glennbech

a)I improvised a battenton with a basket and a linnen cloth. The dough started to fall down and spread outwards the moment I took it out of it. I guess the Idea is to work fast then ? The original Recipe I worked with sait absolutely nothing about support for a rustique bread with 72% water. Book authors should really try their recipes. I ended up with a pancake the size of my baking stone 1 cm thick :-) b) I have a pizza stone, heat my electric oven to max (250c), and put the stone on the floor of the oven. I let the stone heat for 45-60 minutes. I guess this aproach is ok ? By the way jackal10; I saw that you had made some kind of makeshift shovel for plywood or something to insert baguettes into your oven (Not sure what the proper english word for that is).... I saw the picture in the baguette demo thread. I got Inspired and made my one from oak. A bit heavy, but works like a charm .-) http://www.glennbech.com/2006/04/making-sh...ting-pizza.html

Over the last few days, after completing a starter I'm happy with, I've been experimenting with sourdough baking. I guess I make a lot of the beginner mistakes, before finding a routine that works. Inspired by this excellent forum, and this thread in particular ; http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=27634 I'm making another atempt, all will document it here and hope for some feedback. In the mean time, I can tell you all about what went from at my last atempt, finished about 60 minutes ago. - To counter the "pancake effect" on wet dough (mine was at 70%), I've read that it can be smart to throw in a glass or so of water on a cast iron pan or something to provide steam and better heat transfer during the first few minutes. This is said to help developing the crust. Since I don't have room for pizza baking stone, cast iron pan AND bread in my electric oven, I used my turbo fan for a couple of minutes instead..... BIG Mistake !! :-) After 20 minutes I had to take it out of the oven. It was turning black and burnt! The botton, resting on the pizza stone, was turning into black carbon. And the top were also turning darker and darker. 40 minutes, and It would have been a black heap of coal :-) Anyway.. I ended up with a bread that looks real good, a bit on the "over finished" side, but with an apealing a nice and airy crumb. Taste wise however... This is a disaster! The crust tastes burned, and the crumb is not baked 100%, so it "swells" in your mouth when you eat it. My guess is that all this is the turbo-fan's fault. I swear to never to that again .-) Edit: After posting, I noticed that there Was a Q/A Thread fro the tutorial, with posts from 2006. Admins, feel free to move my post at will .-)

I guess the tawing tactic "back in the oven" is great for taste, but have you tried masuring weight after leaving them uncovered 10-15 minutes in the oven ? I just did a very and unscientific experiment with a loaf I'm about to have for breakfast, and lost nearly 10% hydration .-) I might a a math/science freak now. Who cares if it tastes good...Nice looking bakery on display by the way! Inspiring!

I freeze them in the plastic bag. After thawing I notice that there is some dampness/humidity on the insides of the plastic. I guess this is only a very small percentage of the evaporated water. That's why I suspect the crust has not absorbed "all", and that there actually is a microscopic "loss" even when thawing in a plastic bag. Thanks for all the tips here. I'll try thawing in plastic and re-baking. Sounds like that is the process that will give the best tasting result. Toasting is of course another option, but beeing north european.... Well... Toast and tea is just not our thing (at least not mine!) :-)

I recently did a small study on thawing bread. Since you cannot use a plastic bag when thawing it (Crust gets real bad), some kind of "breathing" material must be used, meaning dehydration. So, how much water is lost during thawing ? Here are the results. (Total weight loss over approximately 12 hours.) Plastic: 0% (start weight 149g, end weight 149g) Paper: 1.9% (start weight 104g, end weight 102g) Cloth: 4.9% (start weight 122, g end weight 116g) Other details; the bread was baked with a 65% hydration, baked into round loaves and cut in halves. Three halves have been used in this "experiment". This means that all loaves have a “cut”, and is not totally surrounded by crust. This probably has an effect on the total result, but the comparisons should be valid. I conclude with the cloth/fabric giving the overall best results, but at a higher dehydration cost. (I like crispy crusts!) I guess the overall best approach would have been to put half baked loaves in the freezer ? Any other thoughs on preserving bread ? (Complete details of my "experiment" can be found on my homepage/food blog. Go by clicking here

By the way; Have any one seen a start look like this ? It's a thin layer of fluid on top of the "dough". Very strange... I guess this is a very bad sign .-) .. .And I'm throwing this one away and starting over again, with plain white wheat flour after Jack's instructions when I come back from holiday. I had high hopes for my fruitstarter .-) Maybe I'll try it again later when I get more usded to regular ones, and know how they should behave .-)

JAck; Thanks for the tips. I'll reduce the hydration to about 65% and make sure that my starter is active. I'll post the results in the thread. By the way; Any good tips on keeping the temperature at around 30c ? My kitchen is a bit drafty, especially during winter. The indoor temp is always somewhere around 20-23 depening on the season.

It's always a bit de-motivating when you spend a lot of time on a project, and it doesn't go according to plan. I guess that happened to me. So have a look and learn, see how things can go when working with starters, chefs and sourdough recipes. My Recipe was as follows; 1 kg of Fine what Flour 6,5 dl of Luke warm Water. 24 grams of salt 500 grams of sourdough starter made from fermented fruit. You can have look at a recipe for this starter earlier in my blog. <a href="http://www.glennbech.com/2006/04/baking-with-sour-dough-how-to-make.html">http://www.glennbech.com/2006/04/baking-with-sour-dough-how-to-make.html</a> The first thing that struck me was that the dough was extremely wet... I know all of the recipes from that particular book emphasize on using wet dough, so I didn't think much of it.. After struggling a bit with it to form three loafs of bread, I covered it up to rest for an hour or so. The next thing was that to follow the recipe, I had to use 100% of my starter. I was not very keen on that and wanted to keep 100 ml for further use, so I gambled that 430 grams of sourdough would be enough ( 70 grams short, or 14% less than stated ) . The results were disastrous and the sourdough did not rise properly, the recipe told me to put the loaves on a sheet of baking paper, cover them up and let them rise. Instead of rising "upwards" these bastards chose to rise "outwards". Instead of bread, I got pancakes! After 2-3 hours of "rising" I gave up, covered in plastic and went to bed. The next morning, not much had happened, and I threw the breads away without baking them. I am going to make the qualified guess that three factors made this dough a disaster; - The starter wasn't well enough developed. I kept it and have been feeding it, so I hope it will come along nicely after a few more days. - I took a shortcut and kept 80 grams (1 dl) of starter. Used Less that the recipe stated. - My starter is probably (for some strange reason) more liquid than the starter the recipe was based on, making the total amount of liquid in the dough higher than desirable. Hence the pancakes... At least, these are my theories and the things I'll try differently next time! Here is a step by step illustration of the baking disaster. 1. The loaves are a bit small, but I still hope they will rise, I took the dough out from my Kenwood kitchen machine, and made three loaves, you can only see two because I had another "accident" with the third. Not my day! <img src="http://www.glennbech.com/uploaded_images/step2lookinggreat-770093.jpg"> 2. After half an hour or so of rest, I do the finishing touch on the dough and put them on a paper sheet and cover, so the rising process may begin. I was pretty happy with my result, and pleased with myself. <img src="http://www.glennbech.com/uploaded_images/step1okay-779898.jpg"> 3. Im starting to suspect that this is not going to be the bread of my dreams .-) <img src="http://www.glennbech.com/uploaded_images/step3notsogreat-761329.jpg"> 4. Even After two hours the loaves are not rising at all but just floating out like giant pancakes ... This is pretty much how they looked 12 hours after as well. Can't get much worse tha this ? to bad I don't have a profile shot of the doigh, mabe 1 cm (0,5 inches) high. <img src="http://www.glennbech.com/uploaded_images/step4disaster-752623.jpg">

Thanks for the tips jackal10, I guess I'll have to do some research on how and where to shop my ingredients. The local supermarkets, even the well stocked ones do not carry a lot of different flours here in Norway. I've read some of the more technical discussions here about gluten content and milling. Im amazed by the different things you guys have in stores in the US (And other countries as well). Anyway : An update of my progress is in order as well... Day 16 Today we take 3 dl of fermented apple peel liquid, and mix in 300 grams of fine wheat flour. we also add 1 dl of the product from day 15 and throw away the rest. This time we put it in the fridge. I'll try to use it for baking, and start the feeding process tomorrow. Im hoping to get a stable and reliable chef for sourdough baking going.

Hi All, thanks again for nice feedback. I'm looking forward to participate this active community of foodstuff lovers -) As an answer to seth/jack I'll have to say that the source of my method is one of a rather famous bread bakery in Oslo, Norway, and their published book. They do not state a special reason for kicking off the starter on fruit, other than that you might recognize the taste in the final product. They also claim they survived their troublesome start making apple pastries for a local coffee shop, and used the leftover peel for fermenting starters. I have a questions though; Is it easy to get a starter/chef going on a pure fine wheat flour? I've tried a couple of recipes earlier with rye, but I find the taste not very suitable for fine white bread, and better for wholegrain like for example the danish 100% rye bread (which, you cannot make without sourdough) I guess a 100% sourdough starter made from pure white wheat flour would do just as fine as my fancy one from apples :-) However, Im really looking forward to have my first slices of bread with the jelly I made from the leftover apples .-)

Hello Carolyn, Sorry for the mistake about 17 apples. Hope you didn't start peeling. My intention was to write 17 days to complete the chef. I guess you'd have to peel 6-10 apples depending on size. Lost a chef in a divorce, lol! They couldn't share it ?

14 days ago, I gave birth to my sourdough chef. I decided to go for a fine wheat starter based on fermented fruit. The basic Idea is to use the bacteria present in the peel of fruit to start a fermentation process in water. After a critical mass of bacteria is reached in the water, you start your chef, and the friendly yeast bacteria present in the liquid can feed off the starch in the flour to continue growing. I chose apples as thet are easy to peel, and I didn't have to peel so many to get about 300 grams of peel. It takes about 17 days to complete. 14 days of apple-peel fermentation, and 3 days of mixing in fermented liquid with flour. But after that it's just a matter of keeping it alive. And you can have your chef for ages. As I write, the chef is relaxing in my kitchen, and has one more day to go before I can use it in baking. I'll make sure to post pictures of finished sourdough masterpieces in this thread! Any questions or feedback is greatly appreciated. For more details in the process you could always take a look at my homepage (http://www.glennbech.com/) Day 1 This is my IKEA $5 Jar with 300 g peel from apples in 2 liters of water. Day 15 3 dl of the liquid is mixed in with 300 grams of wheat flour. Nice and bubbely. For the next few days, this mixture will be mixed in with new fresh flour and starter liquid.