Jeffrey

Anyone who has been reading the postings on this forum knows very well that James has been answering the questions with lots of detail--years of hands on and head on work are the combination of skills he brings (along with the good humor), to the benefit of us all. There's one aspect of yeast that he touches on that I will elaborate further on, because it's interesting. James mentions that doughs with a high sugar content (above about 12% of the flour weight) require more yeast. Why? Yeast is a single celled fungus, and its cell walls are semi-permeable. Nutrients can flow in through the cell wall, waste products can flow out. That's simple enough. Simple too is the "hygroscopic" nature of sugar (and salt); that is, they attract moisture (hence a few grains of rice in the salt shaker in the summer or else the salt gets moist). One last piece of information is the yeast's need for moisture in order for it to metabolize and get on with its fermentation work. Putting all these things together, in a high-sugar dough environment, the sugar is taking considerable water away from the yeast. This in turn slows down the yeast's ability to ferment the dough. Therefore, a higher percentage of yeast is required as the sugar content of a dough goes up. For example, it is not at all unusual to see brioche made with 5% or more yeast. It needs it. Were one to mix a dough that does not contain sugar, such as French bread, with 5% yeast, it would blow up in no time--loads of gas and no flavor. Enjoy the bake, Jeffrey

Hello Adoxograph, I think my best learning moment with sourdough bread production came early in my career, when my first boss, a German woman, taught me about the Detmolder three-phase system of sourdough. Basically, the mature culture receives a series of three builds over the course of about 28 hours, after which all the latent potential of the sourdough is developed--the potential, specifically, for the lactic and acetic flavor characteristic, as well as the culture's leavening potential. The Detmolder method is fascinating, and produces remarkable bread, which I enjoy making to this day (there's some 90% rye presently on the counter at home made with the three-phase system). But most amazing to me is how one starts with about 40 grams of mature culture, and once the series of builds is complete and the final dough is mixed, one winds up with about 20 kilos of bread. This is an increase of 500 times. It is these commonplace miracles of nature that excite me most. Jeffrey Hamelman

It's amazing how good a loaf of bread can be baked in a home oven, convection or other. Sure, mortgage the house, buy a $50,000 hearth oven, and live in the car if you want, but first try doing the best job possible in the humble home oven. Even for French bread, great results can come. There are, of course, a few rules to follow: 1. Use a baking stone and preheat your oven hot hot hot (unless your bread has lots of fat, milk, sugar in it, in which case you'll need to lower the heat or the bread will darken too quickly). Remember that you'll lose a good bit of heat in the process of steaming and loading the bread, so don't be afraid to start at 480F or so. 2. For steam, preheat a heavy cast iron pan along with the baking stone. It must be saturated with heat. Just before the bake, I bring 1 cup of water to the boil. With gloves and a long sleeved shirt, pour the water into the pan just after you've slashed and loaded the bread. You'll get copious steam. Close the door quickly and resist any urge to open it for at least 15 minutes. 3. You may need to lower the oven to finish the bake, but that initial smack of heat will help a lot toward achieving maximum loaf volume. Baguettes may be hard to do, since baking stones are usually not more than 16" in diameter, but ovals or rounds, rolls or smaller baguettes are feasible. There's something on the market called a hearth kit, which is a pizza stone with sides and a back--it is meant to give lots more heat radiation and therefore better simulate the baker's steam oven. I have used the hearth kit with great results. Enjoy the bake, Jeffrey

One small change in your baking might help. Once you fill the cannelle molds, put them on the back side of a sheet pan to bake. This should help with more even heat distribution. If that doesn't help, try filling every other cavity of the mold. Bonne chance, Jeffrey

In the mid-1970s I worked for a stint (I guess "stage" would be the better term) in a large bakery in southern Germany. Other than the tunnel oven used for some of the bulk bread production, and other than the endless marching batallions of four-abreast kaiser rolls, and not including the extensive area devoted to pastry production, there were also 12 steam-injected woodburning brick ovens (6 more were being built). Only certain loaves baked in them. The ovens were manned by Turks, who not only did the baking, but arrived earlier than anyone else to cut the hardwood slab wood with a hand held hatchet in order to build their fires. In spite of being young and fit, I found the work to be incessant and demanding--and providing a seed of fascination that sprouted and has remained within me for over 25 years. There are claims about the virtue of bread baked in woodburning ovens that I can not dispute. The combination of conductive, convective, and reflective heat does indeed seem to produce breads with a character that can't quite be duplicated in a standard commercial oven. The breads I ate from the German ovens were astonishing. My most lingering recollection is of a bread made with quark (somewhat akin to dry cottage cheese, but it's a cultured product); it was a straight dough, wet textured and with a rather low profile after the bake. The flavor was amazing. There was a relationship between the crust--dark but not burned, and thin--and the crumb--moist but not gummy, with large holes--that I believe was directly attributable to the brick oven bake. I made the bread every week for years and years afterwards in a commercial hearth bread oven, and it was good, but I could never quite duplicate the distinct character of the original. Of course, other factors enter in when baking in a woodburning oven, such as difficulty in steaming the oven, and fire management. When the bread is ready, the fire better be in perfect shape. James is right--there are already plenty of challenges to the bake, and adding in the considerations of fire management is a large jump in that department. That in itself should not deter anyone from considering looking into woodfired baking. It is probably not feasible for an urban venture, but for someone in a rural area with access to plenty of wood, it might make sense. It is certainly a much cheaper start up compared to gas or electric alternatives. But it does require extensive experience and facility with bread--if skills in any aspect of bread production need improvement, it's probably better to focus on that before embarking on the added complexities of managing the wood oven. Jeffrey