French Bread—Reinhart
Okay.
So Reinhart’s French bread is becoming the bane of my baking existence.
I’ve made it several times. It comes out leaden, heavy, and almost colorless.
I’ve baked other breads with success. I’m not a rookie. I weighed the ingredients. I have a proofer—so the rise temp is good.
I am using regular (non-organic) King Arthur flours.
The loaves come out… okay. They have a decent, though not very hole-y, crumb. If you put them under the broiler to brown a bit more, they don’t get golden: they get black spots.
My questions are:
Is this entirely a shaping thing? (The loaves seem more prone to sideways expansion than upward.)
The bread is lean. Am I not getting any browning because of the lack of sugar? Is that due to under-proofing? Or over?
Should I try dough improver?
I don’t have PR’s books handy. Please reply with formula. Is his “French Bread” a baguette or is it the New Orleans style French Bread that I am familiar with? These two breads are very different?
What King Arthur flour(s) are you using?
Please send all the info you can along with pictures.
We need more information to help you with this.
Danny
Is Pâte Fernentée (16 oz), consisting of:
5 oz all-purpose flour
5 oz bread flour
0.19 oz salt (1.9%)
0.055 oz yeast (0.55%)
6-7 oz water (room temp) (65%)
That sits out one hour after mixing and is then refrigerated overnight or up to three days
You take it out, warm it up, and mix it with all those same ingredients again. You use lukewarm water this time: (90-100 F).
Proof 2 hours (till doubled), then shape and proof 45-75 minutes, until 1 1/2 times original size.
Bake at 500F, lowering the temp to 400 just after putting in oven with steam pan and water. About 2.0 minutes.
(That’s 160% pâte fermentée, if you are curious.)
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As you wrote, the Pâte Fermentée is a very large portion of the dough. Since your dough is not browning well, I suspect that the dough has been subjected to long fermentation. Including fermentation of the Pate Fermente and the 1-3 day retard in the fridge. This long fermentation could exhaust much or most of the sugars in the dough, causing a pale coloring after the bake. I would try adding some Diastatic Malt if you want to continue with PR’s bread.
Shaping issues plague all bakers that are new to baguettes. A baguette is the simplest of bread doughs, yet it ranks at the top of breads that are hardest to master.
Have you seen THIS LINK? There are loads of baguette knowledge available there.
HTH,
Danny
Could it be that your starter and/or levain (or Old Dough) is super sour? It seems you are not using sourdough if I remember correctly.
If too much acid is introduced to the dough it would weaken the gluten after long fermentation and possibly prevent browning.
An image of the bakery’s French Bread will help. Both the loaf and also a crumb shot.
No, not sourdough.
I’ve had success with that in different contexts, but with the French bread… I’m trying to take on only one crazy variable at a time. Commercial yeast seems to be at least consistent.
Reinhart’s book is good, and it seems thorough… but I’m getting the idea that maybe his French bread isn’t the best formula?
As for the bakery bread… all that’s left is some croutons. These were oven toasted.
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THIS FRENCH BREAD may be something similar to what you are looking for. It uses Commercial Yeast only. The bread is fairly soft with a thin crust. The flavor is mild and the bread is moderately light.
It is a great representation of the New Orleans Po-Boy. The locals call it, “French Bread”.
I’m in Memphis, just a bit upriver from NOLA.
I adore true po boy bread—but hadn’t really thought that the bakery here was doing that. Though they could be.
Well, sorta. The bread here is light in the middle. But it doesn’t quite have that shatteringly crisp outside crust. But it is similar, now that you mention it.
Having never been to France, Leidenheimer’s is kind of my standard: but I know that’s not proper French bread, no matter what the locals call it.
However, the influence of NOLA on some of Memphis’s culinary scene is a definite factor.
Neither the French Bread I posted or the Leidenheimer’s have a super crispy crackly (glass like) crust, but it is thin. Both will leave lots of crust crumbs on the board when sliced, though.
Welcome back martino!
Some more questions, if I may.
Are you using a gas oven?
If it's an electric oven, are you using convection mode? If so, are you using top heat, bottom heat, or both?
It’s electric. No convection used.
I did have a baking steel, but these were baked in a pan which sat on the steel rather than directly on the steel. Have done that before, but I thought my French bread might rise better in a pan. It’s one of those perforated pans that are wavy—holds three loaves.
The p.f. Is supposed to rest overnight—but didn’t. He says you can use it the same day if you let it rise two hours instead of the one before refrigerating you’d normally do if slow-proofing.
I’ve been suspicious of over-proofing, so I wanted to try to make it fast—without letting the p.f. sit around long enough to over-proof itself.
Reinhart recommends malt powder if you’re using organic flours—which I’m not. But there’s no sugar in the formula at all.
We have a good French bakery in town, and their bread isn’t dark, but it is a bit brown—and it’s ethereally light textured.
Reinhart’s bread tastes good—it’s just so heavy. It’s not a particularly thick crust or anything either.
I think I’m close. But no cigar, not yet.
Okay, Next question. Please describe in detail how you steam, placement of the pan, how much water, and what the water's temperature is.
I assume in the 2nd photo, we are looking at the tops, not the bottoms, is that correct?
The crumb looks a tad under-baked.
And the bottom crust is definitley under-baked, like its getting too little heat from below. Note in the crumb photo how the cross section of the bottom crust is white, but the cross section of the top crust is brown.
Sometimes this happens when:
- too much water is put in the steam pan below the stone/steel, and the cool steam (212 F) rises and cools down the 450 F stone/steel, and also robs heat from all the air in the oven. Only one cup of boiling water should be needed in the typical American home kitchen oven.
- if cool or room temp water is used, it robs even more heat as it warms up to 212. Water should be near boiling when poured into the steam pan.
- You've got two layers, the steel and the perforated pan blocking heat to the bottom of the loaf. That might be a factor.
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I also recommend that baguette Community Bake that Dan linked. If you don't have time to read 2000+ comments, download the PDF summary file of the 4 main bakers. They all turned into baguette experts as a result of that CB ! It's in the red link near the top of the original post at the link Dan gave.
The water was 1 cup. It was near boiling. The steel was on the middle rack, and the water pan—a thin baking sheet, like a jelly roll pan—was on the bottom rack. When the water hit the pan, steam was the immediate result.
Yes, those are tops. I suspect the difference there is because I ran them briefly under the broiler to get them to color as they did.
Underbaked? I agree, but after 20 minutes, the internal temp of the loaves was at or above 205. I checked.
I’ll have a look at the thread.
Is it possible that I’m using too much water?
My experience with Reinhart’s breads is that with King Arthur flours, I always have to add the max—and sometimes more than he suggests.
I mixed that bread in a kitchen aid mixer: should I do it by hand? The texture of my bread was different from all the shaping videos I’ve seen. The dough was too sticky. But with less water, dry bits of flour stayed in the bottom of the bowl.
Sure, you can use less water, it is up to you, but it looks ok, judging from the picture. The problem is that your baguette dough overfermented and was overproofed before baking, that is why it is pale crusted, slack and did not open along the slash like so
You should remove both the steaming pan (do not steam at all) and the iron plate from the oven and simply bake your loaves in the perforated baguette pan on the middle rack of your preheated oven. See that the bottom crust is white?
It is because there is no airflow, the iron plate was not helping.