Anna N

Same as breakfast.

Thanks. Don’t get to Costco too often and I think I have tracked down some in a local grocery store. Stay tuned.

I have never had bread stick to the pullman pans made by USA. They are amazingly slick and the downside to that is you can easily drop one!

In the event that your levain lets you down, there is a direct method for that bread which is the one I used and got two lovely loaves.

I, too, broke up a vow to myself that I would never, ever again attempt to make a levain. I started it last Thursday.Until this morning I was exceedingly proud of it. I fear it has now gone the way of all my previous attempts. Instead of being active and bubbly and delicious looking as it has most mornings today it had a layer of liquid on top and looked cold and dead. I mixed it up, poured off 75% and fed it. I am thinking of dropping into to my local church on my way to an appointment and lighting a few candles. I was very pleased to see that Modernist Bread would have no truck with weird and wonderful additions to a levain but called for only water and flour.

Thanks. I used a combination of flour and rice flour as recommended by various “experts”. I think Modernist Bread recommends that combination for bench flour also. Might try just rice flour for my next use.

Duck mousse, lingonberry jam and homemade baguette.

Thanks.

Why thank you. Don’t I wish I could eat it all. I am wrapping most of it very well and tossing it into the freezer in the basement and hoping my cleaning lady will walk off with most of it. She cleaned out my freezer of everything at my request because I was afraid that if it ever gave out I would be stuck with a freezer full of thawed meat. It has been sitting empty for some time but I figure if the only thing in there is bread and it goes belly up it’s not going to be a huge deal. Edited to add Likely will not be baking much this week. Seem to have an appointment every damn day and all of them smack bang in the middle of the day.

Yup. Can’t reach the high places because I’m vertically challenged and getting more so and can’t reach the low places because I can’t see with my bifocals and I have health issues that make bending a real challenge. Nobody promised me a rose garden.

Baguette crumb using the direct method lean French dough.

Inspired by this. Although I feel like taking exception with the blogger’s claim that her recipe is only inspired by one from Ina Garten. It’s a pretty close copy. I made a couple of small changes. I added dried mustard to the sauce and scallions to the garnish. Such dishes rarely serve up looking as pretty as they do in their baking dish. Edited to say that I forgot the most important change I made. I did it in the Instant Pot.

That is a bargain. I think I spent $17 or more on each one of mine!

Let me check once more! Yes it does say that — sort of. It’s rather confusing because after you’ve pulled a vacuum you add the salt and then return it to the mixer and mix for 1 to 2 more minutes. So I’m not sure how it can be ready right out of the vacuum bag. But earlier they do suggest that pulling a vacuum is the equivalent to reaching medium gluten development which is impressive. I am going to quote one piece directly: The vacuum forces water into the flour so effectively that it will generally, under our recommended timetables, produce a dough as if it had been mixed to medium gluten development. [my bolding]. Have you found any such timetables? The only time I’ve seen is to leave it in the vacuum bag for 30 minutes. Will certainly have to try this method.

WARNING! Long and potentially boring post. Yes. I know. I promised more sandwich bread. These are obviously not sandwich bread. They are not quite so obviously not Baguettes. Amazon delivered a new toy yesterday and just like a child I had to play with it today. It was a couche hence the attempt at the baguettes. This is the lean French dough using the direct method. Since the recipe is barely an outline but refers one to the original recipe, I sat down and wrote out step-by-step what needed to be done. First of all I must say that the liquid/dry ratio seemed to be pretty much as it should be leading me to think that @JoNorvelleWalker might have been right when she suggested that I had earlier confused the water and flour amounts. I’m still not convinced of this and it was definitely a new batch of flour that arrived yesterday. Be that as it may. Things moved along just fine until it came to couching the pre-shaped baguettes. They stuck. You cannot believe how much they stuck. I thought I had done a darn good job of preparing the couche by rubbing in flour but apparently I had failed. Failed quite miserably in fact. The first photo shows a “baguette” that I wrestled off the couche and reformed almost from the start. It is short and fat and not a bit like a baguette and although I scored it, the scores are not visible. Now came the fun part. Using a hotel pan as a lid means ensuring that your shaped dough is shorter than the longest side of your hotel pan. But it makes baking more than one at a time rather impractical. So this little runt went into the oven alone and I carefully placed the (unheated) hotel pan over it. All seemed good. I set the timer for 20 minutes and poured myself a drink. Now, now don’t get any ideas — it was tonic water over ice. When the timer was up I approached the oven with confidence and two thick side towels. Gingerly I tried to lift the hotel pan. Yeow! Dropped it fast. Steam burns on one hand. Approached it again much more gingerly this time. Managed to nudge it so one edge was just over the outer edge of the pizza stone thus giving me a point of purchase. I wrestled it off, nudged the loaf back on the pizza stone, and then desperately searched for a landing spot for a screaming hot hotel pan. Heat burns on the other hand. (The same hand that has two paper cuts from Volume 5). Gave the little runt another five minutes without its lid before removing it and preparing to bake the other two deformed baguettes. I had wrestled them off the couche but made no real attempt to reshape them as I had done with the first one. I knew damn well I was not going to repeat the disaster with a hotel pan. These two would I have to undergo a non-modernist type bake. I arranged them on parchment paper on a pizza peel, slid them directly onto the stone and threw a good two handfuls of ice into the bottom of the oven. They rose beautifully. They have a gorgeous crust that sang to me and any improvement that might’ve been had by using a lid could never make up for the frustration and the burns. I’m very happy with this result. I did remember to slash both of them but obviously need practice in that regard. I need to re-flour my couche and probably be much more generous with the flour before I put the dough on it. And now before I add a fall to all my other injuries I need to vacuum up the flour that has made my tile floor into a skating rink. Perhaps this time I will add something else to my tonic water.

There must surely be worse things than beef for the winter!

If your freezer is full of things you want it to be full of I don’t think there’s a problem. Mine was so full that I couldn’t put things I wanted in there and that’s why I started the challenge. Nothing much has changed in all this time! It goes down and then it goes back up again. I feel like Sisyphus.

Whoa. I don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving not even Canadian Thanksgiving but that dish is going to show up in my menu very soon. I have a gorgeous cauliflower in the refrigerator, some sharp cheddar and even some bacon. Thanks for posting. I am certain it will be 100 times tastier than a turkey.

Nice. You are just getting into the stride of it in time to come home.

I wasn’t able to find very much on how it works but I believe you are on the right track. There are a number of cautions about using this method which is not necessarily good for all dough types. The book claims it works well for lean, whole wheat and pizza doughs. They also point out that not everyone agrees that an autolyse is a necessary step.

Done? I am assuming you mean the autolyse phase was done. Please correct me if you mean something different.

Just to be clear the vacuum is used to autolyze the flour and water (and yeast) not to mix the dough.

Thank you so much. Yours is the second offer. The other one is much much closer to me and she won’t even have to mail it! And, I’m not in the States, I’m in Canada and who knows if it would ever get through customs. White powder and all you know.

Yeah me too but when I look on Amazon the quantities are such that I would have to eat biscuits every day and for every meal for the rest of my natural life to even come close to justifying such purchase. I did see the mix in a supermarket so I may be lucky enough to get back there and buy a single box.

There sort of is — meaning you will likely need to refer to more than one page and probably more than one volume. The thing you need to think about though is that some ingredients are used for only a single bread and if you’re not going to ever make that bread then there’s no point in purchasing whatever additive it is.