Category Archives: Baking

Cock and balls

Written on August 28, 2009 by Mr Duess in Baking, Mr Duess
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This, ad I hope you’re reading this Mr. Stephenson, is what happens when you rush things:

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I started out well. Got up this morning, fed the starter and mixed 100 g wholewheat bread flour with 100 ml of water for a soaker. The idea was to tease extra flavour and structure out of the wholewheat part of the flour. Came home to very active starter which I mixed with the soaker, 200 g rye and 200 g Red Fife. With all the fermentation going on, this should have been good.

Then, when I put the dough together I added the usual amount of  water, forgetting that the soaker alone was extremely wet and that I was over-hydrating. No biggie, I thought, I just add some extra flour to get things back onto an even keel. Which I did, until the dough came away from the sides of the bowl of the Kitchen Aid, normally a sign that all is well.

When I pulled the dough out, I noticed that it was still noticeably wetter than I normally like it to be for these really quite heavy breads. No matter, I thought, a wetter dough means a lighter crust with larger air bubbles.

I was in a hurry, and as a result I didn’t think. And a result of that I didn’t notice that I was talking total nonsense. What I should have done is put the dough back into the bowl and hand kneaded it, while carefully adding flour, until it felt just right. I didn’t, because I was in a hurry. Instead I told myself that it would be fine.

Of course, for a wet dough to work, it needs a large amount of bread flour which has the ability to form long gluten strands to hold the loaf together, not wholewheat and definitely not rye. A wet rye/wholewheat loaf will do one thing and one thing only and that’s fall down onto itself and create a pancake. Which is exactly what today’s loaf did.

Balls. Cock and balls.

When baking works, it is an absolute joy. When you, or in this case when I, get cocky it’ll hit you over the head and kick your butt without mercy. Baking isn’t cooking. In cooking, a dish is too liquid, you reduce the sucker. Not liquid enough, you add some wine/stock/water. Things, generally, don’t fall to pieces just because you didn’t add 1/2 a tablespoon full of this or that. A loaf of bread can and does fail because it needed an extra teaspoon of flour and didn’t get it.

The journey continues.

Wax on, wax off, or the importance of repetition

Written on August 19, 2009 by Mr Duess in Baking, Editorials, Mr Duess
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I baked another rye sourdough bread today. 300 g bread flour to 200 g rye, 12 g of salt and 200 g of active starter. It came out great, apart from the slashing I tried, which caused the crust to break in unexpected places.

Still, the flavour is there and I am finally beginning to be able to handle sticky rye dough without getting it stuck to myself and/or the entire mixer. I’ve made this bread now twice, sometimes three times a week, for some time. Every time I make it again I learn something new, but I am now pretty confident that the end result will be delicious.

There are other breads waiting for me, other recipes I am planning to explore. But they can continue to wait, for now. Part of this has to do with my wife declaring the rye her most favourite bread ever, but part has also to do with the journey of exploration. In baking, it matters whether you use 12 or 15 grams of salt. 10 ml of water make a difference to the feel and finish of a dough, something that rarely happens in cooking.

Which makes experimentation all that more interesting. Experimentation that changes things incrementally, maybe substituting whole grain for white bread flour, maybe exchanging rye for Fife. The results are always delicious, and always interesting. The aim is to, one day, find a formula that can’t be improved, that is the essence of a dark, delicious, sourdough rye.

I am looking forward to the journey.

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Bread. The road so far.

Written on August 15, 2009 by Mr Duess in Baking, Editorials, Mr Duess
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I had been baking bread for years, on and off,  with somewhat limited success. For a while I owned a bread maker and tried to convince myself that the resulting loaves where both tasty and healthy when they were really just crumbly and horrible. At other times the bread I made was flat and flaccid with none of  the deep flavour and crispy crust I loved about artisan bread. Obviously, I was doing it all wrong but I didn’t know what, why and where to start to change that deplorable situation.

This all started to change when Mr. Stephenson called one day on the telephone and informed me that he had found a small place in Little Italy that was selling baker’s yeast and whether I wanted to accompany him for the purchase. Sure thing, I thought and when I returned home with a sample of the fabled Italian yeast I went to work and started researching what makes good bread.

Time

Mr Stephenson, who drives a fast car, sometimes scoffs about my obsession with time. Time, for me, is a frequently overlooked but absolutely essential ingredient to many foods and has the ability to transform the mediocre into the outstanding.

Time, a good friend to people like us, is also the enemy of the food industry. Time, as we all know, is money and as a result many foods manufactured industrially have taken the results of time and tried to replicate them with chemicals, with flavour enhancers, artificial flavours, colourings, extra fat, extra salt, modified this and modified that.

The food industry has two goals: Manufacture food quickly, then make sure it has a long shelf life. Both of these needs are the antithesis of good food and thankfully we can bypass them entirely.

When it comes to bread, this is what I had always been doing: Take flour, water, a little salt, a little sugar. Mix, rise, deflate, rise, bake. The rise, I had been told, needed to happen in a warm place to get the yeast to work, so was the sugar.

My first mistake

What I have been finding out is that the above method has a snowball’s chance in hell to produce good bread. The magic ingredient, time, is missing entirely and the flour has no chance at all to release it’s flavours. The yeast feeds on the first food that’s available, the sugar, and leaves the wheat or rye alone.

What I do now, apart from frequently using sourdough starters, is give the dough time to work, give the yeast an incentive to interact with the ingredients. I use little yeast, in a cold environment, over a long time. Almost all of the bread I am baking starts life in the refrigerator, where the yeast will go to work very slowly, but with mouthwatering results.

Because I add no sugar, the yeast needs to look for nourishment elsewhere, and as a result the sugar in the grain itself gets used as fuel, breaking down the cell structure and creating depth of flavour. Many people we talk to don’t like to acknowledge the idea that the food we create is made with the generous help and support of many species of micro-organisms. Too many commercials telling them to disinfect their kitchens have done their work, hammering into their heads the message that bacteria are a bad thing and that a sterile environment is something to strive for.

This of course is absolute nonsense. While we do keep our kitchens clean, botulism is no joke, we also understand the symbiotic relationship us humans have with bacteria and other micro-organisms such as yeast, wild and otherwise. Our entire digestive system relies on the help of tribes of friendly bacteria to work and anybody who has ever taken antibiotics knows that kick-starting intestinal flora with a generous supply of yoghurt is a very good thing indeed.

What we do when we bake bread is to create a habitat that the kind of organisms we’d like to move in will find inviting. A bread dough provides shelter and food for yeasts, and in return we get flavour and rise. Not a bad exchange, especially as we’ll be killing off the entire yeast population during the baking process.

My second mistake

Most cheap bread baking machines don’t reach a temperature anywhere high enough to create a decent loaf. Baking bread needs high temperatures, 500º, with the addition of steam to create a crispy crust. Steam can be added in several ways. Commercial bread ovens inject steam at high temperatures. We can mimic that effect by keeping a pan at the bottom of the oven and filling it with hot water at the beginning of the bake. Then get a spray bottle and spray the walls of the oven to create an instant moist environment.

The drawback to this is potential mess and, especially of you’ve got an electric oven, the obvious disadvantages of mixing water with electricity. I own a very simple gas oven, so don’t have to face these issues, but I would be most cautious with a domestic electric model.

Thankfully there is a solution to this dilemma and it has changed the way I bake for the better. It is called a cloche, an unglazed ceramic bowl with a matching ceramic plate underneath. The cloche re-creates the environment we’d find in an old wood fired brick oven, or a steam injected bakery oven and loaves come out perfectly crisp, every time. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

I’ll be posting more about my personal bread making discoveries as I make them. Stay tuned.

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Fife Flour Sourdough

Written on August 14, 2009 by Mr Duess in Baking, Grains, Recipes, Tutorial, Video
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Mr. Stephenson is a huge fan of Red Fife, an old Canadian wheat that has recently been experiencing a bit of a renaissance, and rightly so. As I was out of rye flour, I decided to try and adjust my standard rye sourdough to Red Fife – Mr. Stephenson made a light but intensely flavoured Fife yeast loaf some weeks ago, so this should be a an interesting experiment.

Recipe: Red Fife Sourdough

Summary: A tangy wheat bread, made with Red Fife

Ingredients

  • 300 g Red Fife flour
  • 200 g hard bread flour
  • 15 g smoked salt
  • 200 g active sourdough starter
  • 350 ml (plus) water

Instructions

  1. Day One

    Take the sourdough starter out of the fridge. Feed generously

    Day Two, morning

    Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the starter and stir in. Start kneading, I use a kneading hook and a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, on speed 2. Add the water, adjust until a shiny dough has started to form.

    Go have a shower, get dressed, feed the cats. Come back after 10 minutes and check the dough. If you can see gluten development – take a little dough and stretch it – you’re done for now. Take the dough and put it in an oiled bowl. Cover, refrigerate, go to work.

    Day Two, Evening

    Arrive home, open a beer. Relax. Take the dough out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature, about two hours. It should have grown a little, but don’t worry if it doesn’t look as if anything has happened.

    After two hours, pre-heat the oven to 500º. Take the dough and stretch and fold three or four times. Put into a floured banneton for the last rise. After an hour, drop the dough into an earthenware cloche or on a pizza stone and bake for 40 – 45 minutes or until the bread has an internal temperature of 200º.

Prep time (duration): 30 minutes

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As you can see, it worked out reasonably well. I didn’t score the dough deep enough before putting it in the oven, so the oven spring forced one side further open than the others, but the loaf tastes great and at the end of the day that’s what matters. The entire rise was done by wild yeasts, with no commercial product added.

I shot a couple of snippets with the iPhone video camera. Mr. Stephenson, who is a professional in these matters, is working on a far better looking solution but until that arrives this will have to do. It should give at least an idea of what the bread looks like at various stages through it’s creation.

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PS: A note about salt, and smoked salt in particular.

Salt and smoke are the enemy of microorganisms, like yeast; that’s why we use them both to preserve meat and fish. By combining salt and smoke we’re making the yeast’s life double difficult. Salt is a necessity in bread, it makes the bread, but too much salt will kill our yeast. Smoked salt adds another layer of flavour, but you’ll have to be careful not to overdo it.

I mix smoked and plain salt in a 2:1 ratio. For 500 g flour (plus whatever starter weight I am using) I use 15 g salt, 10 g smoked, 5 g plain. That sounds like a lot, but the yeast seems to survive it and the flavour is excellent.

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Midweek baking

Written on August 11, 2009 by Mr Duess in Baking, Grains, Mr Duess, Recipes
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When Mr. Duess and Mr. Stephenson talk to friends, and frequently strangers, about their adventures in the kitchen where they bake bread, cure meats and lure unsuspecting lacto-acidic bacteria into carefully prepared habitats there’s one all to frequent question:

“Where do you find the time?”

Now, both Mr. Duess and Mr. Stephenson are far from being retired, years away from sitting quietly on their front porch, pipe in hand and feet beslipperd. Yet they like few things better than a slice of freshly baked rye bread, dipped into a humble dish of peppery olive oil. And to achieve that goal, midweek baking is frequently a necessity. Here’s how to do it:

Day One:

In the evening, take your sourdough starter out of the fridge and feed.

Day Two:

The next morning, prepare your dough. Today we used 180g rye and 320g wheat flower, with about a cup full of very active starter. Salt, water; about 300ml for a (roughly) 60% hydration of the dough. Add everything to your mixer and knead while you’re taking a shower. Take the resulting dough ball and put into an oiled bowl, cover and refrigerate. Go to work.

In the evening, remove dough from the fridge and allow to come to room temperature. Fold and stretch three times, then let rise in a banneton for two hours. After the first hour, pre-heat the oven to 500º. Bake for 45 minutes or until the bread has an internal temperature of 200º. This is the result:

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The loaf had hardly risen in the fridge, and even after three hours at room temperature little had changed. The rise happened almost exclusively in the oven – the so called oven spring, where the yeast goes on one last manic feeding frenzy before being killed off at just over 140º.

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A simple sourdough bread

Written on August 9, 2009 by Mr Duess in Baking, Grains
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This is rapidly becoming our standard, always-have-a-loaf-around, bread. The recipe is very simple, the result is tasty; with a crisp crust and a chewy, flavourful interior.

You’ll need:

  • 350g unbleached bread flour
  • 150g rye flour
  • 15g kosher salt, ideally 10g smoked, 5g plain
  • About two tablespoon full of highly active sourdough starter
  • About 250ml water

If you don’t have access to sourdough starter instant yeast can be used. If you use yeast, mix 200 g bread flour with 200 ml water (this is called a 100% hydration sponge) and let it sit in the fridge overnight. The flavour of the bread will improve immeasurably. Add the yeast to the remaining flour and proceed.

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Sourdough starter.

Mix all your ingredients together and knead, either in a mixer or by hand. I use a Kitchen Aid stand mixer and knead on speed 2 for about five to ten minutes or until a shiny dough develops that clears the walls of the mixing bowl. You might add a little water if the mix is too dry.

Put the ball of dough into an oiled bowl and let it rest for three to five hours. If you want, you can even let it rise very slowly overnight in the fridge. The longer you’ll give the bread to rise, the lower the temperature needs to be. Accepted wisdom has it that bread should rise in a warm spot, and while that does get the yeast activated it also keeps it lazy, feeding on the simple sugars present in the mix. The longer you’ll leave it to rise, the harder the yeast has to work, breaking down the actual wheat and creating deliciousness in the process.

Once risen, take dough out of the bowl and put it on  a floured surface. Stretch it gently, then fold it over onto itself. Turn and repeat about six times. I proof my bread in a heavily floured banneton, or Brotform, a little basked made from reeds. It helps to create a lovely pattern on the bread and shapes it as it rises.

Preheat your oven to 500º. I use a cloche, a cover made from earthenware, to bake bread. It simulates the environment in a steam injected bakery oven and makes for a lovely crust. I highly recommend buying one of these, they changed the way I bake for the better. If you don’t have access to a cloche, you might want to use an unglazed flower pot, on top of a pizza stone with the drainage hole plugged by aluminum foil. Be careful that the pot doesn’t contain any nasty glazes not intended for human consumption.

After a second rise of 60 minutes, bake for about 10 minutes at full temperature, then reduce to 450º and bake until done, about 30-40 minutes. Check the core temperature, if it reads about 200º the bread is done. Enjoy.

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