tpassin's blog

During the Infinity Bread Community Bake, I created an Infinity Soda Bread. See it at 

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/529736#comment-529736

Today's bake is nearly the same recipe except I leavened it with sourdough starter instead of baking soda.

This CB called for 1/3 of the flour to be white, 1/3 some version of whole wheat, and the remaining 1/3 to be any combination of grains and flours you want. Today's bread used graham flour for the WW, and a combination of spelt and rye for the remaining 1/3. The formula also included some oats.  The liquid remained a thick, rich cultured buttermilk, the same as I used for the soda bread version.

Pictures then details: 

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The bread is a little delicate but good eating. The loaf has a thin pleasant crust, a soft fairly open crumb, and a good balanced flavor with no sourness.  The nigella seeds come through as a faint perfume that can barely be tasted, which brings in a hint of mystery.  The slices are more delicate than a sourdough loaf would usually be so they should be cut thick.

Steve, the baker of our local bakery, liked it very much.

I purposely made the dough to be wet and it turned out between a batter and a normal dough.  It was very sticky and gloppy. I baked it in a 4 X 4 X 9 inch Pullman pan without the lid. I buttered the insides of the pan with soft butter. 

Recipe
-------
Flour Weight: 420g

Dough
----------
        Baker’s Percent          Actual Weight g
-----------------------------------------------------------
Total Flours  100.0                          420.0
------------------------------------------------------------
AP                 33.3                           140.0
Graham         33.3                           140.0
rye                 20.0                             84.0 (stone-ground)
spelt              13.3                             56.0 (stone-ground)

Liquids
------------
buttermilk       86.9                            365.0

Starter/Levain 16.6                             69.7

Salt                  2.0                                8.4 Sugar

Other
-------
rolled oats        7.0                               29.4
caraway seeds 1.2                                 5.0
nigella seeds    1.8                                 7.6

Process (times are very approximate)
-------------------------------------------------
- 6:45 PM - Finish mixing all except for oats & seeds
- 7:30 - knead (thick sticky paste)
- 8:15 - stretch on countertop
- 9:00 - s&f (in-bowl folds)
- 11:00 - Form log with some stretching, put into Pullman (still sticky but had some cohesiveness)
- 6 AM - Risen to top of pan. Preheat oven 450°F
- 6:20 - Bake 415°F no lid 20 min, 20 min 390°F. Remove from pan, bake 5 min 350°F.

 TomP

Here's a list of all the bakes sent in for the Infinity Bread Community bake. Hope I didn't miss any!

[September 10 - added three template test bakes]

I want to pose a number of questions that I hope will stir up some discussion.  I have ideas about some of them but no real facts.  Here's the first.

I have measured the volume of a starter as it rose after feeding.  I've done this several times with various starters and a poolish. The general pattern was the same.  The starter would, after a delay, start rising and build up to a roughly constant rate, then start to taper off.

If at this time I stirred the starter, it would naturally deflate and then start rising faster than before with little or no delay. I've even stirred it up again and again it would start to rise even faster. I also did this with a piece of dough, which I had to knead instead of stir, and got a similar pattern.

My overall question is: What is going on here?  It comes with sub-questions:

1a. After the initial mixing of the starter, there is the usual delay before rising starts.  But after stirring there isn't much if any delay. Why the difference?

1b. Wouldn't the handling during shaping act like kneading or stirring, and is this the reason proofing usually goes faster than bulk fermentation?

1c. Is there a way we can put this behavior to use?

Before any stirring, the samples I've measured increase in volume at a more-or-less constant rate.  If there were a lot of multiplication of the yeast, the rate should increase since more yeast cells would be available to emit gas.  I think this confirms what we're all taught, that the conditions during bulk fermentation are mainly anaerobic and the yeast cannot multiply.  But why would there be faster growth right away - without that initial lag -after stirring?

TomP

I was looking through the Community Bake on ciabatta, and I didn't see that anyone had tried using the original recipe of the inventor, Arnaldo Cavallari.  It's available on line as a photo of the recipe (in Italian) in his bakery, and there is a faithful translation available, too (I know because I transcribed the recipe from the photo by hand, and translated it with Google Translate). I'll post the links later.  The recipe is very different from what us home bakers typically do, and also from most ciabatta recipes I have seen.

Here's a brief summary: 10kg flour, 50g brewer's yeast, 5L water. Mix in spiral mixer 5 minutes. Ferment 16 - 22 hours at room temperature. Add 2L water, 100g sugar, 250g salt. Mix 5 minutes slow, 8 - 10 minutes medium, desired dough temperature 25 - 27 C (77 - 81 deg F). Bulk ferment 30 - 40 minutes. Scale into 300g pieces and shape onto floured boards.  Proof 1 hour uncovered. Turn loaves over onto baking sheets, bake with steam "at a high temperature" for 30 - 35 minutes, releasing steam halfway through.

Wow! 100% pre-fermented flour.  50% hydration biga. 70% final hydration (modern recipes are usually 80 - 85%). Proof uncovered. So different.

The hydration seems very low but we don't know much about his flour mix.  He said he worked it out with a selection of five local flours of different kinds, and came up with a milling method suitable for the bread - he owned his own production mill.  So we don't know anything about the ability of his flour mix to absorb water, nor what the effective extraction was.  I was not able to find a picture of an original loaf nor its crumb so we don't really know about that either.

We do know that he was trying to produce an Italian competitor to the baguette for sandwiches, and that the bread is said to have had a thin hard crust and soft open interior.

Well, I'm not about to make a batch with 10kg flour, and if I wanted to I couldn't handle nor bake it.  So it will have to be scaled down, in this case to 300g flour for experimenting.  We know that larger batches of dough can behave differently, often needing less yeast and maintaining a higher temperature better.  The oxygenation during fermentation will be different.  Also, I'm not going to try to mix a 100% hydration biga with my old KitchenAide mixer.  In fact, I planned to do the final mixing and kneading by hand too.

So this effort won't be 100% faithful to the original but I'll try to come as close as reasonably possible.  Here are my going-in decisions:

1. Sourdough instead of yeast, so I don't have to guess how much yeast will act the same.  Maybe yeast in a later bake. I used 7% of starter.  I thought this should give me a fairly long initial fermentation, maybe 12 hours.

2. Flour mix: 80% KA Bread flour, 10% sifted stone-ground whole wheat, 10% durum flour.  Maybe this will be something like the original, but who knows?  At least it should taste good.

3. After working in the last 20% (hydration) of water by hand, do several stretch-and-fold sessions to replace the machine mixing of the original.

4. Let the dough ferment long enough to double or nearly so, instead of using the one hour specified in the original.  There are just too many unknowns to justify setting a strict time limit.

Everything went pretty smoothly.  The first fermentation seemed to be done after 11 hours, a little quicker than I had in mind.  Mixing in all that extra water by hand was tedious, and I let the dough rest several times to help it absorb all the water. Then I kneaded it in the bowl until all the layers had merged together.  I did two sets of 20 coil folds 15 minutes apart. After that I thought the dough was in good shape and wouldn't need any more.  Overall the dough fermented for about 2 hours after the last S&F before it had doubled.

The dough was light and airy, and easier to handle compared with typical 80 - 85% doughs I've made in the past, but it felt rather wetter than I expected for a 70% hydration dough. The final proof took an hour.  The loaves baked with initial steam at 425 deg F for 27 minutes.

Overall I found the process fairly easy except for working in all the extra water.  Shaping and moving the loaves was easier than I expected.  The finished loaves look like respectable ciabatta bread.  The interior is soft but not as open as we have come to expect.  The crust was thin and on the hard side but not too hard to bite through in a sandwich.  The flavor is rich, with a little sourness as you would expect after the long ferment with sourdough.

As a sandwich loaf, I used it for a chicken salad sandwich for lunch today and I thought it was very nearly the perfect sandwich loaf. I was able to slice the loaf lengthwise and leave a bit of a hinge on one side.  The hinge had no tendency to break open.  This helps squishy fillings to stay in place. 

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 What's next?  I want to try it again, using yeast for the biga.  I'll probably also repeat with sourdough, but less, maybe 4% instead of 7%.  I'd love to see what someone else comes up with, trying the original recipe.  This might be a very good place for a low-acid Levieto Madre starter, wouldn't you think?

Links :

The English translation: https://www.tasteatlas.com/ciabatta/recipe

The original recipe, in Italian - https://www.tripluca.com/paesi/europa/italia/la-ciabatta/

TomP

After some discussion in recent threads, I decided that it's high time I tried out shorter bulk ferments. My guiding principle has been that the longer the flour is hydrated, and the longer it's fermented, the better the flavor. So I usually let bulk ferment go on to more than double, sometimes triple, the original size.  This usually gives me a fine, fairly uniform crumb, which may have large pores or smaller ones depending on hydration, grains, all these sorts of things.

This practice has served me well, and I like that kind of crumb, but I've been interested to see how a shorter bulk ferment could change things.  Some people only let the dough rise by 1/2 or 1/3, for example.  This bake is my first experiment.  As a bonus, I measured the pH with my new Hanna meter.

Here's the crumb shot, then the details:

_DSC1003_lzn.jpg

 You can see that there is a wide range of pore and cavity sizes, and in the larger ones you can see some nice gelatization. The crust is gorgeous, and the height and oven spring were excellent. The crumb is well open for a 72% hydration loaf.  I'm very happy overall.

This loaf uses mostly all-purpose flour along with some malted barley and Irish-style whole wheat flours.  This made for a soft crumb.  It might be a little too soft for the crust, which is thin, flakey, and a little crunchy.

Formula (flour and water are totals including starter's flour and water) *
=======
10% - malted stone ground barley flour
10% - KA Irish-style whole wheat flour
80% - Gold Medal All Purpose Unbleached
72% - water
20% - starter (100% hydration, made with bread flour)
2.2% - salt

* Total flour was 400g.

Process
======= 
 8:30 AM - Rough mix of all ingredients
 9:00 - knead and stretch
 9:55 - 1st S&F, between wet hands
10:45 - 2nd S&F, between wet hands
12:05 - 3rd S&F, on bench with a little flour
1:30 PM - 4th S&F, on bench
3:30 - shape loaf, proof freestanding covered with plastic wrap**
4:55 - bake 

** Dough had risen by roughly 50%, compared with my usual 2.5X - 3X.

After the 3rd S&F the dough felt wonderfully silky, and was very extensible.  I decided to do a final S&F to reduce this extensibility.

Bake Profile
=============
- Preheat oven with baking steel to 450 °F
- Uncover loaf last 15 minutes
- Slash, insert into oven
- Throw 12 oz tap water on steam tray, block vent for 1 minute***
- Turn temp to 300 °F for 15 minutes
- Turn temp to 425 °F
- Total bake time: 40 minutes.

*** The oven leaks steam so fast that hardly any is visibly coming out of the vent after a minute.

Here is a graph of the pH vs time.  Don't pay any attention to the first point looking lower than the second.  I just didn't write down the second digit of the reading, which I did for all the others.  I'm sure the first point was the same as the second one.

pH_vs_time_20%_starter_72%.png

Oh, yes, the taste is rich, mellow, a bit buttery.  All in all, a successful experiment, I'd say. 

Like many others I have tried my hand at Irish soda bread from time to time.  I've never been happy with the results. The loaf has usually been flat, dry, crumbly, more scone-like.  Usually I have baked the loaves free-standing, a few times in an open skillet, and I usually have used baking powder instead of baking soda because it's more tolerant and why not?

I've read up on the history of Irish soda bread, and I even received a bag of King Arthur's Irish-style Whole Wheat flour for Christmas.

Then I found this story by Stella Parks on Serious Eats that has changed everything -

https://www.seriouseats.com/real-irish-soda-bread-recipe

Digging deeply into how people actually made soda bread in the 19th century, she learned three things that make an enormous difference:

1. The dough should be *very* soft - as soft as can possibly be handled;

2. The dough needs to be alkaline, not acidic.  So you need enough baking soda to neutralize the buttermilk's acidity (baking powder is fairly neutral and won't do that).

3. The bread was mostly baked in an iron pot with short legs and a cover, set over coals and with coals heaped on top.  IOW, a Dutch Oven. Even when baked in a skillet, the skillet would have been covered.

Ms Parks tried it out, and she says the results were a revelation.  No more crumbly, dry bread with little taste.   To quote her,

Before digging in, I let the soda bread cool on a wire rack for about 15 minutes, a completely arbitrary time determined strictly by my own impatience. The sound of it was glorious, accompanied by a shower of crispy shards that flew out with every pass of the blade until my knife sank into a pillow crumb that gave way as cleanly as any sandwich loaf.

My first slice was without butter or salt, yet it tasted moist and rich, with an aroma something like that of a bakery-style pretzel—mild, but distinct. My second, third, fourth, and fifth slices were consumed in a blur of butter and honey

So I tried it and got pretty much the same result.  That was with white AP flour.  Then I made a loaf with 50% Irish-style WW, and that was wonderful too.  Both these loaves were rather flat because my dutch oven is too big across to provide any real containment.

For today's bake, I used a smaller, ceramic pot (2.5 qt) to contain the dough, and I added some baking powder to get more lift.  Wow! Look at that lift!

Here's what the loaf looked like before slicing:

high_soda_bread-1.jpg

high_soda_bread-2.jpg

 Today I'm a happy camper!

TomP

A few days ago I posted about a loaf of bread that included cooked oatmeal and graham flour (see https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/73391/oatmeal-graham-flour-sourdough-pullman-bread). I wanted to try it with buckwheat, and I found a box of Wolff kasha, which are toasted buckwheat groats.  Perfect!

The bread is very good in taste and texture, and the striking feature I want to highlight is how very open the crumb is. I didn't think a porridge loaf could have such an open crumb.  I used less flour for this loaf compared with the earlier oatmeal one, 300g vs 370g, yet it rose as high in the Pullman pan. Otherwise the recipe is the same: 20% (pre-cooking) kasha, 30% graham flour, 65% hydration, 30% innoculation with 100% hydration starter, 2% salt.  The starter was a little old, though, and had gotten somewhat thin.

I used the amount of water the package recommended for the weight of kasha I used.  The cooked porridge had absorbed almost all the water.  I had to hold it covered in the refrigerator over night for timing reasons, and the next day it was very dry and crumbly.  I loosened it up with a little milk, maybe an ounce/30g, and squeezed the porridge between my fingers until it turned into a thick paste.  After all the ingredients were mixed, the dough was a wet, thick paste.  I didn't worry about it since the previous loaf had the same pasty consistency.

One other change was that I bulk-fermented in my proofing box at 76 deg F/24.4C since my work counter was a little cooler, enough to slow down the development.  After I put the dough into the Pullman pan, I increased the proofing temperature to 78 deg F/25.6C.  It rose very well over the next 2 1/2 hours.

I baked with the lid for 40 minutes at 350 deg F/177C.  Then I removed the lid and baked at 400 deg F/204C for another 20 minutes.  As with the previous loaf this was enough to develop a thin but crunchy crust.  I think it would have been good to continue cooking the loaf for another 10 minutes, perhaps, to drive off more moisture since even the next morning the loaf had a very moist crumb.

With the previous oatmeal-graham loaf I found that the bread grew on me as I ate more, and this new loaf with kasha instead of oatmeal has an even richer flavor. And it toasts up so well!

TomP

I received a sack of graham flour for Christmas.  It is from Burkett's mill.  If you read up on graham flour you usually read that is whole wheat ground more coarsely than the usual WW.  If you find the right site, it will tell you that the endosperm is ground finely and the bran and germ are ground coarsely, I think the flour I have must be the latter.  It's color is lighter than the water wheel-stone ground flour I have, with larger flecks and dark bits.

For this loaf I cooked some rolled (porridge) oats in the microwave, and added them to the dough. The flour content is 70% bread flour, 30% graham flour, and the uncooked oats weighed 20% of the total flour.

A picture of the crumb, then ingredients -

graham-oatmeal-slice.jpg

Ingredients
=========
70% bread flour (KA)
30% graham flour (Birkett's Mill)
20% oatmeal (rolled oats uncooked weight)
50% water (for cooking oatmeal)
60% other water
36% starter (100% hydration)
2.2% salt

---------------------
370g flour (exclusive of starter)
990g Total dough weight

It is always hard to know how much of the water in cooked grains, scalds, etc. will contribute to the effective hydration.  In this case, I had trouble wetting all the flour so I added some water.  Apparently I added too much because I ended up with a thick, pasty batter.  A few sets of coil folds over the next 2 1/2 hours added some strength, but I still had to scrape the dough into the Pullman pan.

The loaf rose well in the end and has a surprisingly open crumb.  The crumb is a little delicate; the flavor is richer than the usual WW, and a little sweet, which I think is partly down to the graham flour and partly to the oatmeal.

I baked the loaf for 50 minutes at 350 deg F/177C without the lid.  The internal temperature had reached 208 F/97.7C but the loaf was pale and I knew it had a lot of moisture still to give off.  So I baked it at 400 F/204C for another 10 minutes.

Overall, a very nice loaf.

This bread uses rye and wheat flours in the same proportions as dmsyder's San Joaquin breads, but the process and levain are different, and the rye is toasted. I included a little sugar because that seems to go well with the rye.

The loaves proved to a surprisingly large size, baked up beautifully, have a wonderful crust, an open crumb, and a mild lovely flavor with cereal notes.  I don't taste any sourness.

The dough has 65% hydration (not counting the starter ingredients) and 30% starter, with no levain build stage.  The shaped loaves were proofed freestanding and retarded overnight in the refrigerator. Pictures first, then details.  The sheen on the crust is not an illusion. Actually, in person the sheen is even more pronounced. It's something I expect to get on most of my free-standing bakes.

The truncated bit on the left side of the crumb photo is where the two loaves merged, like Siamese twins joined at the hip.

Formula
=======
Total flour 600g (not including starter)
---------------------
      5% toasted rye
    10% whole wheat (93% extraction stone ground)
    85% all purpose Pillsbury Unbleached All Purpose)

30% starter (100% hydration, fresh white AP flour))

65% water
2.0% sugar
2.5% salt

This produced two loaves of about 475g each, or a little more than one pound.

Process
========
- toast rye
- mix starter, all flours, salt, sugar, water
- rest 30 - 45 minutes
- knead/stretch
- 2 S&F in hands over next 1.5 hours
- finish bulk ferment (5 hours total)
- scale, form two loaves, preform, rest 10 minutes
- proof loaves 1.5 hr covered with plastic wrap
- refrigerate loaves overnight
- warm up loaves 45 minutes, uncovered last 10
- preheat oven to 450° F
- bake with steam at 425° F for 38 minutes
- cool down in vented oven for 4 minutes (turned off).

The dough rose quickly in both bulk ferment and final proof, where it took me by surprise. I have a tendency to underproof my loaves - though they seem developed by the poke test - and though I was worried these had overproofed since they had swelled so much, as you see they came out quite beautiful.

The loaves proofed side-by-side on a parchment-covered plastic cutting board.  They got so big that in the end they touched and merged together at the middle, like a tray of buns. They started to overflow the cutting board by bake time.

As usual I baked with a baking steel and steam.  My oven vents steam out of a range-top vent within a few minutes, and this time I blocked the vent for a few minutes to keep more steam in the oven longer.  The dramatic sheen and the rich color you can see in the pictures are enhanced by the steam.  I used to get them with a previous oven, but my present one vents more aggressively.

The crust is very crackly and flakes into shards when you bite it, and you can bite through it without a fight.  The crumb is very open for a 65% hydration bread. It's a little soft, which might be because I didn't wait for a complete cooldown, or could be a hint to use bread flour next time.

All in all, a big success.

TomP 

I used the same formula as for my 50-50 Emmer bread -

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/72946/50-emmer-sourdough

and made rolls instead of a loaf.  The process was the same.  I portioned the dough into 4-oz (114g) pieces.  This might be a little large for a roll, and I would probably go for either 3 or 3.5 oz next time (85 - 100 g).  The dough, though a bit sticky,  was easy to shape as long as I used a little flour on my hands and the bench.  The rolls overnighted in the refrigerator on a parchment-covered cutting board, covered with a sheet of plastic wrap. There was no sign of drying out or slumping.

To get the glaze, I mixed a little water with an egg yolk and brushed on a double layer after slashing.  I have found that using an egg yolk instead of a whole egg makes for a deeper glaze, sometimes even looking like it was lacquered.

These were baked with steam on a baking steel at 450° F for 15 minutes.

The crust is softish, which is good for a roll.  The crumb and flavor are just about the same as for the linked 50% emmer loaf. 

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