teonzo

Gas is circulating in the oven, pretty quickly at those temperature. You can't expect the head portion of the jar to be close to oxygen free during cooking, even considering the vapor pressure at those temperatures. Plus you are forgetting all the gas inside the pockets in the dough, which is the most important thing to consider in this case. There's oxigen there too and it's not going away during cooking, otherwise the dough structure would collapse. Urg, I got a cold thrill through my spine reading this...when subjected to a higher external pressure a sponge compresses, not expands. If you have a chamber vacuum machine try putting a slice of bread or a babà or something leavened and with a soft crust (just the dough, without putting it in a bag), then pull your desired vacuum %. If what you wrote was true then the dough should expand when the machine releases 1 bar air inside the chamber. It happens the exact opposite of what you wrote. Teo

I would say so. Just think about these 2 questions: 1- how could you get a vacuum in the jar if the tool you are using is an oven? 2- if there was vacuum in the jar, what would happen to the bread when you open the jar and the dough is subjected to a quick change of pressure from 0 bar to 1 bar? Bread in a jar is akin to jams or preserves, not to sous vide storage. Please notice I don't have Modernist Bread so I don't know what they wrote there. This sounds really interesting. If you can share what you find I would be grateful, thanks! Teo

Time ago, on the Dong people thread, you wrote they are famous for their wood-only bridges (no metals, no concrete, no screws, just jointed wood). This seems like one of them, right? Do you have a picture with an overall view of the bridge? Thanks. Teo

I would suggest to write to the consumer service of the producer and ask them. Usually this is the best course of action. Teo

The hook shape definetely affect the mixing results. Wide hooks (the ones with the bigger distance from the rotation axis) give the worse results, since the dough almost always sticks to the hook. If the dough sticks to the hook then the gluten development is not optimal, the dough is beaten continuously, not stretched and compacted alternately, this way the dough parts that are in contact with the hook get few / null gluten development. To try to avoid this you need a hook with a narrow and circular spiral, like the one at the center of your photo (as you correctly pointed out). Kenwood makes a dough hook that's more akin to a bar than a hook, of the ones I tried that's the one where the sticking effect was more limited (but still present). Overall a planetary mixer is far from being the best choice for bread dough mixing. It's the best compromise for home users, since spiral mixers and other kinds of machines are much more expensive and can make only that job. But it's still a compromise: you will never be able to get the correct strech-compact movement. You needed to drink another mai tai. When in doubt this is the solution. Teo

The croutage will be faster, this is not a problem at all. If you leave your almond flour bag opened for quite some time (hopefully it's not the case) then it will tend to get a bit drier, so it's possible you will need to add a small amount of egg whites to the usual ratio of the almond + sugar + egg whites mixture (if you use the Italian meringue method). Can't think about other possible differences. Teo

I suppose it has something to do with the latent heat of cristalization and the low surface radius on that side of the heart-shape (lower radius means higher latent heat in the time unit). Maybe that single mold was in a hotter zone or had less air circulation or something else that prevented the latent heat to be dissipated correctly. Try to put the molds in a colder place after pouring the first chocolate layer (the outer shell). Teo

You need limited radiant heat from above... there's a reason why wood fired pizza ovens have a high roof, while wood fired bread ovens have a lower roof. You don't need a microscope to notice the difference about results. It just takes few trials to see that cooking a pizza near the broiler is one of the first things to avoid. Teo

This is the side I was more concerned about buying this set of books. The Modernist team are not the only ones that studied bread baking, so I need good reasons to part with more than 400 euro. I need infos that I can't find on the dozens of books I already have, I need them to be reliable. Reading that they wrote that brioche in a jar are under vacuum makes me rise more than an eyebrow, from a scientific team I'm expecting something much more accurate. Cooking pizza in home ovens is a well studied problem here in Italy. There is a whole online community, a good amount of them have university degrees in physics, chemistry, engineering and so on. Putting the stone at the half of the oven is a no-no. It's something tried and re-tried by hundreds of people. I'm not happy to write this, because I have a lot of admiration for Myhrvold and even more for Migoya (I really love his previous 3 books), but from what I'm reading here it seems this book set is not what I was hoping it to be. That's perfect. Don't worry, I'm not forcing anyone to do what I write. We are here to discuss and learn together. Teo

If the price on Amazon.com was the same as on the .it then it would make for a fine joke/suggestion. Unfortunately the price on the .com is almost like a car, so it has no sense for you. Here in Italy it has a great success. It reaches 400°C so you get a much better result than with a home oven. Price is reasonable (82 euro). You spend less money about electricity consumption. It's quite small for what it does. So families who like to eat homemade pizza frequently buy it and are happy. Teo

Uhm, most probably I will sound caustic and pedantic, but I'm puzzled by reading this too. To cook pizza properlyit need to receive the heat mainlt from the bottom. You need to lay it on something really hot and with a high thermal mass, trying to avoid heat from above. Using a thick stone is perfect. Putting it at the middle of the oven not so much, it's better to put it the lower you can. Turning the oven at the broiler setting for the 5 minutes before cooking the pizza, well, far from optimal since it's going the give the opposite effect (more heat from above). I would strongly suggest to move the stone to the lower position you can achieve (the nearer to the lower oven's heating element the better), totally avoid to turn the oven to the broiler function at any time (best thing would be to use only the lower heating element, just the opposite of the broiler function, but almost zero ovens have this function), check the temperature of the stone before cooking the pizza (you need a "touch" thermometer like Thermapen but that can support temperatures above 200°C, the ones you are using measure the air temperature, not the stone temperature). With such a thick stone it's possible you need to pre-heat the oven for much more than an hour. People get better results with a steel sheet because it reaches the temperature in less time, so it's always hot enough when they use it, with a baking stone 1 hour can still be not enough. Judging from the photo of the bottom of your pizza I would say that almost for sure the stone temperature was well below the desired temperature (the one of the rest of the oven).. So next time try to put the stone at the bottom of the oven, pre-heat it for more time (I know, it costs more money) and check its temperature. If you still get burnt cheese, then (just after laying the pizza on the stone and before closing the oven door) place a cold baking sheet on the top position (near the top heating element), this will act as a shield and will retard the cooking of the cheese. Another solution: ask your granddaughter to buy you a Ferrari. A G3 Ferrari. Teo

I don't have the books, but I'm a bit puzzled reading this. If it's made properly then the final jar is not vacuum pulled, they are air-tight closed and pasteurized. Shelf life is longer for this reason. They are not vacuum closed like what happens with a vacuum chamber machine at full force. For example you can put biscotti in a jar, close the cap not tightly so air can escape, put it in a vacuum chamber machine, let it run at maximum, when it's finished you get a tightly closed cap (due to the difference in pressure the cap gets pulled down when the machine let air returns in the chamber) and vacuum (well, almost vacuum) in the jar. With leavened dough in the jar you still have gas inside the jar, including oxigen. It lasts more because it's air-tight and pasteurized. Teo

If a standard brioche is crumbly then usually it's due to overmixing. This has cocoa (at least I suppose so, I don't have the recipe / books), so it's a normal effect. When you add cocoa to a dough it becomes crumbly. You notice the effect from 2% (baker percentage) and rising, the higher the % the crumblier the final dough. Teo

I would prescribe an enigmatography exam to the doctor. (I'm joking of course, in case it is still not clear it's: camel + RA = caRAmel --- Rob initials are RC so they need rewording to fit) Teo

Since you live in Canada I suppose you don't have much troubles on finding a cold place that is not a refrigerator... If you have double windows then try to check the temperature between them. Teo

This sems like another case where simply scaling the recipe from big to small is not the best thing. If my memory serves right you studied engineering so you are good at math. Think about 2 spheres where you want to keep constant the difference in radius: the volume ratio is not costant if you change the radius. This is not the perfect analogy, just to point out that there is a limit on how thin you can (have sense to do) stretch a dough, so when you go very small you need to reduce the inclusion/dough ratio. To avoid the explosion you need to pick a rolling pin and roll/stretch the exterior sides (the uncovered dough) as thin as possible, until you are able to close them without extending the covered dough. Bit of a PITA to do. Teo

To get a good distribution of the inclusions I would suggest to add a fraction of them (say 1/5), make a simple fold, add another fraction, make another fold and so on. Teo

Ask your granddaughter for a pair of barbecue gloves. Making puppy eyes helps in your case too! Teo

Good! I heard of way too many people (both professionals and amateurs) ruining their machines in this way. At a restaurant where I worked the chef continued to say that Kitchen Aid Artisan sucked because they always broke after few months... he mixed bread at maximum speed to save time (and waste money). Refrigerator is fine, but it takes more time for obvious reasons. This temperature range is important for gluten development, yeast survival, but more than all butter texture. To get a proper mixing you need the butter to be soft. If it's hard it tends to break the gluten structure. If it starts to melt then it's a trouble. This is one of the steps where professionals and home users diverge. Professionals use "bread machines" (can't recall the English term, I mean the ones with 2 mechanical arms) or spiral mixers, if you add the ingredients at the proper temperatures then you don't incur in these kind of troubles. Hook mixers (the ones used at home) have a much higher friction rate, so the doughs get heated much more, this causes the trouble of going over 26°C each and every time. For normal breads it's not a big trouble, for enriched breads it is. This is one of the themes where I'm wondering about the quality of this book set. As far as I understood they are covering both the professional side and the home user side. So hopefully there should be the explanations on how to adapt things for the home use. Probably they explained this stuff about temperature (and how to remedy) somewhere in all that huge number of pages. If they didn't then it would be a serious oversight, because home baking needs a very different approach than professional baking on a lot of things. The main problem is that a lot of times you can't simply re-scale recipes to get them working. You need to adapt a lot of minor details. The raisin bread seemed like a case where the home recipe was simply scaled and not controlled. If a person makes a small loaf and a big loaf and wants to get 2 spiral rounds on each one, then he/she need to adapt the quantity of smear: the smaller one will need to be rolled thinner, so it needs more smear. This is why I wrote that probably it was an error by the book. It's really hard to catch these errors while proof reading, because when you proof read you tend to check if the numbers correspond with the ones on the original files/recipes, then you check the ratios to see if they are correct. But if you scaled the recipe dividing by 20 and not by 10, then this error slips very very easily (there is an Italian book where almost all recipes have this defect) For home use I think it's much better to mix together whatever ingredients you are adding after gluten development, then add them in small doses and frequently. In this case I would mix soft butter with sugar and salt, then add around 1/8 each time. The first addition takes a bit of time to emulsify, the other ones are quick. The difference is much more noticeable when you need to add butter and eggs, if you mix them together instead than adding them separately then you get a better result. The problem of adding butter to a dough is that fats act as a lubricant between gluten strands and as a barrier to develop more gluten bonds. The more gluten bonds you create, the more elastic / extensible the dough is (you see this with the difference in the windows test with standard bread). It's similar to the case of pulling 1 spring or 2 spring in a series (not parallel): more gluten means more "springs", so it's easier to pull the dough. When you add butter yu add fats, which prevent the formation of new gluten bonds: some get formed, but much less than what happens if you continue mixing without adding fats. After adding all the butter you get a window test that gives similar results than what you have with full gluten development in a standard bread recipe (no fats), not because you reached full gluten development equally as with standard bread, but because fats are acting as a lubricant, making it easier for gluten strands to stretch. So the process of adding butter to a brioche dough is more about getting a correct emulsion than reaching full gluten development. You could object "well, why not reaching full gluten development before adding butter?". It's a matter of compromise: gluten can't stand indefinite mixing times, each flour has a parameter that indicates how much time gluten takes before collapsing (I'm pretty sure it's explained somewhere, this data is much more difficult to get from flour producers because it's an indication of flour quality, the ones with poor quality are reluctant to give this number for obvious reasons). If you reach full gluten development before adding the butter then you reach the stage where gluten starts collapsing, so you end up with a texture more similar to melted cheese than the one of a proper dough. You can try for curiosity, but the results after baking will be catastrophic. This is why making panettone (and similars) is one of the more difficult tasks in the pastry world. Ah, I was forgetting one thing. For this step (adding butter to a brioche) it's better to use the paddle attachment and not the hook. Disclaimer: what I write is what I learned from other professionals or by direct experience. So I can't swear that what I write is correct and precise, we all know that most explanations by professional chefs are not that scientifically perfect. I'm curious to know what the Modernist Cuisine team says to be correct and what wrong. Teo

If you create the stage name Rob Acornoley then it's perfect. Teo

Prepare a lenghty Christmas list to give to your granddaughter, this year you deserve more gifts than usual! Chris already wrote that you need to watch the gluten development and not the mixing time. The other critical point is adding butter in small amounts and not all at once (otherwise you break the emulsion), but I'm confident it's well explained in the books. I would add that it's better to read the manual of your stand mixer (or whatever machine you are using). If you are using a stand mixer for home use (small Kitchen Aid, Kenwood or whatever) then they are not engineered to work at high speed with heavy doughs. Brioche is not as hard as a low idration bread dough, but it's still in the heavy dough category. The mechanics of small stand mixers are not built to stand the stress of mixing heavy doughs at high speed, you don't break the machine immediately, you keep ruining the gears and they will break in the medium term (few months / a couple of years with average home use). This is the major reason behind home stand mixers maintenance: people don't read the manual and mix heavy doughs at high speed. For example with a Kitchen Aid Artisan Tilt-Head you don't have to go over speed 2. So please read your machine manual before slowly damaging it. Slow speed means more mixing time, just watch gluten development. Or to be more precise: watch the emulsion. With brioche you add the butter when you already developed the gluten, the critical point is keeping the emulsion, not developing gluten since it's already developed. The final window test with brioche is meant to check that it's perfectly emulsified. Another critical factor, expecially with enriched breads that have a lot of butter, is watching the dough temperature. Ideally you should remain in the 22°C-26°C window. The best thing to do at home is to check the dough temperature every 5 minutes. If it reached 26°C then transfer the dough in the freezer for 5 minutes, then resume mixing. If you have enough space in the freezer then just put the mixer bowl with the dough inside, less work and more effective. Teo

The logo is easy: a camel with a R and A on the two humps. Teo

That's the best way to go! You have more fun and it's more useful, since you learn much more things by making mistakes first hand. Teo

You need to try other breads now, that's the best way to spoil love your granddaughter! This can depend on the type of flour. Flour with the same protein (total gluten) content can give pretty different results. Different ratios between glutenin and gliadin make for very different results in doughs. In this case I would go with a pizza flour, which is more extensible than a standard bread flour. To know the difference in extensibility of the various kind of flours you need to check the P/L ratio. For sure it's explained in the books. Less sure is to find it written in the flour package, but usually you just need to e-mail the producer to know it. The main difference is about taste. Personally I think that when I taste a flavored bread I want to perceive the flavor and then the bread, not viceversa. But this is just a personal preference, to each his own. The second difference is structural. If the smear is dry then it will absorb a bit of moisture from the dough (water migration), making it drier (this can explain why you felt it was dry, too). Hahahaha, I was not trying to induce you in buying a sheeter, that's a non sense for home use. It was a masked compliment: to get a perfect spiral you need to roll the dough at the exact same thickness in each point. This is easy to do with a sheeter (it's automatic), almost impossible to do with a rolling pin, especially with an elastic bread dough. If you don't have a good hand with rolling pins then you don't get a spiral but a monster. Teo

First of all, congrats, if it wasn't for the tunnel you nailed it at the second try! The tunnel forms because the dough is not attached to the inner spiral. The dough in the outher spiral grows bigger during proofing time, so it tends to detach from the inner spiral. If the dough is just laid over the smear without being "glued" then you will have this trouble. Usually spreads/smears are soft and wet, this way they are easy to spread and act as "glue" between each spiral. Judging by the photos (I don't have the recipe) the smear for this recipe looks to be on the dry side, this prevents the spiral to be "glued" together. It's not a problem for the inner ones, since they find an outer spiral that keeps them in place. Since you prepare an egg wash for the final surface, then you can use it as "glue" when you roll the bread. Just brush some egg wash over the smear and the raisins, then roll the bread the tighter you can. You need to avoid air bubbles, act a little torsion to the roll while you form it making it tighter, pressing on the lower dough sheet while you roll. This way all spirals will get "glued". This kind of breads are much easier to make in a professional kitchen, a sheeter is a HUGE help, so if you see a professional loaf with a perfect spiral, well, it wasn't the baker, it was the sheeter that did the job. Teo