Professional Help for the Exorphin Junkie #2

Bread Making Course Results, Day 2

We've had our second and final breadmaking class at the nearby college (see the first class here).  Just like last time, we made four different doughs.  Just like last time, they were all bread flour, or all-purpose flour breads.  Not my kind of bread, but a fun day out nevertheless.

My biggest question prior to arrival was, "how is she going to teach us the sourdough?"  Sourdough needs to be prepared.  How would that fit into our chef's philosophy of production kitchen, straight dough methods?

In a nutshell: Chef Stephanie came prepared.  She had elaborated her mother starter all week long, and brought in a huge tub of it for us all to take some.  We each took 2 cups, and there was still lots left over.

Today we all paired off and afterward split the booty.  While I put together the ingredients for the Sourdough bread, my wife made up the dough for the Lavender Brioche.  Later in the day, she made up the Honey-Oat Bread (only, she used organic molasses instead of honey), and I mixed the Ciabatta dough.  Incidentally, that Ciabatta also used a starter (chef called it a sponge), and there was a giant tub of that, too, for all of us to dip into to use.

Just like the last time, I post the recipes here for those who are curious.  I probably won't be using these recipes again myself, unless I am going to try making them with whole grains. 

Sourdough Bread

This was not exactly a wild yeast sourdough.  Chef has been keeping this starter alive since last summer, feeding it weekly or replenishing it as she uses it, but it was originated from commercially obtained active dry yeast.  Nothing wrong with that.  I'm just saying.

We used 2 cups of her Starter in our Main Dough.  The curious thing about this bread is that, in addition to the starter, it calls for vinegar and baking soda.  This dough didn't seem to want to rise at all in the proofer.  But once it went into the oven, the spring was substantial.  Too much, in fact.  Chef warned us that this would happen, due to the baking soda.

The loaf on the left was brushed with an eggwhite wash; the loaf on the right was brushed with water -- both prior to baking.  You can see where the wash ends, and how much it rose, from the bottom of the tray.  Like it wanted to lift off like a rocket.

Lavender Brioche

This is a very enriched dough.  As Chef Stephanie put it, "not the healthiest loaf, but you will die happy.  This is decadent."

The lavender is infused in the milk ahead of time (again, Chef came prepared, and we all used her lavender-infused milk).  The lavender gets sifted out.  It just imparts a mild flavour and scent to the milk, most of which is lost, frankly, when you go to eat it.  But the idea of infusing the fluid that hydrates your bread (be it water or milk or juice) with herbs really got our imaginations going.  What if we infused it with cinnamon?  Cardomon?  Ginger?  What other taste could we "infuse" into our bread via the hydration?  Clearly, there is an infinite room for experimentation here.  But again, just how much do you actually taste in the final product?

We ate a couple of the brioche buns that we put on the fluted tins, and felt that despite all the enrichment, it still needed something.  "Surely not more butter," I said.  "There is a ton of butter in it already."  Luckily, my wife had brought some trail mix with her, and she tossed that in some of the dough.  The raisins and nuts complemented this nicely.  She was already thinking of using this dough for an Easter loaf.

Lavender gets sifted out

I think we had a double batch of the brioche for some reason

Honey Oat Bread (but made with Molasses)

We had this for lunch when we got home.  Meh.

Ciabatta

This is the big tub of sponge that Chef brought in for us all to share.

We were supposed to make smaller ciabatta, even smaller than the ones I made.  They probably should have been called ciabattini, or ciabatta rolls.  This dough is tricky to work with, it is so gooey.  But mine rose a bit during the proofing stage, and it had some nice oven spring.

I had the distinct sense that I didn't "own" these breads, though, because I had not made the Starter myself.



Results:

This was the haul we had when we laid it out on the kitchen table when we got home:

While this was a fun class to take, I can't say that I really learned all that much about bread making in it.  We received 8 total recipes, and we now know ways to mix by hand and machine; we know a couple of basic shapes for bread; and we know the feel of several different doughs.  No one can expect more from 10 hours of class time.  I got no more, and no less, out of this class than I expected.  Well, I guess I expected more teaching on how to shape loaves, and we didn't get that.  But I am not disappointed.

The Proofer.  This machine sees a lot of use, with 25 students waiting on doughs to rise.

Our corner of the kitchen, right in front of the two convection ovens.

There might be the odd crumb shot picture I will add to this blog entry, if I feel like it.

Right now I'm just a little sleepy, and hope to have a short nap.  Postprandial Bread Narcolepsy, no doubt.

By the way, I don't get this crashing feeling when I eat whole grains.

Notes to Myself

• Temperatures given in the recipes are for CONVECTION ovens; for other ovens, the temperature needs to be 20-25 degrees HIGHER than what the recipe says.
• The Sourdough bread contains vinegar to boost the acidity, not for the yeast, but for the baking soda to work.
• Notes on brioche: when scalding milk, before you put the milk in the pot, first fill it with water and simply rinse the pot.  This will help prevent your milk from being a messy pot cleanup.
  
  If you are going to make an Easter loaf with brioche dough, add your raisins right at the very end of mixing the dough.
  
  The Brioche dough is made not with bread flour, but with all-purpose flour; you could even use cake flour in the recipe (up to about 1/2 the quantity of flour).  Here, what makes it rise so well is not so much the gluten strands trapping the yeast gases, but the emulsifying of the eggs and other fat in the recipe.

Collaborative bread - Fanny Farmer's Oatmeal with whole wheat

A Collaborative Bread 

This was a collaborative bread that my wife and I made together, out of necessity.

Born of necessity
I was working a 3-day stretch, but only had bread for 2 days. Knowing I'd run out in the middle of that exhausting period when I was working, I once again decided to put together the ingredients for the soaker and biga the day before working, so as to make it easier on myself. But really, the Reinhart breads are simply too time consuming to make when one is working 12 hour shifts and expected also to sleep.

(see this recent experiment in time, as I tried to put Reinhart's bread into a nurse's schedule)

I looked at those ingredients I had put together, but I knew I didn't have time before I slept, or after I slept, to bring the dough to room temperature, make the bread, do all the various rises and formations of it, and bake the bread, before I had to return to work.

I required a bread that I could just make and bake and be done with it. That is why I reached for the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. It has many recipes that are similar to quickbreads, entailing a straight mixing of ingredients and baking, with no overnight soakings or extra-long waiting periods.  That's what I needed here.

The bread recipe I selected was a bit serendipitous. I had just recently had someone reply to one of my old blogs, the one where I made "William Melville Childs Health Bread".  That bread had oatmeal in it, and I had made a version of it that had all-purpose flour; I was still curious about the bread and if it would perform as well with whole wheat flour.

Now here was the Fannie Farmer cookbook with a simpler recipe that used oatmeal in a remarkably similar way to the Wm M Childs Health Loaf. But the Fanny Farmer's recipe also featured all- purpose flour. I decided to make the Fannie Farmer loaf, but to use whole wheat flour instead, without otherwise adjusting the hydration. The method of making the bread seems similar, although the ingredients are not the same.

I only had about three and a half hours to make the bread, which wasn't quite enough to actually bake it. That is why, when I left the house for work, I required the assistance of my wife to put the loaves into the oven and bake them in my absence. She was willing: hence, this is a collaborative bread.

Ingredients
Here are the ingredients I used. As usual, your mileage may vary:

• 100g instant oats
• 483g boiling water
• 9g yeast
• 59g warm water
• 164g molasses
• 15g fine sea salt
• 12g olive oil
• 854g whole wheat flour

I didn't actually incorporate all the whole wheat flour. I probably used only 5 3/8 cups, rather than the full 5 1/2 cups.

Method: you boil the water, cover the oats, let it stand 15 minutes.

The yeast is put into warm water (I added a bit of the molasses to the water too) and it stands 5 minutes.

Then everything is mixed together.

and kneaded until smooth.

It sits in a bowl to double.

and then it is shaped and put into pans. (At this point, my wife took over) The dough is left another hour,

the oven preheated, and it is baked for 45 minutes at 375 degrees F. (By this time, I was already back at work).

You might argue that we could have just as easily collaborated on the Reinhart bread. But I think that the Reinhart loaves are just a little bit more complicated, and I felt that prevailing on my wife to perform the extra steps of forming the final Reinhart loaves would have been too much for me to ask. I simply would not have been as far along in the bread making process if I had stuck to the original Reinhart loaf.

Results:

My wife says that she can taste her jam on this bread, even though the molasses imparts a lot of the taste to this loaf. The whole wheat flour isn't noticeably bitter, and the molasses was not overpowering for her.

While I'm not particularly impressed with this bread, I'm just glad I have a few slices that I can take with me on that third day of work.

Notes to Myself

• The amount of starch in a whole wheat flour is less than the similar amount by weight in an all-purpose flour.  Is there similarly less gluten?  If so, you can't just adjust the hydration and expect it all to just work out.   
• Try the Wm Melville Childs recipe again, but use whole wheat.
• Keep the house warm when bulk fermenting.
• Find a recipe that you like for these times when you have to bake an "Emergency Bread"

Experimental Loaf with Whole Wheat, Rye Sourdough, Oat, Kamut and boiled grains

Experimental Loaf 

using whole wheat flour, rye sourdough, oat flour, kamut flour, and some boiled grains

Inspired by Nils Schöner's recipes (see the last post, a first attempt of his recipe for a 'German-style Sourdough') that incorporate so many seeds and other chunky cereal parts, I threw this experimental loaf together tonight to see what I might get.

I was also inspired by the latest 'Mother Earth News' (Dec 2010/January2011 issue) that had an article on bread making "Homemade Bread: Truly Easy and Delicious".  The author of that magazine piece, William Rubel (author of a forthcoming book on bread), said a couple of things that intrigued me: for one thing, he said that he rarely measured anything, but let the dough tell him what it required.  And he indicated that the dough must not be rushed.

This is interesting advice, but it makes a couple of assumptions that I can't always live with.  For one thing, I measure things not to be picture perfect but to help me, if I ever do bake a really great loaf one day, so that I can duplicate the procedure.  Secondly, the loaves that this author is talking about are enriched white wheat flour breads.  Perhaps the author can be forgiven for making such an assumption: everyone else seems to make these kind of breads.  But I am more interested in whole grains, and whole wheat is so very different from enriched white wheat flour, there is really little comparison.  Secondly, I am also interested in other grains besides wheat.  And each grain has its own characteristics.  You can't 'go by the dough' if you've never worked with a grain before, because every grain is going to perform differently.  Wheat and rye have gluten; a few other grains have some too, but not as much.  So why would anyone use them in a bread?

Well, people sometimes use other grains because of the gluten: more and more people are discovering the dangers of gluten, and many people seem to have a sensitivity to it, some even have an allergy.

Besides, it is probably not a good thing for humans or for the world's environment to eat only a monoculture of one grain.  If you do, you will lose out on the benefits of, for example, buckwheat's wonderful organic conditioning of the soil; or oat's amazing ability to lower cholesterol.  Or the wide variety of micronutrients that are provided in differing quantities in other grains beside those with which we are so over-familiar.

It was, in fact, the idea of eating more oats in my diet that interested me about this particular combination of grains for my experimental loaf.  I had some oat flour, and some steel cut oats; and I wanted to add this to some kamut flour.  And I was going to use some whole wheat flour and some rye in the form of a sourdough, as well.  I am, after all, not one of those who has a gluten sensitivity, as far as I know.

I had no idea how this particular combination would behave, so I decided to follow Nils' Schöner's basic schedule for his various rye sourdough raised loaves.  I was using a lot more rye sourdough, but I was hoping that this might make up for some deficiencies in the gluten forming ability of the oat flour and the kamut.

Here are the ingredients I weighed:

• 2 c flour 316g
• some rye sourdough @ 100% hydration 511g
• 1 c oat flour 130g
• 1 c kamut flour 177g
• 1/2 c 8 grain cereal 52g
• 1/2 c steel cut oats 87g
• 1 c boiling water 231g
• 2 tsp sea salt 12g
• 1 3/8 c cold water 349g

Method:

Boil the water and stir in the 8 grain cereal and the steel cut oats.  Bring to a boil, stir rapidly, then cover and remove from heat for 15 minutes.

Mix the remaining flours, and salt and sourdough and add the cold water, mixing as thoroughly as possible.   I found I had the consistency I wanted when I had added 349g of water to my flour and sourdough mixture.  Here I was just going by feel, like Rubel suggests.

When the boiled grains have cooled slightly, fold them into the mixture and pour it onto the counter top to knead until everything is well incorporated.

The first bulk fermentation is 30 minutes in a bowl.

Then fold it one more time and place it in a buttered tin.

Wait 1 1/2 hours, and preheat the oven to 450 degrees with a pan for steam.
At the 2 hour mark, the oven is hot enough.
Dock the loaf, coat it with some egg white, and place in the oven with a cup full of water to provide steam in the closed oven.
Bake for 20 minutes and then turn down the heat to 400 degrees.  Bake for another 40 minutes, turning the loaf midway through the bake.

I was really quite amazed at the powerful oven spring that this loaf had.  I didn't score it, but it blew itself apart. 

Results:
The crumb is a little gummy: it could have used a longer and perhaps hotter bake.  I may have stopped the baking prematurely as the egg white wash on top made it look browner than it truly was.

The crust is fine.  The taste of the interior is somewhat unusual, and I'm thinking that it is the kamut that gives it this unnameable essence of flavour.  Since the interior is still somewhat moist, toasting it seems to improve it.  The steel cut oats and the 8 grain cereal that I boiled are completely lost in the taste: either I need more, or I need to use them as a soaker, not as a boiled ingredient.

Notes to Myself

• You are unlikely to make this combination of doughs precisely the same way ever again - mostly because of the excess of rye sourdough used.
• If you are just using up starter in these experiments, try once to make it with a different sourdough, too -- perhaps using the one you've been keeping now, refreshing weekly, for about a year, at 75% hydration.
• Make it with 20% more ingredients.
• Make it the same but don't roll it up as per the instructions, just fold it and stretch it and put it in the tin.
• Try scoring the loaf.
• Instead of boiling, try soaking the steel-cut oats overnight.  And use more, lots more.