varda's blog

Recently I decided it was time to try to learn to make baguettes.    My strategy has been to make baguettes every day, both to get practice and to try different approaches.    Since I am making them so frequently and often tucked in the middle of other bakes, I don't always have good records.  That hasn't been much of an issue, as these are practice baguettes and haven't been that terrific.    The other day, though, amidst baking other bread, I made the tastiest baguettes ever.    Unfortunately my records were incomplete, and I wasn't entirely sure what I had done.  

The ones pictured here are all white, 80% hydration, 20% prefermented flour, refrigerated in bulk for 20 hours.  

As part of this learning process I have been reading a lot on TFL from all (actually some, there are a lot) of the great baguette makers including Janedo's great post on the Bouabsa method, and David S's amplifications and Mark Sinclair's amplications on those amplifications, and of course txfarmer.    This makes learning so much easier.    Thank you all.  

Here are the difficulties I am having.   First and foremost shaping.    I know this is entirely a function of the high hydration I have chosen.    And yet, based on my experience so far, they seem to get tastier at higher hydrations (and perhaps prettier at lower.)    So I would like to make it work.   I have been proofing on parchment paper seam side down on a baking sheet, using the parchment as a couche for support.   This way I don't have to attempt to move them when time to load into the oven other than to flatten out the parchment.   Scoring is even worse than shaping.   My lame just gets lost in the soft dough.   I can't get a clean cut.   So suggestions extremely welcome. 

And now on to recreating that unrecorded baguette.  

Update:   I have tried a few more times and got quite different results.   A bit mystified but here is the latest:

Somewhat dramatic difference in shaping and slashing no?

So what changed:

Formula:  

Instead of 80% hydration, 75% hydration

Instead of 20% prefermented flour from starter, 25% prefermented flour from starter

Method:

Instead of 20 hour retard, 24 hour retard

Instead of 30 minute rest and 1 hour proof, 25 minute rest and 50 minute proof

Equipment:

Instead of baking on sheet on stone, proofed and baked on baguette tray.

Taste?  

I'll just say it is a tasty morsel, and a fine resting point for now.   No need to get obsessive after all.

Formula and Method:

Lately I've been baking a lot, as I decided my family's appetites did not quite coincide with either the type or amount of bread that I wanted to bake.   This has led to a conundrum, as I have occasionally made a great many loaves and then ended the day with no bread in the house.   Suddenly my barely tolerated bread has become a must have, so I have to make up the difference with a few more loaves after the big bake is over.   Yesterday I made these loaves which all went to good homes by the end of the day.  

Today, to make up for the lack of bread in the house,  I made a couple more durum loaves, and then a somewhat of a mystery boule.   The mystery wasn't what was in it, but how much, as my scale bit the dust before I could weigh the ingredients.   So basically some white starter, rye sour, KAAP, water and salt.   The water must have been quite a bit, as the dough turned out to be quite wet.  

These durum loaves were the first I've made with King Midas Extra Fancy Durum.   I was pleased to taste them and find that I couldn't tell any difference between that and King Arthur, and as you can see below, the crumb color didn't suffer.  

The mystery boule dwarfs the durum one. 

It has a nice light sourdough texture and flavor.   Of course I will never be able to recreate it.   I suppose the point is just to eat it.  

This morning I baked a sprouted wheat loaf.   I had made my first one the other day and it was an ugly duckling but delicious, so my plan was to make a prettier bigger one.   I succeeded on the bigger.

I will say this though - this loaf rose very nicely both in and out of the oven, and I didn't use any VWG.   I did however use lots of rye sour and starter which had the effect of obscuring the wonderful taste of the sprouted wheat.   Good but not ready for prime time.  Back to drawing board.   Ideas?

No sooner was my sprouted loaf out of the oven when it hit me that I had a pain de mie biga timing out in the refrigerator.   I had not been planning to make a second loaf today but didn't want to lose it, so I gave up on what I was supposed to do and made the pain de mie.    This time, again following Janet, I decided to make a 100% whole white wheat loaf.   I had made one with high extraction flour earlier which tasted terrific but was somewhat disappointingly flat.  

This one was much better behaved.   After mixing my last one for 45 minutes it was still a liquid although a particularly viscous one.    Here, after 20 minutes or so of intensive mixing, the dough came together in a ball, but didn't windowpane.   I gave it a 10 minutes rest, then mixed around 10 more minutes.   This time it was definitively done.

Much to my delight, it did not come out of the oven looking like a cornfield flattened in a tornado but had a pretty nice loft (see above.)   Comparing it to my last (same size) white pain de mie (see below) it wasn't shaped all that differently.

Crumb shot:

Formulas, Methods:

Sprouted Wheat Loaf

Whole Wheat Pain de Mie

Some time ago I posted on a chocolate borodinsky.  This was scaled to a mammoth 1.4 Kg to fill my 4x4x9 Pullman pan.  That's a lot of Borodinsky particularly since certain people in my domicile eschew high ryes.   (And eschew doesn't mean chew.)   So what do you do if you want a  bit of Borodinsky, or you are baking for other folks who love carbs, but not that many of them.   One cannot piece Borodinsky loaves as you could say a pain de mie.  Paste doesn't piece.   A dilemma.  

The answer?

Cut a piece of parchment paper to width of pan.   Fold in half and fold loose ends to form an upside down T.  Hold vertical in pan at right division point, and then spoon in desired weight of each loaf on either side of parchment.   When pan is full, smooth down each side with wet spatula.   Proof and bake.   As you can see above, this worked.   The division wasn't quite as straight up and down as I had hoped, probably because I didn't get the exact right spot to divide the loaf.    I baked this for 50 minutes, then removed from pan.   The divisions simply fell apart from each other.   No pulling required.   I baked outside of pan for around 10 minutes longer.  

Since this loaf was experimental, I decided to cut the small one right after cooling to see if there was any reason to wait 24 hours or so as I usually do.   (Electric light plus flash.)

The crumb was actually fine - not gummy as I expected.   And the taste was good as well.   I didn't do the scald until the morning for these loaves, but I think its better done night before.

The small loaves are kind of cute.

And I think more satisfying to have a whole small loaf than a cut big one.  

Update:   Here is second loaf crumb- cut after 22 hours (outdoor light)

Formula and method

scaled to one 450g (dough weight) and one 700g loaf. 

It was late.   I had three breads to prepare for.   This meant two starters, two soakers and a biga.   My eyes drooped.   I was almost done - once I made the second soaker, and then the biga, I could go to sleep.   Yet something was wrong and I didn't know what.   I looked down.   Instead of holding a bag of whole wheat flour, I was holding a bag of whole rye flour.  And I had already made the biga and the soaker for whole wheat sandwich bread with rye instead of wheat.   No rest for the weary.   I placed the mistaken soaker and biga in sealed tubs in the back of the refrigerator, and made the biga and soaker again - this time with wheat.    

What a difference a day makes.   My three breads prepared, I thought, hmmm.   Wonder what I could do with that rye soaker and biga?   I had extra starter.   That's always a good place to start.   But isn't it the case that wheat doesn't raise rye?   That's what I have believed for the last three years.   And yet.... extra starter, misbegotten biga and soaker.     I pulled the rye soaker and biga out of the refrigerator.   They both had taken on the texture of cement during their overnight stay.  Not very promising.    I'd probably be throwing good flour after bad.   But really, what did I have to lose?

So I mixed up the soaker, biga, starter, added some extra bread flour, salt and water for good luck, and had a dough of some sort, not sure what.   Then went through sort of half rye, half wheat bread steps, as I wasn't really sure what I had.    Then baked it.   It came out of the oven looking surprisingly pleasant.   As it cooled, I finally sat down to write down the formula of what I had in front of me.    More rye than wheat, percentages reasonable given that I did all the computations in my head at the counter.   And not enough rye that I had to wait until next day to cut.   All it needed was to cool down. 

I cut.   Hmmm.  

Really not that bad looking.  I tasted. 

Pleasant, mild, rye bread, without the sour tang that comes from leavening with rye sour.   A bread that many people might enjoy.   A bread that I would like to make again.  But on purpose next time.

Weird.

Formula and method:

Recently I posted on a bake of Syd's Asian style pain de mie, and Janet commented that she was going to make it with her white whole wheat home milled flour.   I decided to try something similar.    Instead of white whole wheat, I used my golden flour which is home milled hard red whole wheat with some of the bran and some coarse flour sifted out.    I believe the closest official name to this would be high extraction flour, probably around 90%.

I followed the original formula with the following changes:

-Added a bit more milk in the biga

-Used golden flour in the biga and final dough but not the Tang Zhong

-Added a bit more milk and egg in the final dough

During the intensive mix of the final dough, it acted quite different than the original.   It started out with the consistency of pudding, and stayed that way for quite awhile.   I put it in my Bosch Compact at speed 4 and mixed a long time.   Finally, getting bored, I walked away.   When I came back, the dough had changed and started to lighten and come together elastically.    I let it go for awhile longer, and finallly, when it was still spreading out irregularly but was clearly an elasticized mass, stopped.   Possibly 45 minutes?   I'm not sure, as I wasn't watching the clock.  The dough was still more liquid than solid.   When I took the dough off the hook, it poured slowly down, but sheeted out into an impossibly thin membrane without tearing.  

When it came time to shape, the dough was not as manageable as the white version, but still shaped fairly nicely.    The surface was bubbling up a bit, which I figured would mean a more open crumb - not the desirable thing for this kind of bread per Syd.   

The upshot?   A bread that is just as decadently delicious as its predecessor, with the added whole wheat flavor.   Healthier?   I let you be the judge.

The crumb?   Nothing much to look at.  Just whole wheaty sandwichy.

But try this with your basic whole wheat sandwich bread:

Inadvertently perhaps, I made some changes to the method:  I've been baking a lot of challah so I ended up following times and temps for challah.   In Syd's version bulk ferment is only 30 minutes, and bake temperature is 350 instead of 375.

Formula and method:

When Floyd posted his Hokkaido Milk Bread I just had to try it.    Finally I got to it, and tasted it and then thought, I've made this before, even though I knew I'd never made a bread called Hokkaido bread.    I went back to the databanks and found that a year and a half ago, I made   Syd's Asian Style Pain de Mie, which is what I had been thinking of.  I must have had some sort of trauma interference with my memory as at the time my Kitchen Aid was not up to the task of intensive kneading, so I did it by hand which was a bigger workout than I had bargained for.   Fortunately, now I have upgraded to a tiny little Bosch which is much more suited to the task.   That freed me up to bake both of these breads. 

So being somewhat anal...ytical, I decided to bake them side by side and see how similar they really are.   First the formulas:

Quite similar.  What the Pain de Mie lacks in hydration it makes up for in butter, and so forth. 

These formulas reflect two changes I made in the Hokkaido bread - for all the milk products listed in Floyd's formula, I used milk, as well as all the liquid in the Tangzhong.   Also I upped the salt to 2% which I meant to undo today, but which I forgot to undo.  

While the ingredients are the same, and percents at least similar, the methods are quite different.   Syd's is made over a four day period - first the tangzhong, then a biga like thing, then final dough.   Floyd's on the other hand is made all in one shot.   Also the tangzhong ingredients and procedures are different.   I followed each of the methods as written.  

The doughs handled fairly differently.   The Pain de Mie after around 10 minutes of pounding at high speed, came together in a tight ball.   The Hokkaido bread took a longer beating and while it window paned beautifully, it still remained somewhat slack and sticky.   At shaping, they also handled somewhat differently, with the Hokkaido being more airy and light, and the Pain de Mie more easy to manage. 

Now the crumb (or should I say the mie.)

First Hokkaido:

Now the Pain de Mie:

Similar yes?

And now the question - are they shreddably soft?

Yes - I think so.

First Hokkaido:

Now Pain de Mie:

And finally - the taste:

They are very similar.   However there are subtle differences:   The best distinction I can come up with is  the Pain de Mie is smooth and creamy, while the Hokkaido is a bit sharper.  Both are really delicious.  

So going forward, which version would I make?   If I remember my four day window, I'd go with the Pain de Mie simply to get that extra smooth and cream texture.    If I forgot the window, I'd make the Hokkaido.  

And that's that.

The other day I was baking a lot of bread, and had excess white starter on my hands.   I knew that I had (or would have) too much bread on hand to make more, but what about later in the week?   Maybe I would run out and wouldn't have time to bake.    So I took my excess starter, added flour, water and salt, mixed it up, put it in a lidded tub and stuck it in the refrigerator.   Two days later, sure enough the bread had run out.   So I removed the tub from the refrigerator.   The dough was totally aerated, but did not have a sour odor.   I took that as a good sign.   I scraped out the dough, cut it and shaped it.    Talk about enzymatic autolyse - oh forget the autolyse part.   The dough was extremely sticky and would not unstick.   I figured less handling would be better than more, so I just got it shaped without trying for much form, and floured it very well, so it wouldn't stick to the couche,  Then let it proof while I preheated the oven and stone.  Then in it went.    The resulting bread was certainly not the best I've ever made, but really not bad.    And no surprise here, very tartly sour.   I don't generally strive for sour bread, but this was a nice change of pace. 

Here's the insides:

From these pictures you can spot two issues:   separation in the crumb.   I'm not sure what that's from.   And a somewhat pale crust undoubtedly due to the long refrigeration.   However, despite the paleness, the crust was quite crisp and good. 

Since I just threw this together, computing in my head at the counter, I'm not 100% sure what this is.   Here is my best guess:   100% KAAP, 67% hydration, 20% prefermented flour, 2.5% salt.   I was going for 2% salt, but as I recall, accidentally put in more, and then thought, that was just fine given that I didn't know when this was coming out of the refrigerator.  

For a bread that took less than 15 minutes of work altogether, I will declare this a success.

I have never been one to put extra stuff into bread.   Flour and water all the way.   And yet, resolve weakens, fruit beckons, fresh loafers keep on posting.    What can one do?    A rhetorical question of course.    The simple answer is throw in a few dried cranberries.   I had already developed a nice seeded levain (after tasting Jong Yang's delcious one at the TFL Boston meet-up)  and thought - just swap out the seeds for the cranberries.   It works.   Two completely different breads on the same substrate.  

One might note that this is a tad underdeveloped.   It is because at the same time I was making this loaf I was also making several others:

I neither had time to properly knead by hand, nor was the mixer free.   So I just mixed it up by hand and did a few stretch and folds, and it almost got there.  Here it is on the front left with two seeded levains, one tzitzel rye, and three challahs.   The sourdough challah is courtesy of Maggie Glezer, via zolablue's excellent 6 year old post.   I never realized how easy it was to do a six strand braid until watching the Maggie Glezer video referenced in zolablue's write-up.   

The ones on the right are six strand.   On the left is 4 strand using exactly the same braiding technique.  

But the real news here is how delicious this challah is.  I made a few different versions of challah over the week, trying to decided which one to go with.   This beat them hands down.   It doesn't taste even slightly sour, but the starter takes a caky, eggy treat and turns it into a really fine bread.  

Update:   Tried the cranberry sourdough again but this time with mixing.  It makes a difference. 

Formula and method for the cranberry sourdough

Way back when, Sylvia posted a pugliese with a lighter than air crumb.   I baked it once and loved it, then forgot about it.  Browsing through old bread pictures the other day I came upon a photograph of my old pugliese, and decided to try it again.    However, I couldn't leave well enough alone and follow the recipe.    Instead,  I tweaked it just a little.   

The original formula calls for poolish, and yet, there was ripe starter sitting on the counter with no label other than discard.   Should I discard it or did it have a place in this little pugliese?    The problem with using starter for a bread like this is that it takes up too much of the flavor room and masks the delicate taste of the durum.   A baking error one might say.   Not wanting to fall into this trap, I decided to use some of the starter, but handle it very carefully to keep the flavor nice and balanced.     

I fed the starter with some fresh flour and let it ferment for just long enough for it to start expanding, but not long enough to build up a heady aroma.    At that point, I mixed everything up, and proceeded as directed.   

This dough was very wet and somewhat difficult to handle.   I developed the dough by mixing at speed 1, 2, 3, 4 (!) in my Bosch Compact for a total of 6 minutes.    By the end, it had cleared the bowl but was very wet and sticky, and spread out again as soon as I let it rest.   I did stretch and fold in the bowl twice at half hour intervals, and for the third S&F after 30 more minutes, got my hands very wet and picked the dough up and suspended it and rotated it.  

I "shaped" the dough into a boule, which is similar to saying that one shaped a water balloon - more like a little prod here and a poke there, dusted it with durum flour and proofed upside down in a ceramic bowl.    It swelled up over the sides of the bowl (doubling in size) in an hour at which point it went into the oven unscored, as there was just no point in poking at it. 

It came out nicely - self scoring along the way - and had the subtle flavor I had hoped for, with a light, tender crumb and a  crisp crust.   All in all, a  pleasant flavor variation from the original but still a pugliese at heart.

Formula and method:

 Note:  fixed formula error - reversed amounts of KAAP and Durum in final.

Mix poolish. Ripen for 3.5 hours

Mix ingredients 6 minutes, increase to speed 4

Dough cleans bowl but still wet and sticky

S&F in bowl every 1/2 hour 3 times - final in the air

BF total of 2 hours 45 minutes - dough will have expanded

Shape into boule on counter dusted with durum flour

It is very squishy like a balloon

Proof in dusted bowl for1 hour - dough doubles

Bake with steam for 5 minutes (oven preheated to 500 then turned off)

then at 450 for 35 minutes