Professional Help for the Exorphin Junkie #1

I get Professional Help for my Addiction - #1

I have been baking bread and blogging about it for about a year now (baking longer than that, but only blogging about it for a year), and I figured it was time I got some professional help.  I took my first ever bread course today at the nearby college.

This bread making course is a rather intensive 2-day course, and our instructor is one of the chefs at the college's Culinary Arts program.  When I say it is intensive, I don't mean that the loaves we made were difficult or time consuming.  No, I just mean that we moved along fairly rapidly, and made a total of 4 different doughs in one solid day of baking.  I didn't have a lot of time for taking pictures.

This course is something my wife and I have done together, on this cold Saturday in February.   We have been looking forward to it for a long time now -- almost like a vacation.  And although I was warned by several people that I probably wouldn't learn anything I didn't already know, I expected to learn quite a bit.  And I wasn't disappointed.

Chef Stephanie has been teaching for eight years, and has had lots of baking experience before that.  Many of the restaurants that she worked in serve Mediterranean meals, and some of her favourite breads are in the Mediterranean style.  That is what we worked on today, for our first lesson.

She handed out some recipes and an apron to each of us, and we began.  I have posted the recipes from day one here, in case anyone else wants to peruse them.  They are volume measurements, not recipes given by weights.  (I may be able to get the weight measurements from her, I'll see).

Chef started us off with a Rosemary Focaccia, which I thought was a great idea because there is virtually no forming of the dough: you just mix the ingredients, get a feel for it, let it bulk ferment, and then press it onto a pan. 

My focaccia

While it is proofing the second time, we were making our second dough, essentially the very same ingredients, only this time we added Sundried Tomato and Chevre (Goat Cheese).  Here, she showed us how to roll up the dough with the cheese inside it.  It is essentially the same as pushing down the dough like we did the focaccia, but instead of proofing it like that, we sprinkled some cheese on the bread and rolled it up like a log.

I got to use a dough hook on a mixer, first time ever: mostly, I do all my kneading by hand

 

My sundried tomato and chevre loaves: before the final proof, and after baking

While that was proofing, and we were baking our focaccia, we made the same loaf using Black Olives and Gorgonzola Cheese.  By now we were getting the hang of it.  This was made exactly the same way as the Sundried Tomato and Chevre loaf.  The interesting thing about these loaves, I thought, was the way she had us brush olive oil on the tops, and score the loaves BEFORE the final proofing.  I had always only ever scored my loaves just prior to putting them in the oven.  For these loaves, this pre-scoring worked well, although I really didn't see any meteoric oven spring on any of my loaves.

My olive and gorgonzola loaves, before proofing and after baking

The final loaf of the day was a Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf, which she allowed us to make into a free-form loaf.  I made my dough into a couple of smaller boules, and they retained their shape and didn't sag out over the parchment paper, like some of my whole wheat doughs do.  If you use bread flour, bread is a lot easier to form.

Walnut and Carmelized Onion Loaves

One of the Convection Ovens

I was pleased with the way the surface of these boules turned a nice light chestnut colour in the College's convection ovens.

Almost the entire haul of bread, made between the two of us

My wife and I came home with a lot of bread.  We ripped into my Focaccia on the drive home, and we ate some of the Black Olive and Gorgonzola loaf and the Sundried Tomato and Chevre loaf for supper tonight with a soup, and we froze some.  We'll be delivering some to our moms in the morning.

These loaves squished down a bit on the ride home.  Imagine, we forgot to take some bags with us.  Next time, we won't forget

The breads we made today are easy to make, and they taste good.  They do, however, all use bread flour or all-purpose flour.  My interests, as I have been blogging and baking, have turned almost exclusively to whole grains, but it is good to make other breads once in a while to remind oneself of the possibilities.  I am not sure whether the bread recipes that Chef gave us will translate well to whole grain flours, but I am sure going to give it a try.  (I already have a whole wheat focaccia recipe that turned up recently on the Fresh Loaf blogs by Marie H that I want to experiment with!)

Addendum:
The next day, we cut into the Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf.  We both think that this is the best of the loaves we made.  The Onion imparts a nice scent and a surprising amount of sweetness.  The roasted walnuts provide texture and colour (they leave the white bread stained a bit purple -- the digital photos here don't quite deliver that colouration, unfortunately), as well as an interesting taste.  This is a nice bread, almost like a desert bread, it is so sweet.  You can't eat this all the time, it is far too starchy.  But it is nice as a treat.

I am thinking that a whole wheat version of this might work, too.

Best of the Four Breads: Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf

Notes to Myself

• Get the weight measurements for these recipes, and then see if it will translate to whole grains.
• What is the advantage of scoring prior to the final proofing, vs scoring just before putting the bread in the oven?  It is possible that the late scoring will deflate the dough somewhat.  It is possible though, that you won't get as high an oven-spring if you score it too early.  Hmm.

Everyday Bread #38 - Sourdough Olive Bread a'la Lahey

 An Olive Loaf for Kathy

One of my co-workers has been asking for some Olive Bread.  This is so easy to make via the Lahey method, how could I say no? 

But easy = boring.  Of course, I thought I'd try something a little bit different.  I would have to experiment.  Instead of yeast, I would use some sourdough that I should have discarded when I refreshed my motherstarter today (but I am too cheap to do that!).  And I decided to use up some more of that Multigrain Bread Dough that we've had kicking around for awhile.  I was hoping that the many grains in the mix might add to the flavour.

The recipe calls for 3 cups or 400 g of bread flour.  This multigrain flour is so dense, it required only about 2 cups to reach that weight.  I dumped in some kalamata olives, and the water, and stirred it up. 

How much sourdough starter would I use?  There were no guidelines in Lahey's book.  He expects this dough to rise in 18-24 hours using only 3 g of dry yeast.

I used 1/3 c of my whole wheat motherstarter.  It seemed to me to be a bit more hydrated than the rye motherstarter, even though I've kept the amounts of flour and water that I've refreshed them with exactly the same throughout their life cycle.  Lahey likes a wet dough, so I was hoping these wild yeasts would fit right in and do their job.

I set it aside, expecting it to take a bit longer than the 18-24 hours that the commercial dry yeast would take.  I was hoping for a doubling in volume, but I thought it might be great if I could get even more than that.

It more or less doubled before the 18 hour mark, but I waited until then to refrigerate it.  I wouldn't be able to bake it until Saturday night after work, which was good because that was when I was working with Kathy, the one who likes olive bread.  If I baked it Saturday night, it would be ready to take on Sunday morning.

The trouble was, I would have to enlist the help of my wife to take the dough from the frig before I got home from work or I would be up past midnite.  She took it out a couple of hours before I got home and when I arrived home from my shift on Saturday, I began shaping the loaf and baking.

The dough was very wet, and gooey.  I thought that perhaps the gluten structure was spent, or past its prime.  Nevertheless I proceeded.  I used some cracked wheat for the crust: lately I've been enjoying the way this tastes.

The dough has to sit 2 hours after forming, and then it bakes for almost an hour.  So I was up until 11 pm anyway.

The results were okay on the outside.  I used a casserole dish as a makeshift Dutch Oven, and there was some decent oven spring.  I had to wait until I got to work to crack open the loaf to see the crumb.  Luckily I took my camera to work to get a picture of the inside of the loaf.  It was pretty dense, and perhaps a bit too moist.

Kathy said she liked it (but she may just have said that to be kind), and a physician who dropped by and tried a piece said he liked the slice that he had.  But others refused to try it or tossed it away with a 'blechh'.  The olives were very salty, and the sourdough was truly sour, and I can see how it might not be to everyone's taste.  I liked it well enough with some brie cheese.  I tried some with nothing but some olive oil, and found it fairly bitter that way.  I think I like the olive loaf made with the ordinary bread flour better, for colour and taste.  But the crust was nice.  The cracked wheat makes for a nutty and crunchy crust.

Over all, this one was a fairly good loaf.

Notes to Self:

• Sourdough isn't to everyone's liking: when making a bread for public consumption, you probably should use yeast, unless you specifically are asked to bring a sourdough loaf.
• When using sourdough to raise a Lahey-style loaf, 1/3 of a cup is good and works well, but you probably could have used less and it still would have worked well.   Either try using 1/4 cup, and/or add a bit more flour to make the dough -- and the crumb -- slightly less wet.
• Eating sourdough bread means you are ingesting lactobacillus, which converts lactose and other sugars into lactic acid.  These beneficial organisms thrive in wild yeast doughs and give sourdough breads their distinctive sour taste.
  
  Today at break while at work I was reading a bit more of Sandor Katz' book, "Wild Fermentation".  Katz said something about Lactobacillus that caught my eye: these little beneficial bacteria live in our gut and they make Omega-3 Fatty Acids - they actually give off nutrients that are essential for our well-being.  Hey, isn't that cool?  A symbiosis right in our own human gastrointestinal tract, an ecology of thrift, a culture of cooperation.

This news particularly intrigued me as I have been looking for ways of increasing the Omega-3's in my (vegetarian) diet.  I read one of the popular books on Omega-3 recently, that says that Flax Seed Oil is one way, but that only gives you the short-chain Omega-3s, not the more beneficial long chain Omega-3's (EPA and DHA), which comes almost exclusively from seafood and some ocean algae; and besides, Flax Seed also contains Omega-6's which we should be cutting down on even as we are increasing our 3's.  Jerry Brunetti in his slide show 'Food as Medicine' says the body may be able to make EPA and DHA from the short chain Omega-3s in small amounts, but that you need extra "magnesium, zinc, B-6, and Vitamin C." The book I read, Evelyn Tribole's 'The Ultimate Omega-3 Diet", says that some algae that vegans can use to supplement their diet will give you DHA but not EPA; but while the body cannot manufacture EPA and DHA out of the short-chain Omega-3's (despite what Brunetti says), it can make EPA from DHA easily.  Not sure what to believe.

But wouldn't it be nice if we could just live in harmony with a little, otherwise maligned, microbe in our own digestive tract?  We could feed it, and nurture the culture of lactobacillus in our guts, and it could feed us, and everybody would be very happy.  Right?

Well, maybe not.  I was thinking: if the best thing for us is to create an environment where the beneficial organisms are thriving, how do we do this?  Do we eat more fermented, sour (acidic) foods, like Katz suggests, to add more lactobacillus life forms to our gut, or do we feed the ones already in our gut with things they like so they will reproduce and thrive and give us the nutrients we need?

I know, for myself for instance, that if I eat sour cream (which I love), something in my gut loves it too: but they manufacture gas in huge amounts, and it is loud, painful and smelly.  The culture in my gut might be happy but I am unhappy because I cannot enjoy human culture at that point.  So for me, eating sour cream to keep my flora happy is not going to be a permanent solution.  I can't eat it the day before I am working with patients, for instance.  That's not fair to them.

I have a ton of questions.  Why does sour cream affect me this way, but not cheese, not milk, not yogurt?  (or perhaps these items do affect me this way, but there is quicker pass-through so the gas doesn't build up to quantities that I notice?)  Is the gas that these microbes give off the only way to know if the bacteria in our gut is thriving?  Is it the lactobacillus in my gut that loves sour cream, or some other bacteria?  If lactobacillus ferments bread and other things we eat, does it also ferment things in our gut?  Is this a good thing to do inside us?  Would it have the same effect if we just ate fermented things instead?

Obviously I need to do a bit more research. 

I have been thinking lately that my own human gut is like a black box, where you don't see anything that is happening inside it, you only know what goes in and what comes out.  I can analyze what goes in, in terms of ingredients and how that breaks down to nutrients.  And I suppose I can also analyze what goes out: I can examine my scats, my farts, my boogers, my sweat, my energy levels.  But there is the thing: is this blog the place to do it?  Should I be talking about farts in a blog that has been so far mostly about bread and recipes? 

I can't really think of a better place.  After all, it appears no one is reading my blog or looking at my pictures of bread (and why should they, after all 'nobody cares what you had for lunch').  But do I really want to have pictures of my bread side-by-side with pictures of my stool, for all the world to see?  Yuck.  I've actually been thinking of starting another blog, linked to this one, with the pictures of the output.  There would be pictures of things that I would be examining under a microscope.  But I would restrict access to that other blog to myself. 

I mean, a blog with scat pictures is the human cultural equivalent of GI flora manufacturing too much smelly, bloating gas.

Best to think on these things some more.

Lahey #7 - Olive Loaf revisited

I just made this one again.  Mostly because I had the olives on hand.  And I wanted to know if I had cut into it too early last time, which affected the crumb. And besides, it tasted good last time.  I made only a couple of minor changes from the last recipe: (1) baked with lid off only 15 minutes, and (2) used cracked wheat, not bran, for the surface crust and to coat the couche.  I think I prefer the bran, but I like the 15 minutes rather than 30; on the other hand, it does make it difficult to cut, because the crumb is so wobbly it doesn't stand up for the knife.

Notes to myself:

• Make this with bran on the couche, not cracked wheat.  Try baking covered x 30 minutes, uncovered about 18 minutes, next time.
• Try it with green olives so the crumb doesn't look so grey
• Try folding it in the bowl a few times rather than once on the counter
• Try baking in a shallower pot so you can better manage the transfer from couche to baking dish

Lahey #3 - Olive Loaf

I simply followed Lahey's recipe here, using bread flour, and some pitted, roughly sliced Kalamata Olives.  Since they are so salty to begin with, this recipe doesn't need any extra salt.

I used a full 18 hour fermentation here.  When I took off the lid, it was very yeasty and had a pleasant  scent of olives that would carry through all the steps of baking and eating.  The dough was very gooey, and despite my wet hands, it was pretty tricky to form into a ball.  I have had to use a pastry scraper.  The couche kept the dough from spreading sideways too much while it rested, and as I've said before, it even soaks up some of the excess moisture too, even as the dough incorporates some of the bran you have sprinkled on the surface.

I should mention that when I place the dough into the crock pot, it is entirely removed from the oven, unlike the youtube video of Lahey, who flung his dough into his crock pot and probably burned himself. The question then becomes, what do you place the very hot crockpot on, when you remove it from the oven with oven mitts?  Well, I have been putting it on my baking stone, which sits on top of the stove.  So far, I haven't had any problems.

This dough was so sticky it stuck to the linen as I was putting it into the crockpot.  There is a huge wet spot on the couche, and the bran is impossible to get off.  I left the couche to dry in the sun outside.

I may not have had enough bran on the couche, the bottom of this loaf seemed to me a bit blonde.  And because it stuck to the linen, this boule didn't form well, didn't rise well, and was a bit misshapen.

We cracked into this one for lunch a trifle early; it was still warm.  It tasted great with the vegetable soup, but my wife said that she thought I could use a lot fewer olives next time.  She had the idea of broiling some bruschetta and cheese on slices of these, so that is what we had for dinner, too.

Notes to myself:

• Make sure you have enough bran on your linen couche to completely coat the bottom of your loaf, so that it will not stick to the cloth
• Anything you might put with the dough that contains a lot of salt might inhibit the gluten formation: make sure that you give it enough time to ferment
• If what you are adding to the dough might have extra hydration (such as these olives), you may be able to back off your water content by a tablespoon or two.  You still want a wet dough, but it has to be manageable.
• Try it with about 100 g less olives next time.