January 4, 2023 - 12:34am
Pan de Cristal from Martin Philip
Just watched this video with a super simple recipe for Pan de Cristal from KAF by Martin Philip, looks really nice! Thought others might like it too.
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Just watched this video with a super simple recipe for Pan de Cristal from KAF by Martin Philip, looks really nice! Thought others might like it too.
I'm on the case - or will be sometime within the week! I've played around with Pan de Cristal before but always added the YT video suggested olive oil and sugar. After one or two duds, had some fair success. But this seems more straight forward.
Here is a link to the company that developed and trademarked it. http://www.pandecristal.com/language/en/
Alan
First attempt yielded a fair result, except that out of an absurd overabundance of caution when applying flour to the workbench, the underside of the loaves looks to be a white flour mini-warehouse. Time for round two.
Several changes a foot. Mixed by hand rather than my KA mixer. For divide I slathered the workbench with oil instead of flour. This allowed the loaves to remain almost completely clear of flour on the underside. Used the "channel" method for final proofing, cradling the loaves in parchment paper to maintain whatever shape te had and not flatten out.
Being alfanso, I just had to toy around with the shape and looked to form batons rather than squares. Some success but the elongated breads are more craggy-shaped and didn't rise as high as the previous bake. With a dough this fragile it is hard to do much without some mangling, as I so nicely demonstrate here.
After the initial ~13 minutes of bake time I removed from parchment and placed them on a baking/cooling rack directly above the baking stone.
2nd bake
1st bake
I'll find a happy medium between these two bakes. The sweet crumb and shattering crust are a delight. If the loaves were any lighter I'd have to put a paperweight on them to keep from floating away.
Alan
Wow Alan, that crumb is perfection! Excellent bakes my friend.
I’ve converted this recipe to a sourdough version and hope to bake it in the next few weeks before we head south again. I am planning on using the couche to final proof since the sourdough version will need longer to ferment fully.
Benny
could handle the moisture for the 2 hour final proof without severe sticking. Unless you mean to cradle the parchment inside of the couche channels.
Will see you soon enough!
And I didn't comment on your bake because it gets tiresome trying to find the next level of superlative to bust out. 🙄
Yes, I’ll use parchment on the couche. I’m not sure how long the final proof will be with a SD version so better to be safe.
Benny
Ooh, lovely crumb! Looks like broken glass – and hand mixed, too! FWIW, I had the same experience with caked-on flour after bake #1 – and then too little flour in bake #2. I'm wondering how long it took you to hand mix this. It's unlikely that my hands would be up to the job, but I like the idea of hand mixing this dough and might try again if it seems doable.
And it did not take long, probably less than 4 minutes. But I'll take a guess that my arms are bigger than yours. (Benny can likely testify to that). Just had to make sure that the "batter" was smoothed out.
I'd run out of KA BF so I had to calculate (Pearson's Square) how much Vital Wheat Gluten to add to the KA AP that I have in order to give the flour additional strength.
There were concave pockets just teeming with cakes of raw flour on the underside of the first bake, none on the second when I switched to an oiled work bench.
The glass is half full of air. This bread resembles a geode. The outside hides the true beauty of the inside. Im guessing the dough is not easy to handle but you managed to shape them so they look like Kentucky and Tennessee. Maybe I will cross the Mason Dixon line and try for Ohio and Illinois or maybe Iowa they have a lot of geodes.
Nice to see Alfanso back in the house
To honor the pets we have lost I’m switching my avatar to commemorate or last furry family member who recently crossed the rainbow bridge.
Don
Sorry to hear about your li'l kitty, Don. Those critters have a way of taking over our lives and then ripping our hearts out. It's a year since we lost our German Shepherd Dog and we're just now getting to the point where we don't expect him to knock us over when we walk through the door. Must mean it's time for a new door knocker. –AG
They do give so much while they are here but they take a lot when they pass away. Kitty was actually her name because she was such a tiny little thing. To see her napping in a sunny spot meant everything was right in the world. Otherwise she just complained about the service around here.
Sorry to hear about Kitty Don. Our pets really are members of our family so their loss always hurts so much.
Benny
this way, and which I duly appropriated. That breads are like geodes and we can't see their true beauty until we crack them open - or something like that.
I hardly post because I don't bake anything new, no point in rehashing the past unless there is something new to say.
In the summer of 2019 we had an off-line about saying goodbye to our 4 legged shadows, never a good moment in our lives.
Thanks, Alan
Territory of getting older especially when you have a good memory. I suppose we have said it and heard it all before by now and very little bares repeating. We will probably get another animal at some point when the void becomes intolerable. As to whether it barks or meows I am not sure. As I may have said in the past Dogs have masters but cats have servants.
Thanks, Don
We have 3 kitties currently and 4 dogs and I know how much losing one levels a void in one’s home and heart,
Ian
Your full house beats my flush. Im finding out that the freedom that comes with an empty nest is haunted by ghosts.
Don
I saw that yesterday and hope to try baking it in the near future. Martin made it look so easy.
Benny
And ready to try again. Took a screen shot of the time line. 20 min between each folding and looks like a bit more after 4th before gently dumping out onto a bed of flour.
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I tried this recipe just today. I guess you could call it a semi-dud. I didn't get near the open crumb or the hight.
Everything seemed to be going well until the 2-hour proofing period. Mine never developed any gas bubbles on the surface as noted in the recipe. I let it go another 30 minutes and still nothing.
The one thing I did different was, I used an inverted cookie sheet to bake on. I don't have a baking stone.
cookie sheets before and preheated dark sheets. (After heating oven, slide in the sheet to heat up.)
Hard to tell from the photos...but... How does the bottom crust appear?
Looking at the loaf shoulders, the loaves might have held out for a longer final proof.
Lol, my photos are about as good as the bread.
Rich you’re being too hard on yourself, they look great. What temperature did you do final proof at? Is your home quite cool right now?
Benny
My Kitchen temperature runs 75–78 degrees. I used room temperature water to mix the dough. After hand mixing, dough temperature 81 degrees. The first 20 rest, I put the dough in the refrigerator to cool down a bit. After that, room temperature all the way.
Your Pan de Cristal looks super and I bet it tastes as good as it looks. We are all our own worst critics, but these really look good! –AG
Thanks, yes, the bread tastes good and very usable. I was expecting/hoping for a more open crumb and a taller loaf. To me, mine look somewhat flattened out. Maybe I'm expecting too much.
Richie
I don’t think you can expect a tall tall loaf with such hydration. Mine are similarly shaped.
Here’s my take on this awesome bread. I made some changes to the composition of the bread adding olive oil and also changed how the dough was developed, using bassinage instead of adding all the water at once. I also used my Ankarsrum Assistent for the mixing. My dough only required 3 coil folds.
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The details of my bake here.
Is there a way to delete a double post?
Not that I know of.
Thanks, Benito, for your input. Your bread looks great. I'll give your method a try next time.
I just noticed the Ankarsrum Assistent in your profile, it does an outstanding job at bassinage, so you can definitely do what I did to get the hydration up there. Depending on how it feels you could even go higher if your flour is strong enough.
I use KA Arthur Bread @ 12.7 %. I have been wondering about upping the hydration a bit. My Kitchen is dry this time of year. 20-25% humidity.
You might be able to, next bake I think I will try.
Thank so much for posting this link, Ilya! As soon as I saw it, I wanted to make the bread, which I did this weekend. A test bake on Saturday, and then another bake for a friend's dinner party on Sunday. The test bake was a half batch, about 500g of dough, and Sunday's bake was a full batch, just over a kilogram of dough. I attempted to hand mix as done by Martin Philip in the KAF video, but that failed miserably. I started over using my Ankarsrum for the initial mix and bassinaged the final 20% of the water. This seemed to work adequately for both doughs, but I had a hard time doing coil folds on a kilo of dough. That dough ended up under-developed so the bread had marginally had less volume. Unfortunately, I didn't get photos of the Sunday batch because it would have been odd to photograph bread on someone's dinner table in front of the other guests, haha. It was very similar to the photos below.
It's really delicious bread. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's bakes and am anxious to hear how others manage the gluten development
The crumb looks like a pearlescent sea sponge. Breaking glass at a party is now a good thing!
I have been intrigued by this bread since this post
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/50220/pan-de-cristal-glass-bread
but I never got up the nerve to try it because of the extreme hydration of 110% or more. After seeing stellar results like yours I am going to try my hand at this soon and it’s so nice of you all to lay down some excellent markers.
Don
Thanks for bringing Abel’s post up, I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Interesting that he includes sugar, I knew that most include olive oil which is why I added that to my bake. I like his idea of a hybrid dough with both commercial yeast and sourdough leavening.
I’lll look forward to your bake of this Don, you always get open crumb.
With the sugar in the levain. If you were thinking of a SD version. The few times I used a sweet levain it was quite gassy with large holes in the bread. It might also crystalize the crumb enough so that you could grate a tomato on it like it is served in Barcelona.
I was just trying to play around with my spreadsheet and to get enough sugar to get the concentration high enough in a stiff sweet levain gets the sugar higher than the total sugar that Abel uses. I think I’ll try it out with just a liquid levain first and see how that turns out. Given the slower fermentation of SD I think I’ll need to use parchment on my couche to do the final proofing.
Benny
Your snail's eye view has the look of an ice cave in the middle of a melt. Or - a science experiment ;-). Beautiful.
This is a step beyond ciabatta, but in a way fussier and quite a bit longer to get from soup to nuts. But then again, ciabatta for me is like sitting down with an old friend, we've known each other quite well.
I'm headed back to Barcelona soon enough, Abel Sierra's old stomping ground. And there will be plenty of "pa amb tomaquet" on my plate. Only someone else will be doing the baking!
Is it best eaten the same day like a baguette, or does it have more staying power? Apologies if someone already mentioned this and I missed it.
Since it has so much water, it'll stay fresh a little longer!
The crust might lose it’s crispness after a day, but that isn’t anything you couldn’t fix with a bit of water on the crust and a bit of time in the oven.
I’ll have to try this soon (after I finally get around to Benny’s braided sweet potato loaf).
I can report, from this as well as prior experiments with it, that it makes for a fabulous toast. And the toasting certainly returns any crispness that the crumb may have lost.
my freeform pan de cristal
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Wow Rob, that crumb and crust look amazing. You can see how thin the crust is!
That looks super, Rob, just like Martin's! Nice work!! Did you mix by hand or machine?
hand ... also, I didn't sweat the timings on the coil folds. I had a 1-hr zoom thing in the middle of it all, so I did a few extra before the meeting began and a few extra after.
thx for the rhyme!
That looks so good. I need to revisit this bread!
thx, Ilya. It's a fun and relatively quick bread to make and, as you pointed out on the thread, it keeps pretty well bc it's 100% hydration.
One other thing -- as one of the commenters on the King Arthur site noted, this is a Catalan bread & maybe we should know it by its local name: pa de vidre.
Rob
110% hydration Pan de Cristal. I was working on a sourdough version of this today but messed up on my measurements I think and had to toss the dough which was soup really. Since I had planned on using this bread for sandwiches for dinner I quickly put another dough together, but without any levain ready had to reach for the IDY. I increased the hydration to 110%, I think this is the limit of hydration or perhaps a bit past the limit for my flour. During a coil fold the dough tore in half! I’m sure I could have been more gentle but either way, I think 110% is a bit too high for my flour. That being said, the end result was excellent overall. The crumb is better with this bake than last. I once again used the Ankarsrum Assistent for all the mixing as I’m still trying to get as much experience in with it before I head south and have to go back to hand mixing everything even enriched doughs.
The details of my bake are here.
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Dave in Indy once commented "Alan, you could make a dough of 25% sawdust, and turn it into beautiful baguettes!"
And really "Benny, you could make a dough of 50% sawdust, and turn it into beautiful bread!"
LOL thank you Alan, only if it were true, but I appreciate the compliment. What Dave said is true about you though, you could turn anything into a beautiful baguette.
Benny
That is just perfection Benny. So glad I accidentally started a community bake :)
Yes you did start us down the road of super hydration Ilya, thanks for getting us started. These are fun to do.
Benny
Reflects the effort you put into all your breads. It looks like you broke the glass ceiling with this batch.
Thanks Don, someone else will break the glass ceiling soon I’m sure!
A fun thing to bake on a Sunday, thanks Ilya and everyone for all your lovely bakes.
Ugly looking, but super light and tasty. Need to work on the baking of these, the first two got a little burnt as I lowered the shelf with the steel and didn't use steam (trying to follow Martin's instructions). It might have been better with steam and the usual oven temperature that I bake at (230C) which is 10 degrees cooler than the recipe.
I did supplement my strongest flour (the sifted hard white, around 13-14% protein) with some VWG, but since this dough was more than strong enough will leave out the VWG next time.They look great Jon, they really are amazing for sandwiches. The crust is so thin and crisp and the crumb is so open.
Benny
Love that paper thin crust, and the color too. Excellent rise. Perfect panini bread! –AG
This was hand mixed using Martin’s method from the video. The only change was the addition of 10 grams of sugar which is half the amount that Abel uses in his formula to make the crust thinner. My dough was looser and didn’t behave like in the video. I think I should have powered through the arthritis flare up and stirred it more in the bowl to develop more gluten upfront or done more folding because the dough strength was somewhat lacking. The other problem was a cold kitchen with granite countertops that seemed to bring the dough to a standstill while it proofed. The final results show some of the stumbles made while trying to handle this delicate dough for the first time while moving from the bench to the paper.
In spite of all these issues, the flavor of the bread was surprisingly good for such a short process. Abel said the olive oil is the key flavor enhancer so use the good stuff. The texture is enjoyable and the keeping quality is better than expected. It was great for a tuna salad sandwich and as Alan said it makes great toast. It has the best qualities of an English muffin when properly toasted. I will make these again and even if I can’t improve them they are plenty good as they are.
The dreaded raw flour line
Maybe that’s how this bread got its name. I wasn’t expecting to have see through glass but maybe the sugar does more than make a paper thin crust.
edit to add another photo
Beautiful results as always Don, this has your trademark open crumb in spades. Yes I think that the name is from how almost see through the bread is. Your crumb definitely has that glass appearance in places.
Benny
"Yes I think that the name is from how almost see through the bread is." And also the shattering crust.
I had an aborted run the first time when the dough was so slack that it was unworkable. I tossed it and can only surmise that I had added too much water from initial through bassinage.
Well done Don. Keep this up and then you can move on to try tackling the Bouabsa baguette!
Beautiful crumb and you certainly developed those thin films of gluten.
This is another one of those breads that any mistakes along the way are brought forward. The flour trapped in a crease is like a black hole that absorbs the life around it.
I wonder if you could dump the dough on the lightly floured parchment and divide it in place without the transfer. I thinking the flour is introduced when it wrinkles as it is separated into pieces so I will have to try Alan’s oil slick next time and handle with care.
These are the most crystalline membranes we've seen yet, Don. I love how that came out, it looks like it could float on air. This is not a dough for arthritic hands and, after two failed attempts at hand mixing, I'll stick with the machine from now on. You seem to have done alright with the hand mix. Gorgeous bake all the way around! –AG
I have not seen the clear bubbles in any loaf before this one. Don’t know if it was the high hydration or the added sugar. I am hoping someone else will try adding the sugar to compare results. I think sugar will increase the overall hydration but I am not certain by how much. The dough starts out like slimy gravy and I don’t think my Bosch is well suited for it. I am afraid it would be a bigger mess than it already is. I used a few paper towels rather than put that goo down the drain.
Don
looks like it could handle the "sliced tomato test." :)
To this community bake. Followed Benny’s instructions. Used King Arthur AP and mixed using a Kitchen Aid. I was initially worried I wouldn’t be able to coil fold the dough but it strengthened over time. As others have said, it does toast very nicely.
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Wow another beautiful piece of glass bread, beautiful bake you have there. Do you like how it tastes and do you like the texture?
Benny
Excellent bake! The fact that you were able to make it with AP flour is even more impressive.
Don
Amazing that you accomplished this with AP flour! Beautiful results.
Entirely white breads aren’t my favorite, but I did like the unique texture and would make again.
The use of AP flour wasn’t really intentional. I avoid very strong bread flour because I don’t always like the texture, but I do use it when it’s required. I had just forgotten that this is one of the recipes where it is required.
Everyone has taken this and added their own touch and they have all been amazing! I’ve really enjoyed looking and reading. I intend to give this whirl.. literally in my “ new” rebuilt KA 600 pro. I gave mine to my daughter and bought one that MrMixer had rebuilt. Used it for my bagels and it’s wonderful.
I have t80 French flour which Abel uses so I’m looking forward to seeing what it does with his formula . Will post soon.
So glad for the shared experiences! c