The Bread Topic (2009 – 2014)

[Ann_T]

Anna, I've never had the Brazilian Cheese Bread.   They look so light and airy. Definitely need to try these.

Dcarch, the next stone I buy will be one that lets me bake longer baguettes.

 

Fed my two sourdough starters yesterday. One with white and one with rye. 

 

Made both a Biga and a Levain.

 

Both were ready to use by late afternoon.

 

Mixed up two batches of dough.  One for baguettes using the biga.

 

Used half of the baguette dough and took four baguettes out of the oven just before bed.

 

Sliced this morning. 

Edited March 4, 2014 by Ann_T (log)

[Anna N]

Cheese bread. Nothing special just odds and ends of various cheeses added to the dough for white sandwhich bread. I added about 6.5 ozs to 1 lb of dough. Might up that to 8 ozs next time.

Ann_T,

Those baguettes look great.

[Ann_T]

Anna, I would love a slice of your bread toasted.  Love toasted cheese bread.

 

Last week I ordered a Lame and three linen couches from the San Francisco Baking Institute.  They arrived yesterday, just in time for this week's baking.   If anyone is looking for a linen couche, the SFBI had the best prices I could find on the web.  I bought the largest size, 31" X 36 at $10.50 each. 

 

 

Used the other half yesterday's (Biga) dough to make two Batards.

 

[DianaM]

Those batards look fantastic, beautiful slashes on them!

I made cinnamon rolls a while ago, P Reinhart's recipe. I never ice them, I much prefer them this way.

[Ann_T]

Thanks Diana.

Your cinnamon rolls look so perfect.  Great photo.

 

 

I fed my sourdough starters on Wednesday.  They hadn't been fed for 9 days.  One was fed with a combination of white and rye and the other with just white.  Both had almost doubled within three hours.  I used two ounces of the leftover starter to make a Biga. The Biga had more than doubled by early evening so I kneaded up a batch of bread dough and after the first rise it went into the fridge overnight.  This was a pure wild yeast sourdough.  Without the addition of commercial yeast.

 

Taken out about 3:00 PM and allowed to come to room temperature before shaping into two baguettes and one Boule. 

The bread came out of the oven late, and was left loosely covered with a tea towel overnight.

 

Sliced this morning and toasted for breakfast.

Edited March 14, 2014 by Ann_T (log)

[Tri2Cook]

Just finished baking an onion rye to go with the corned beef that I started last week and will be cooking tomorrow.

[TylerK]

So many beautiful loaves on here.  I thought I'd share a couple of my own that I baked recently.

 

 

Sourdough pumpernickel baked in a pullman pan.  Contains rye berries, chia seeds, flax seeds pumpkin seeds and caraway seeds.  Not a traditional dense as a brick, baked for several hours German pumpernickel.  It's fairly soft and spongy.   

 

 

Standard white sourdough.  I'm not pleased with the way it looks, so I'll be making my slashes up top next time like I usually do.  Still, it's nice and crusty, and I think it got some pretty great oven spring...  

 

 

 

...and I'm fairly pleased with how the crumb turned out.  Pleasantly sour, but I need to up the salt next time.

 

[Anna N]

Tyler,

Your pumpernickel looks awesome.

[TylerK]

Thanks Anna.  The flavour is great too.  

[Ann_T]

Tyler, that pumpernickel looks great. 

 

  Baked sourdough rye this morning.  Needed it to make corned beef sandwiches.

 

[Ann_T]

 

Sourdough White.  Started late afternoon with a biga.  Out of the oven just before 10:00 PM.

 

[DianaM]

I'm on day 5 of having created a sourdough starter from flour and water. It has doubled its volume in 6 hours on a 1:1:1 ratio feeding schedule, it looks bubbly, and am hoping to put it to good use in a few days with a pure levain bread.

[TylerK]

I made a sourdough brioche this weekend. 

 

 

 

 

This picture is half a year old, but I just wanted to say that this recipe makes fantastic hamburger buns (placed them a little to close on the pan):

 

 

[DianaM]

The buns look beautiful, Tyler, the way they merged together actually looks intentional. Like a couronne.

On day 7 since starting my culture, I put the leftover starter to use, and made this pain au levain, a nice 750 g (finished weight) boule. My slashing technique leaves a lot to desire, I am using a serrated knife since I don't have a lame (yet). The flavour is very good, not sour, but with a very pleasant, subdued tang on the finish. I think it would have benefitted from an extra half hour of proofing, but I wanted to get to bed before midnight, so maybe next time.

First pic, right after it was baked.

Sliced this morning.

[TylerK]

Is there something that makes for a good slash as opposed to a bad slash?  Using a serrated knife may make things look a little more ragged when making the slash, but it all stretches out in the baking.  Granted, I'm no expert, but I can't look at your bread and tell that the slashes were made with a knife and not a lame. 

 

It's a great looking loaf.

[Ann_T]

Tyler, Nice looking Brioche.

 

Diana, beautiful loaf.  I actually like your slashing. Nice pattern.

 

I fed my sourdough starters yesterday and also made a sourdough biga.  Kneaded up the dough last night and after the first rise it went into the fridge.  Pulled out this morning. 

 

 

Baked three baguettes.

 

And decided to make sourdough kaisers with the remaining dough.

 

Shaped and proofing.

 

Topped with sea salt and black pepper.

[rotuts]

I admire any one that makes "buns" what ever you call them

 

you know  the stuff you slice and put Burgers in.

 

Kudos to the Bun Makes. !

[thock]

I started back bread-making in early February. I used to use a bread maker, but it was inconvenient to bring it to the kitchen, so I haven't been using it, this time around.

 

I started out with a few yeast experiments, basically prompted by the discovery of a dried-out, yet not moldy, cake of fresh yeast in the fridge. I had bought it a year ago, this past holiday season, and had promptly forgotten about it. I was curious to see whether it could be "revived," so I mixed it with a little water and sugar. To my amazement, it bubbled, so I used it to make a loaf of bread. I forgot to add salt to the dough, so it was kind of flat-tasting, but it did work. It had a nice, moist, fine crumb. I saved a piece of the dough to try to use later as pate fermentee.

 

I also started some instant yeast in a flour and water mix, just because I had heard that starting with a little yeast creates more flavor than a lot of yeast. Those experiments worked out well, too. I kept hunks of dough from those, too, and they're all in the freezer, at this time.

 

I started a sourdough culture shortly after starting the yeast experiments, and when it was going well, I abandoned the commercial-yeast breads for 100% sourdough breads. When it was just about ready, but not quite, I started making pan breads with my starter. I didn't follow any recipe, as such, but just added water to the starter, and flour to the water, until I got something that looked and felt ok. I kept track of the weights, and increased each of them over time, until I was filling the pan well.

 

After getting a white loaf that went over well, I decided to add white whole wheat to the mixture. Whole wheat because I wanted to add fiber to the bread, and white whole wheat because it's less hassle to get certain people to eat things with whole wheat if it's not as obvious.

 

I've been getting compliments from the other half about the breads, which is good, because he's difficult to please. Where I like crusty loaves, he likes thin, soft crusts. He also has an aversion to whole grains. He says they're "acidic-tasting" to him, so it's a victory when a 50% white whole wheat loaf is pronounced "the best, yet."

 

The other day, I needed to make some bread, but didn't have time for a sourdough dough cycle, so I used my starter, but added a teaspoon and a half of instant yeast, to make it rise faster. That went over best of all, because it wasn't as sour. I was told that he didn't really like the sourdough taste as much. I think that part of the reason it wasn't so sour was that I used double the amount of starter that I normally do, adjusting the water and flour to account for the added volume. I am currently trying the exact same formula, without the addition of yeast, to see how that is received.

 

I have been getting consistently close, fine grain structure, which is good, because we like to use this for sandwiches. The doughs are 70% hydration, if I'm figuring it right (total water divided by total flour), so they start out really sticky, but end up being less so in the end.

 

I'm not doing a lot of kneading, either. I mix the starter and water, add the flour and salt, mix it with a spoon until it's mostly together, then use my hand to finish mixing. Then, I let it rest for a while (half an hour to several hours), and then deflate, if necessary, and pick up the dough ball and turn it under in my hands a few times, put it back in the bowl to rise, then deflate, shape, pan and rise before slashing and baking.

 

I think I gleaned all this from people's comments about artisan bread and things like that, and it's worked out well.

 

No pictures, but I'm enjoying this.

[DianaM]

I really wanted to like whole wheat, but I have an aversion to it as well. I have tossed out many a bag of w/w flour because it just went rancid, barely used, in the cupboard (and yes, later I started storing whole grain flours in the freezer). Have you done any experiments with spelt or rye? Those might be some options to consider.

As for the sour taste in sourdough, my (very limited) understanding is that the sour taste is given not by the wild yeast, but by the lactic acid bacteria living in symbiotic relationship with the yeast. I seem to recall reading on The Fresh Loaf that the sour taste can be reduced by taking a small amount of culture, and gradually building the starter for your bread in 2-3 stages with higher ratios of water and flour, like 1:3:3 (starter: water: flour). I have not tried it myself, my culture is not even two weeks old yet, and I've only made 2 breads with it, both with the leftover starter that I was loath to throw out.

My process for the levain breads is a little different than yours. I was using a recipe, and it said: build the starter, mix starter with water and flour for autolyse (about 30min), add salt, then knead by hand in the bowl. Bulk ferment for a few hours with 2 stretch-and-fold's at 50min intervals. Preshape, rest 20min, final shape, then proof either at room temp or retard in the fridge before baking. I have actually been surprised at how spongy (in a good way) these breads were, I expected dense, and I got the opposite.

For my future experiments, I'd like to try incorporating seed and grain soakers into the dough, dried fruit and nuts, then maybe try a rye sourdough. Oh, and maybe some enriched doughs made with wild yeast, I want to try that also. Along with about 50 other non-bread things, the list is getting ever longer.

[Anna N]

The idea of prodcing a decent baguette by lunch time is just too appealing to ignore. So this "genius" recipe from Food 52 was my Saturday morning project.

http://food52.com/blog/10044-dan-leader-s-4-hour-baguette

My slahing needs work and I will reduce my oven heat by 25 F next time but this recipe (converted for the Thermomix, yes I really am that lazy) will be added to my bread arsenal. One loaf made its way over to my daughter's home and got rave reviews.

[Smithy]

The idea of prodcing a decent baguette by lunch time is just too appealing to ignore. So this "genius" recipe from Food 52 was my Saturday morning project.

http://food52.com/blog/10044-dan-leader-s-4-hour-baguatte

That is a nice recipe! I learned about it from the Saveur article to which that blog post refers, and have had fun making baguettes from the magazine. This blog post has some helpful photos. Nice loaves, Anna. Thanks for the link!

[thock]

I really wanted to like whole wheat, but I have an aversion to it as well. I have tossed out many a bag of w/w flour because it just went rancid, barely used, in the cupboard (and yes, later I started storing whole grain flours in the freezer). Have you done any experiments with spelt or rye? Those might be some options to consider.

As for the sour taste in sourdough, my (very limited) understanding is that the sour taste is given not by the wild yeast, but by the lactic acid bacteria living in symbiotic relationship with the yeast. I seem to recall reading on The Fresh Loaf that the sour taste can be reduced by taking a small amount of culture, and gradually building the starter for your bread in 2-3 stages with higher ratios of water and flour, like 1:3:3 (starter: water: flour). I have not tried it myself, my culture is not even two weeks old yet, and I've only made 2 breads with it, both with the leftover starter that I was loath to throw out.

My process for the levain breads is a little different than yours. I was using a recipe, and it said: build the starter, mix starter with water and flour for autolyse (about 30min), add salt, then knead by hand in the bowl. Bulk ferment for a few hours with 2 stretch-and-fold's at 50min intervals. Preshape, rest 20min, final shape, then proof either at room temp or retard in the fridge before baking. I have actually been surprised at how spongy (in a good way) these breads were, I expected dense, and I got the opposite.

For my future experiments, I'd like to try incorporating seed and grain soakers into the dough, dried fruit and nuts, then maybe try a rye sourdough. Oh, and maybe some enriched doughs made with wild yeast, I want to try that also. Along with about 50 other non-bread things, the list is getting ever longer.

No, no spelt or rye, and as I said, he's not complaining, so I'm not going to change it, at this point.

 

Yeah, I was expecting dense, too. I've been pleasantly surprised not only by the taste and texture, but also by the simplicity. I work from home, but frequently have meetings either in or out of the office, so it is important to me that I not need to have to handle the dough on a regular basis. My method started out as an experiment, and it has worked out well.

 

I have been eating a lot of sourdough pancakes, lately, too, which are tasty. Since S.O. doesn't eat them a lot, I just use 100g of starter, 1 large egg, about 5 g oil, and a couple grams each of salt and baking soda. That makes about half a dozen pancakes, and I am not "wasting" starter. I store it in the fridge until I'm ready to make pancakes.

 

I am going to try to make banana bread using starter, too, just to use some of it up. But first, I need to liberate my KitchenAid from storage.

[Ann_T]

Made a double batch of dough Wednesday. Both with sourdough bigas.  One was all white and the other was a rye biga. But both batches of bread were made with white flour. Baked on Thursday.

 

I still have half a batch left that will be baked on the weekend.

 

Crumb of a loaf made with the rye biga.

[fvandrog]

Made a double batch of dough Wednesday. Both with sourdough bigas.  One was all white and the other was a rye biga. But both batches of bread were made with white flour. Baked on Thursday.

These certainly look great!! I just got my hands on Flour Water Salt Yeast by Forkish, I'll try to pick one of his easier breads this weekend for a first venture beyond the bread machine 

[lindag]

I've searched for a thread dedicated to sourdough but have had no luck.  What am I missing, if anything?