kendalm's blog

Super quick bake after a few loaves of bread. Prep'd the lamination in about 10 minutes this morning mostly to experimwnt with a hotter oven (bumped 425f to 450f) as well as baking on stone with parchment instead of a pan. Noticed much better pop amd the results speak for themselves. Although far from great, the inner portion of the spirals has opened much more and beginning to see the beautiful spiral 'honeycomb' materializing. There's a great video by louis lamore on croissants and one thing I noticed is how he performs the first roll - that is he seems to avoid pressurizing the inner-most part of the croissant and so gave that a shot too. Interesting how little things make a big difference. Anyone whos interested here is his video - such a perfectionist - his croissant even before they bake are gorgeous - https://youtu.be/409birlmP1s

All loaves shaped up pretty nicely. Ok so this is just another usual bake nothing special, no levain or anything fancy just a bake to make sure not to 'lose it' ... As one wise tfler reminds us, 'if you don't use it you lose it' - most exciting part here is that I usually have one loave considerable malformed which has been convenient at least for choosing a crumb model for disection but today the question becomes which one of you goes to the lab for analysis ?

Quick snap of one of 6 croissants baked today that are showing signs of improvement. Firat few attempts at these yeilded sandwich bread style crumb and now slowly seeing better and better results with the occasional step backwards. This bake invokved a change up whereby I decided that in order to improve the crumb, I needed to find a way to deliver more heat to these guys and did so by baking directly on the stone (well almost with a single layer of parchment). I had previously been using a fairly large pan which despite being a convenient vessle of transfer from bench to oven seems to hog a lot of the potential energy and results in a sluggish rise. This bake instead was performed by peeling off the proofed pastries to the hot stone and as a result popped farily quickly. i did notice the crumb was still a bit moist leading me to believe a boost of about 15 or 20 degrees might help.

One thing about croissants though is that no matter how bad you screw up they are almost always edible and sort of addicting. Whatecer the case, may the quest for the perfect croissant continue ...

Been nursing 3 new starters for almost 3 weeks now and at least one seems like its reaching a goos maturity level. This was a quick test bake to evaluate proofing times and although the crumb appears to have developed nicely i sti have a bit of work in determining optimal proofing times. Last week i clearly overproofed and therefore decided to try the other end of the spectrum (a really short final ... Ie 45 minutes as opposed to 2 hours). As much as i love the fact that spurdough crumb, at least in my experience seems to comply mkre often than commercial yeast I am still trying to come to terms with the massive flavor masking of the acids in this bread ... Where oh where are those delicious wheat tones ? This particular bake was done with 20% starter at 100% hydration for final hydration of 73%. Still not game enough to use imported flour and so, resorting to king arthur AP (maybe after a few more experiments we'll try some t65)

Heres the first bake from week old starter - results ehhhm, just ok. These seem fairly over proofed or the starter needs to mature more. Having been on a long commercial yeast kick its quite a change of pace using natural yeast whos timing and quantities I've gotten down to minutes. The first major adjustment is dealing with the long bulk and temperature sensitity. I usually cold retard over night and see about 1.5 time rise followed by a quick final. Here I let the dough rise at about 76f for 12+ hours and saw a good rise to near double size. Next is the final - nothing happens at 66f (my kitchen temp in the am) so had to move the proofing to a warmer spot at right around 75-76f and 2 hours later loaves look about right. Since I not confident enough yet to ise my favorite flour I opted to use KA AP which at 11.somthing % protein presents a lot more resistence than Im used to (at 9.4% T65) but despite that, shaping worked out alright. Slashing was a totally different experience, much easier due to the tougher surface. In the end this was a 69% hydration (down 3% from the norm) using a mix of ap and rye starter. Crumb...nothing to write home about - flavor - tangy tangy and more tang. I could get into this if I can mellow out this over abundance of tang and get some more spring here. Seems like it may take some time to nail the finer points and who know maybe a decent loaf can come of this but so far, I can eat it but really miss the flavor of the wheat which seems completely masked by lactic / acetic acid. Whats really been capturing my attention however are some of these multi-grain loaves with seeds and other goodies mixed in - as for a plain baguette made from sourdough its hard to beat the traditional version. Despite that, still excited to see where this starter goes from here :)

Sitting beside these 3 baguettes, why yes it is but before anyone rushes to judgment these are my usual schtick of yeasted loaves. Just wanted to advertise the fact that this starter is now mature enough to start baking more natural yeasted loaves. This is really a shout out to alfanso so he knows they are on the way. Was hoping last week the starter would be ready but it was just too young (just a week old). So hopefully tomorrow will see some test bakes - im thinking of doing a batard and a baguette together - got some dpugh in bulk right now and keeping an eye on progress - lets hope for some yeast action !

Its been a while since I baked these delicious morsels and spent a good deal of watching niko triantafillou's super quick video (found here https://www.saveur.com/how-to-make-canele). As a self proclaimed obsessive he already holds tons of credit and then watch his video (kiss fingers mmmma!) Just beautiful. So this time i decided its time to go all the way - vanilla beans instead of extract and gee instead of butter in the beeswax mix. Oh and 36 hours rest instead of 12. There was still a little muffin topping but after a gentle vibrating of the molds around the 20 minute mark they settled and stayed settled. The result - much much better browning of the tops. The hardest part - waiting for them to cool (the smell of vanilla permeates everwhere and i am pavlov's dog right now)

The picture perfect loaf. After a couple of disappointments ie, full on overproof last week and slightly entering the overproof zone yesterday, I figure it's time to cpncentrate again. This time shavint 5 minutes off the final and remembering my own tips on scoring. Its so easy to forget. Pretty nice loaves today !

Posting just for the record. Went ever so slightly into the over proof zone again. Not quite the pop I like but still pretty decent stuff. This formula calls for 0.8% fresh yeast which for 600g flour mean 4-5g of yeast. This is a real pain to measure and thinking back of both the noticable high rise in the morning and thinking about measuring I may have added 7-8g which is easy to do if your scale doesnt do 10ths of a gram. I often notice that I can weigh the same small amount twice and have two readings differing by up to 2g. I usually look for about 1.5 times the rise after cold retard and had almost double this morning. I shaved time from final but still have a few hints of collapse starting ... Hence the very selective photo. Another testament to process !

Objective today was to improve on some former efforts to achieve a more open crumb with croissants etc. Unfortunately as i began dough prep last night I was almost out of the flour I have been using and, have discovered works nicely for the lamination process (francine bio t55). This makes a really great dough that glutenizes beaitifully just not a great bread flour as its missing some af the additives (malts etc) - this is straight flour at about 9.4% protein. So only having about 250g left for a 500g batch I, added the other 250 as gold medal AP. Once time came to start the rolling process I was met with much more resistance than accustomed and ended up (as is fairly visible in the photos) with only two single folds. I am sure with more resting time resistence would diminish bit at the same time I had been curious to see how things migh develop with only 9 layers as opposed to 12 which is sort of standard (one book and one single fold). The results were indeed some very heavy layers but thats ok for this experiment. The objective was to work on crumb structure and after careful thought and observation of yeast activity I decided that in order to avoid overproofing, I would allow about twice the time on final that I would with a regular loaf - this based on observation of activity etc. It appears to me that this particular recipe (despite having 7-8 times the yeast) develops about half as fast as straight bread. I am also fairly confident that the crumb development is similar to that of bread whereby layers expand because gas trapped in the dough is creating bubbles that push the layers apart and, in some areas together. Despite popular opinion that suggests the butter is vaporizing and blowing the layers apart this makes no sense to me. This seems impossible as even if the butter vaporized the gas would immediately evacuate to the atmosphere by way of the dough edges. So it must be that croissants form an open crumb exactly as bread does - via co2 bubbles expanding. And, since I have long been able to get bread to pop, i decided to follow suit with laminates. About all I know is that if I develop decent gluten, perform a long cold retard, control keep yeast activity to a minimum for a long period and then blast the final shapes after a short proof, then usually an open crumb develops. It definitely seems the case here. Despite some dense middle sections these are showing signs of opening decently. Yes they are very heavy croissants with few layers but overall I am pleased to see improvement. The other thing to note is that anytime trying to master a product, it helps to use the same ingredients each time. So far I really like president unsalted butter - this seems a good plasticity. For dough I avoid milk and go with all h20, no eggs and instead extra butter. Other egg and milk-based doughs as too gummy for my liking. So as of now it looks like more flour needs to go on order but in case any other croissant enthusiasts are struggling with structure, I thought I would post this as an interesting experiment and hopefully it can help with understanding how this particular product works :)