – in a stressed out kind of way.
- The bread was a hit, and everyone loved getting to take home their own loaf.
- This semester’s students were really lucky, I’m never doing this again!
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- 4kg of mixed lean dough
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- 4kg building structure after a few stretch and folds
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- New 4kg batch of 9 Grain (with honey!) – it’s hard to believe this blob will turn into bread
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- 8kg of bread doing a slow fermentation in the fridge
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- 9 Grain on the left, Lean on the right
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- 9 Grain ready to bake
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- Lean bread ready to bake
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- 22 250g loaves rising – each row of 6 is offset in the process by 1/2 hour
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- 28 loaves (6 big, 22 small) of 9 Grain and Lean bread