new loaves

Hey Amigo,

Do you have a recipe?  I'm all for free form, but I see that I have so much to learn and people have been baking bread for a LONG time.  I'm baking someone's recipe today.  Probably whatever you do will give you some kind of a loaf, but, my idea at this point, is to follow a couple of recipes and see what the flavours are like.  I got some good results myself with the baking, with what it looks like, but just winging it is wasting a lot of time that I could be using to perfect recipes to my liking, when I started at a higher level?  You know?  Like we don't need to reinvent the wheel, but we can tweak the hell out of our ride. 

Anyway, it sounds like what you're doing will work, to me.  Don't forget the salt.  I did that recently and it was very bland.  Now I measure out the salt and have it on the counter in a little bowl to remind me to put it in.  If it's still in the bowl, I didn't put it in.

What is the difference to you between your "starter" and your "sponge"?  I want to be sure we're using the same words to mean the same thing.  Talk to me.  Tell me your whole plan.  I think what you're doing will work, but I'm insterested in the whole picture.  How much flour, etc.

:-Paul

I think I know what you want, it's what most of us want.  It's called "oven spring".  When you put the flattish loaves into the oven you want them to spring up and have nice airy holes inside.  That's called an "open crumb".  You don't get that with dry dough.  You get that with wet dough.  Handling the wet dough takes a lot of technique.  That's the art of bread baking.  Measuring your ingredients and watching your temperatures and that sort of thing is the science.  The art and science of bread baking.  That's one of the things that captures the imagination of most of the folks here.  You take measured amounts flour, water and salt (science) and you apply technique (art) and you get something more, something fantastic, you get bread.

From reading your note here's what I would recommend:  

Get a counter scraper.  They're only about $6, you might be able to find it in the kitchen wares isle of your grocery store.  It is indispensible.  It's that metal thing that you see on most of the videos.  The little bowl scrapers are great, too, and only about $2 a piece, but they're harder to find.  I had to order mine online.  If you live in a town that big enough to have a kitchen supply store you can probably find them there.  These are two essential tools for handling wetter doughs.  

>now what my question is ,after you make the recipe and put the dough on the counter how much flour should you work in , during  the kneading<

In general, I'd say the answer to that question is "as little as possible, hopefully none".  You don't need to knead much, really.  You want to use time and that stretch and fold technique.  Here's an experiment for you:  Next time you're going to make bread do this:

I think you first create a "sponge" and then you add flour to that?  If so, take your sponge and add the measured amount of flour to it that you need to make your dough - what you would normally knead in (maybe a little less - you know the amount because you've been keeping records)   Roughly mix it all together, trying to make sure that all the flour has gotten moistened.  Then leave it on the counter with a damp towel over it.

After 1/2 an hour scrape it out on the counter (using your groovy plastic bowl scraper) and stretch the whole thing out.  Watch Mike Avery's videos on SourdoughHome and Mark on Back Home Bakery.  They both do it a little differently, Mike is more gentle.  Do what feels right to you, some people only fold it once at this point, some people do multiple folds.  This is some of that "art" we were talking about.  Anyway, you so some stretch and folds.  Your dough will already feel amazingly different than it did when you dumped it out on the counter.  It's one of the coolest things ever.  Do that evey half hour for two or three times, putting it back in the bowl and covering it between foldings.  After the last time let it "rest" for 30 minutes back in the bowl and then preshape and shape.

When you let the dough "rest" it stops fighting you.  I just had a really cool experience this morning while shaping my baguettes.  I discovered another piece of the puzzle for myself.  It always seemed kind of stupid to me "rest the dough 5 minutes" but now it makes sense and its another powerful tool in working with dough.

OK, so you've got your dough in your bowl all stretched and folded (you didn't really "knead" did you?) and rested.  Now you're going to "preshape".  Preshape means dividing the dough into however many pieces of the right size you're going to make into loaves.  Say 3 (or, if it's all going into one loaf, then you don't need to preshape).  If you do preshape, then do that (cut the pieces off - use a knife if you don't have a counter scraper - just don't tear it with your hands) and then let the dough rest another 5 mintues right on the counter.

If you're looking to do these wet doughs, you need a form for them to rise in.  As you observed, they tend to flatten out.  Not all at once, but if you just leave the blob on the counter for a couple of hours it would start to look like a thick pancake.  So you want something for it to rise within - like a form for concrete - if they just poured concrete on the side of the road it wouldn't make a very nice sidewalk, but they use forms.

Here, again, comes art.  You can use just about anything for a form.  Start looking around your house and thinking.  I like to make little loaves so i can play with scoring more.  I use cereal bowls.  Whatever you decide to use, you need to make it so the loaf will come out after it's proofed.  So, what I do, is I spray oil all around the bottom and sides of the bowl and then I scoop in some flour (w/w, white, whatever) and tilt the bowl around while tapping the sides to get it all evenly covered and dump out the excess.  You could also line the form with floured cloth - that works great 'cause when you dump it out, it comes out, then you can carefully removed any stuck parts.  I've got some cloth and a sewing machine, but I haven't make my little liners yet.  It's on the iist.

OK, say you were making 4 small loaves.  You have 4 cereal bowls prepared as above.  You have 4 blobs of dough on the counter that have rested for 5 minutes.  You need to develope some surface tension in the shapes as you put them in the bowls.  Here's what I do: (everyone does it differently, you'll develop your own style, but this will get you started and it's easy).  Get a LITTLE flour on your hands, just enough so the dough doesn't stick - have some flour around that you can easily dip your fingers into if it starts to stick in the middle of this process.  Take one hand and pick up your little ball of dough like one of those things with the claw that grabs stuffed toys and drops them in a chute - you know?  The idea is to pick the dough up using the upside of the dough and sort of keep gathering the dough on the top with both hands, it's like you're pulling the skin up from the bottom.  Hard to describe, easy to do. Remember, you're establishing surface tension on the underside of your little mini loaf, what.s the bottom now is going to become the top.  Now, move the dough over one of your prepared bowls and gently set the dough into it (without turning it over) and kind of pull up one last time and pinch all the folds and stuff together on the top there.

Do that with all 4 (or however many you have, going into what every shape containers, the principal is the same).  Now let them proof.  That's the final rest before they go in the oven.  I put a piece of 2 x 8 across the bathtub and fill the tub half way with hot water to get heat and moisture.  I have a small bathroom.  Cover your proofing loaves with a floured cloth in case they rise up too much you don't want them to stick to the cloth.

While they're rising, preheat your oven.  If you don't have a baking stone, use an upside down baking pan, like a cookie sheet or someghing.  Preheat to 50 degrees hotter than you want to bake your bread.  

You must have parchment paper.  Again, very cheap and available in rolls at your grocery store either in the baking isle or next to the wax paper and that sort of thing.

It's going to be awkward for you to get the parchment paper into the oven loaded with the loaves.  You'll have to get creative.  Maybe you can cut pieces of parchment paper that are the right size for only one loaf at a time.  You do want to get them all in at as close to the same time as you can.  If you want to invest, there's a baker's peel.  They are wonderful.  Basically it's a long handled giant spatula.  Like they use in pizza parlours.  Anyway, like I said you'll have to get creative.  Anyway what you want to do is:

turn the bowl upside down on the parchment.  You want to do it all in one motion and there'll probably be a bang when the bowl hits the counter.  If you just turn it and dump it slowly, it will change the shape of the loaf.  You want to handle things very carefully at this point.  I suppose dumping slowly would be another technique (more art) - whatever you like to do, it's really all OK.  There are all sorts of bread shapes, no one is "right" or "wrong", but if you have something in mind, it's fun to try to achieve it.

Now you have your 4 little loaves upside down on the parchment paper.  You've carefully lifed the bowls and you used enough flour and oil so that didn't stick much, they just sort of slowly fell out of the bowls and onto the parchment paper.  Or maybe some did stick and you had to GENTLY scrape off some of the stuck parts as best you could, being creative along the way.

Get a cup of water ready.  Ideally you would microwave it up to boiling first but I hardly ever remember to do that.

Do your scoring.  Use a double edged razor blade, they're thinner than the single edge ones.  Everyone has a different style.  Try some things and see how they go.  But best if you have something in mind.  From the moment you dump the loaves out of the bowls until you slide them in the oven, you want that time to be as small as reasonable.  You want to slash with authority and move on.  If the slash doesn't go well - too bad, the bread will still be great and you get to try again next time.  Feel free to slash the same line again or just once or what every.  You're trying to get 1/8 to 1/4 inch deep slashes.  It helps to use two fingers from one hand to very gently hold the dough on either side of the razor blade as you slash with the other.  Again watch videos, like Mark from Back Home Bakery.  For the beginning you should do something simple.  Are you into myths and spirits?  Way back in history they would slash a cross on the top of the bread to let the devil out.  You just draw one line from the bottom of one side over to the bottom of the other, rotate 90 degrees and do it again.  Voila!

OK, somehow get those loaves, on their parchment paper, slid into the oven and onto the stone or upside down cookie sheet.

Throw the cup of water onto the bottom of the stove and close the oven door.  Wait 5 minutes and then turn your oven down to baking temperature.  Do not open the oven door anymore than you have to.  Do not open it to look.  After 15 minutes you can open the door and rotate the loaves to help keep the browning even.

Try all that and I think you'll be happy.  There's lots more, but that's a darn good start.

:-Paul

%-)

:-Paul

Very cool that you're keeping track.  Now you know how to time things when you're dealing with your starter.

Names... I think about names all the time.  I think about naming my breads, once I have some breads to name.  I live on Three Mile Road, if I made a Rye Bread, I think "Three Mile Rye" sounds very cool.

I called my last baguettes "Los Chicos Malos" - that is: "The Bad Boys".  Although I had really good success today.  I'm about to write it up for the web site here.

There's this movie by the Coen Brothers, they did "Raising Arizona" and "Fargo" and some others.  Anyway, one of their early movies, before "Raising Arizona" was called "Blood Simple".  The idea is that some people, when exposed to blood or violence go "simple" - they make all sorts of mistakes because their brains just aren't working right, they've been knocked out of their normal existence by the blood.  I call my bread enterprise "Bread Simple" - it's a pun on "Blood Simple" and the idea is that I want to make bread that is so good that people taste it and go "simple" - they forget how to talk.  I had a bit of it today.  I baked this morning at 10 or so and took 2 baguettes to a friend for a present.  They were about 4 hours old.  Perfect.  He was blabbing on talking to me about this and that and while he was talking he took a bite of the baguette.  He got about two more words into his next sentence and suddenly he stopped and went "oh" and "ah" and just noticed what he was eating and stopped talking right in the middle of his sentence.  It was great.

I have no interest in ever selling bread, but I like to give it away and I like to mess around with creative stuff, like printing the name on the bag and things like that.  It's all fun to me.  Right now I'm working on sewing some denim bread bags.  We're going on a road trip and I figure to take a bunch of bread with us - road food.

So yeah, naming starters is right up there.  I have one that is named, actually, she's "Princess Tomato Yeastwater".  Currently the princess is dining in the 'fridge, getting fat and sassy for a loaf on Tuesday.

:-Paul