Pizza #11: Pizza Fungi after Lahey with Smokey Tomato Sauce

Pizza Fungi

I made a couple of these Lahey-dough pizzas, both with portobello mushrooms and some red onions, shaved thin on my mandoline, and fresh thyme from our garden.  One pizza had some dried tomatoes, the other had some fresh diced tomatoes, and a few olives.  Both had some mozzarella cheese, but each one had its own, unique cheese too:

• Italian Pecorino Cheese
• Portuguese Sao Jorge Cheese (Lorais)

The dough takes 2 hours to rise, and then you have enough for 2 pizzas

I liked the one with the Portuguese cheese.  To me, it has a mild flavour, but a taste that is subtle and clean.  This pizza just worked better.

Both pizzas were cooked without tomato sauce, but we had our own homemade smokey tomato sauce for dipping and spreading on top.  The first pizza didn't need it, but when eaten together, the taste was nice.  The second pizza definitely required the extra taste.

The pizzas were baked at very hot temperatures (>700 degrees F) on our barbecue, using firebrick and pizza stones.  By now, this is pretty standard for us, as it works fairly well: you heat up the barbecue on max to get the stones hot, until the gauge reads over 700 degrees.  The pizza stone is slathered with olive oil, and the pizza is built right on top of it, while cold.  When all the fixings are in place, it bakes at the barbecue's highest temperature for 14-15 minutes.  The stone is then removed, and the pizza goes to the table like that.  Some more baking of the crust occurs on the hot stone, during the time it takes to cut the pizza and serve it.  There is no hurry, it will stay hot.  The second piece is often the best, and the very thin crust gets nice and crispy.

 

Best Pizza Fungi today: 

The baking stone was a teensy bit too big and the barbecue cover tore a hunk off it (that was my piece)

The barbecue takes a tiny piece of cheese skyward because the pizza stone is 1/8" too big

Leftovers

I'd like to explain here how we made our smokey tomato sauce, because it is really special and nice, but my wife will not allow me to divulge the recipe.  I guess, for now, it is a secret.  Even though I believe she adapted it from a couple of recipes found on the Internet.

Smokey tomato sauce on top

Notes to Myself

• I really want to move to a whole wheat pizza dough, and have a recipe ready to try. But it won't be when company is here, like today.

Nils Schöner's 60/40 Oblong Loaf Bake-off: ww vs ap

 Nils's 60/40: episode 2

(a bake-off of loaves made from Whole Wheat vs All Purpose Wheat Flours)

Another spectacular bread failure for me.

Today was to be my 60/40 Bake-off day.

Yesterday I made a loaf using this recipe from Nils Schöner's Recipe book, 'Brot:Notes of a Home Baker in Germany', using half whole wheat, and half Canadian All Purpose flours from the local mill.  Today I was to complete the experiment by baking, side by side, two more 60/40 loaves, one made entirely with whole wheat, and the other entirely with the all-purpose flour.

It goes without saying that the difference in wheat flours only affects 40% of the loaf.  The rest of the dough and bread will be exactly the same: 60% rye flour, half of which comes from the sourdough.

Mixing the doughs, up to just before the first 45 min rest

I awoke at 0600 and began measuring ingredients and documenting the steps for the blog.  This dough will come together very quickly, if one were not so anal as I am about taking pictures of each step.  I made sure that the sourdough was room temperature this time; it had been out overnight, and had risen and fallen gently.  It smelled great.  I carefully measured the flours and calculated that the water had to be 30 degrees C.  The hydration is high enough that one can simply stir it and all the ingredients are fully moistened.

The difference in the doughs is immediately apparent.  The dough with whole wheat is a lot easier to stir with a spoon.  The dough is suddenly taut, and cohesive, and turns itself into a structured ball without much effort on my part.  On the other hand, the dough with the all-purpose flour is suddenly difficult to stir; the gluten is stringier, it allows you to pull it further, but it is a lot more gooey, and it has no cohesion.  Things get stickier fast.  Although the water temperature was exactly the same for this dough as the other, in this case the water seemed hotter, slipperier.  The dough was wetter, but also gluier.

The dough, up to the end of the second 45 minute rest (aproximately)

Turn
I formed both loaves into a ball and let them sit for 45 minutes.  Then I turned both envelope-style as I did the day previously, and placed them back into a container for another rise.  Finally, I shaped them in an oblong form, and prepared to set them aside for the final proof.  I tried to be gentler this time, so didn't manhandle them as much.

The dough is dusted with light rye flour for its final proof

Improvised Basket
I wanted to make both loaves at the same time, but I only have one basket, so I had to improvise a second proofing basket using some rolled-up tea-towels.  I gave the best basket to the dough that seemed the most promising at the time.  This was the dough with the whole-wheat flour.  This was actually a surprising development for me.  I fully expected the dough with the greater gluten to be fluffier at this point, but it was nothing but saggy.  It seemed to have no structure at all.  Was this merely because the whole wheat had absorbed more of the water?  Or was the bran in the whole wheat providing some structure to the dough?  When would the gluten in the all-purpose loaf stand up and show this bread some backbone?




One Kitchen, Two Cooks
Right about the time of the final proof, my wife, who woke up around 0700, decided to kick me out of the kitchen so she could make some waffles for my son and his girlfriend who are visiting this weekend.  Since that young couple were not going to be awake before my dough was fully proofed, my wife needed the oven to keep her waffles warm.

I had been using the oven timer to tell me when the second 45 minute rest was finished, but she turned that off without telling me, and reset it for her own purposes, so I can only say that the second 45 minute resting period was somewhere around 45 minutes.  When I got cranky about how she did this without telling me, she told me it was entirely my fault that she had not noticed I was using the timer.

Furthermore, I was told that I could not use the oven, and she threatened to make me a kitchen in the basement so I would never be in her way ever again.  She moved my rising dough several times as she expanded her influence in the kitchen, and firmly established her place.  It wasn't a fight.  It was over before it began.

40% whole wheat dough, fully proofed

40% all purpose dough, fully proofed

Barbecued Bread
That is why, about 25 minutes before the final proof was done, I was forced to use the barbecue to bake my bread. I scored the bread and transferred it to my barbecue's firebrick.  By now my son was awake and able to photograph some of what I was doing.

The dough goes in

I already had the firebrick in place, it was just a matter of trying to get them hot enough, and regulate the temperature, which was going to be a bit of a challenge.  Also, I didn't think I'd be able to get steam into the barbecue.  But it was either this, or the whole bake-off was a bust.

Discovery of some holes in the side of the barbecue for injection of mist for steam

I only had about 20 minutes to preheat my firebrick and while trying to decide what to do with the steam, I discovered a couple of holes in the sides of the barbecue through which I would spray some mist while the bread was baking during its initial 5 minutes.  I sprayed through both holes every 30-90 seconds for five minutes, then I stopped.

The most difficult part of baking with the barbecue is regulating the heat.  I had a particularly rough time of it this morning: I think that the initial temperature was a bit low, only about 450 degrees F when it should have been 500 degrees F; afterward, it climbed to about 525 degrees F, and then I backed off the flow of the propane and monitored it every 10 minutes, while everyone was sitting there eating breakfast, and I was trying to enjoy the idea of sitting together for a meal.  But I was up and down like a yo-yo.

Once when I came outside to check the temperature, it had fallen to about 370 degrees, so I had to crank it up again.  Ultimately, most of the baking was done at a slightly lower temperature than the recipe called for, I am afraid.  I think that I was in the neighbourhood of 400 degrees F when I should have been in the 425 degrees F range for most of the time the bread was in the oven.  But during the last twenty minutes, I noticed the temperature drop to 300 degrees at one point.  I cranked up the propane to max, and checked it five minutes later, but it had further dropped to 200 degrees.  I was out of propane.

And I had been so proud of myself that I managed to stop myself from peeking inside the barbecue lid until an hour was up.  Had I lifted the lid even once, all of my heat would have escaped, and the loaves wouldn't have even started baking at all.


Back to the Kitchen
By now, though, breakfast was over, and my wife had left the kitchen.  I popped the loaves back into the now vacated kitchen oven at 425 degrees for another 15 minutes.

Out of the cold barbecue, into the hot oven

Results
Certainly, not a fair trial of these loaves.  These loaves suffered from an very uneven baking.  And I think that the upper grill of the barbecue might have even prevented them from rising, even if the misting I was doing had worked (and I don't think it did).  I'm not even going to comment on which loaf did better.  They both died at the gates.  It was a fiasco, from start to finish.  And it is all my fault, for starting this at 0600.  I shouldn't have bothered.  I'll have to do it all again.

The best I could do, this morning.  AP on left, WW on right

Overall, very disappointing session, and another bread failure for me.

My failed attempt at Nils's 60/40 Oblong Roggenmischbrot: AP vs WW

These breads taste very similar, despite the difference in the wheat flour, which constitutes 40% of the entire mix.  In contrast to the 60/40 bread made earlier from the same recipe, in this bread the sourdough taste is more predominant (originally I thought that I could taste more sourdough in the all-purpose flour version, but later I could taste the same flavour in the whole wheat version).  Overall, there seems to be no discernible difference in taste or texture, to me.  The bottom crust is much harder, but I think that this is more from the extra 15 minute baking in the oven without a baking stone, rather than its initial baking on the (too cool) firebrick in the barbecue.  It is this that gives these loaves a decidedly malted rye flavour, from the roasted light rye flour that was used during the final proof to line the couche. 

Obviously, the all-purpose loaf has sagged a lot more, and it has not handled the hydration as well as the whole wheat flour (although it might have something to do with the makeshift basket I made, too).  It has achieved a bit more volume, but if that volume is more spreading than rising, what is the point?

It would seem, based only on taste and the way the all purpose loaf sagged, that there is absolutely no advantage to using all purpose flour in this loaf.  At least some whole wheat would seem to be indicated, so why use any all purpose at all?

But due to the complete failure of this experiment, I will have to try again sometime.  Unless, as usually happens, I get distracted and find myself wanting to try a different recipe.

Notes to Myself

• Try again.
• Don't bake when your wife has company in the house.
• This bake-off proved nothing.
• If you are baking bread in the barbecue take off the upper rack so that it might rise. 
• The waffles were enjoyed by all, except I was not that hungry, having eaten my rye bread from yesterday somewhat earlier.  My wife says that Germans don't eat rye bread for breakfast, and they don't put jam on their rye bread. Not being German myself, I feel empowered to bread her rules.

Nils Schöner's 60/40 Oblong Loaf - Roggenmischbrot

Nils's 60/40: episode 1

(using a 50:50 mixture of Whole Wheat and Canadian All Purpose Wheat Flours)

This bread is what Reinhart and the French call a Siegle, that is, a rye bread made with more than 50% rye flour.

Probably Germans would call it a Roggenmischbrot, or rye-wheat bread.  But rye is so common in German breads, it probably is simply a given, and doesn't need to be named so explicitly.  Nils calls it his "60/40", and that is enough for everyone to know what he is talking about, 60% rye, 40% wheat.

Originally I wanted to make two loaves, one with completely all-purpose flour, and one with completely whole wheat flour, to see what the difference might be.  When I was making up some sourdough starter for these two loaves, it occurred to me that I should also make a loaf with a mixture of these flours, too.

But rather than make another sourdough starter to test that idea tomorrow, I decided I'd bake that mixed loaf immediately, with some of the 100% hydration starter I had on hand.  I had to refresh it today anyway, so I might as well use up the left-overs.

Rye Sourdough, Rye Flour, WWflour, AP flour

Mis en place (except for the water)

The wheat flour that I used for this recipe, then, is a 50:50 mixture of whole wheat and all-purpose flours from the nearby Arva Flour Mill.  Both of these are made from hard red spring wheat, so they will have slightly more gluten than the flour that Nils is using.  I'm convinced that our rye is different somehow too.

The recipe is very easy.  Once you have the sourdough on hand, the trickiest part is getting the water temperature right.  And that is where I ran into a bit of a head-scratcher.

Dough Temperature
The importance of the ambient temperature of the flour (yes, I meant flour, not dough) first came to my attention when I made Myrtle Allen's Brown Bread.  In that recipe, the flour is placed in a gently warming oven.  And it makes a substantial difference when you go to mix up the dough.

Nils' "Appendix on Temperature" talks about the ambient temperature of your flour, and he gives a simple formula for calculating how hot your water should be to achieve a certain temperature of dough for your specific ingredients.  But the appendix suggestions don't actually gibe with that given in this recipe for Nils's 60/40.  Based on the recipe, it seems that we are aiming for a 26 degree C dough (thus, the 'magic number' of 52); but the appendix on temperature says that for a bread containing >50% rye, we should be aiming for a dough of between 27 and 30 degrees C.  So our 'magic number' should be between 54 and 60, not 52 as Nils gives it, or so I thought.

I wondered if Nils offered the lower number because half of Nils' rye flour is in the sourdough starter.  That rye flour is already mixed up: in other words, we can forget about it.  The rye flour we are now mixing up is in the ratio of 47:53 percent with the wheat flour. This means our target is the 'Moderately Warm Dough', and our 'magic number' would be in the range of 50-54.  And of course, it is.

What I ended up doing was aiming for the 26 degree temperature, but not worrying too much if I was a little bit hotter by a degree or two, based on my cheap analog thermometer.

Analog: Temperature of the flour, temperature of the water

But the colder sourdough throws off the careful calculations

It was only when I mixed up the warm water with the flour that I realized all my calculations were going to be off anyway, because my sourdough starter was only one hour out of the refrigerator, and so that was going to bring down the temperature of the dough as well.  So, from high ideals to the reality of baking, I goofed.  I should have waited at least another hour so my sourdough starter came to room temperature.  My dough was probably too cold, after all.

Turn, turn, turn
Other changes I made: I used kosher salt, and not sea salt.  I used 1 g of dried yeast instead of fresh yeast.

Comb-over for balding bread dough

And I wasn't quite sure what Nils meant when he says "give a turn", after the first 45 minute rest.  I decided to pour the loaf out on the counter and use my pastry cutter to do a single 4-fold envelope style bending.  I suspect that this is where Nils uses his unique 'fork' technique (but as far as I know, he hasn't yet shown us how this is done, with pictures.  I can hardly wait.)

The fold that I did isn't a stirring or a kneading, but more like a mere 'comb-over' for a balding bread dough.  Then I put it back into the container for the second 45 minutes.  If I was supposed to merely turn it over, this was a mistake, but I was hoping that the final proofing might fix any mistake I might be making.

Proofing
I don't have the proper banneton, but I did recently buy a nice little somewhat oblong whicker basket at the local second-hand store for 25 cents.  I even spent an afternoon trying to make a dedicated couche lining for it, but the experiment in sewing was unsuccessful.  My wife has said she will make one for me, for her it is child's play.  But she just doesn't have time right now.

Improvised Banneton, manhandling of dough

In the meantime, I just line it with one of my bread linens, and take whatever folds there are in the cloth as a texture in my final crust.

Maybe some family member who reads my blog will get me an authentic banneton for these rye breads for the upcoming holidays, hint hint.  I don't have one yet because they are not that easy to find.  If one bought it through the internet, the shipping would be the most expensive part.

I liberally coated the couche with a light rye flour (something I have very little use for, otherwise: I think I have gone through four bags of dark rye since the time I bought this bag of light rye).

I think I overly manhandled the rye dough, in getting it into a more-or-less oblong shape.   I used wet hands, but by the time I was done tucking it under and gently elongating the boule I was making, the dough was beginning to stick to my hands anyway.  I sprinkled a bit of light rye flour on the top of the loaf, too, prior to covering it for the proof.

Into the Oven
The dough came out of this basket after an hour a little misshapen, and I think it could have proofed a bit more.  But I was afraid the structure of the loaf would begin to suffer. 

Scored loaf just before the bake

I upended the basket onto a pizza peel liberally coated with light rye flour, scored the loaf and put it in the oven.  With 40% wheat flour, the loaf does have gluten.  The scoring revealed that there is some structure to the dough.

The liberally sprinkled rye flour, once it hit the hot stone, began to set off the fire alarm. 

Best Use for a Pizza Peel
I have discovered the best use for a pizza peel is fanning cool air at a smoke alarm that is going off while your bread is in the oven.

Best use for a Pizza Peel

Results
This bread smells great while baking.

I didn't get much oven spring, and I think this is a combination of using the wrong basket and under-proofing (the under-proofing could be a result of using a too-cold dough, i.e. sourdough starter that was too soon out of the refrigerator).  My scar looks quite a bit different than Nils' picture.  This is a result of the different texture of the flours, no doubt.  But it might also have to do with the amount of yeast I've used.  He is trying to minimize the amount to 0.5%, but because I am using Instant Dry Yeast, I may have put in a bit too much.  If I scale the recipe up, but leave the yeast the same amount, perhaps my seam will look a bit nicer.

The scarred rye loaf looks like a salamander walking across the bread

This is a tiny loaf.  I think that I would like to scale the ingredients by another half -- that is, if I can get a slightly larger basket to proof my dough.

I tasted one small piece of rye without toasting, and was thrilled at the taste.  The crust is crunchy yet I think people will not break a tooth on it; the crumb is full of the wonderful flavours of rye and whole wheat, and when you chew it, you know you are eating something of substance.  My wife will not like the amount of flour that I used on the exterior of the loaf during the final rise, but she can brush that off.  And I think she will approve of the overall taste, which can hold up to different flavours that she will put on it -- her jam and her cheese.

Breakfast for me was three slices of toasted rye bread, buttered.  The two smaller slices are accompanied by some recently home-made carrot cake jam (a sweet jam first shared by Michelle of the blog 'Big Black Dog' -- a jam with the texture but no bitter overtones of marmalade). The third slice had a couple of tiny slabs of Mecklenburg Tilsiter Cheese.

This is wonderful tasting rye bread.  Have I accidentally hit upon the right combination and amount of Canadian wheat flour to make these German breads?

However, I would really like to not use any all purpose flour; and I would really like this bread to 'sit up' more, i.e., retain its structure during baking, and not spread out so much.  The rapid high-heat initial baking has helped, but the banneton I used doesn't provide the right shape to begin with.  I can still play with all these details.  I'm very curious to see what tomorrow's bake-off will tell me about these loaves.

Tomorrow: The 60/40 loaf bake-off, one with whole wheat, one with all-purpose flour.

Notes to Myself

• Make sure your sourdough is at room temperature before starting: I would say more than 2 hours out of the refrigerator is needed to warm it up.
• Get a decent banneton, or get a dedicated couche for this one.
• Look for a slightly larger oblong basket, and scale this recipe by 1 1/2 times
• Pay close attention to the temperature of the water.
• Try aiming for a slightly warmer dough than Nils gives in his recipe: try aiming for the temperature of the dough as given in his Appendix on Temperature (i.e. use a 'magic number' of 54-60 minus your ambient flour temperature).
• Try this recipe again, but with a more recently refreshed 100% hydrated sourdough starter.
• Use slightly less Instant Dry Yeast than 1/8th tsp = 1 g for Nils' actual recipe, to see if that stops the scoring seam from blowing too far outwards.
• This is a tiny loaf, good for one person for 3-4 days; for two people, try these amounts, the next time you try this recipe (assuming my wife likes this loaf with some jam).  Here I've just scaled Nils' recipe x 1 1/2:

Ingredient	%	weight in grams
Rye Sourdough (100% hydration)	contains 30% of total flour, 30% of total water	405
Dark Rye Flour	30%	203
Wheat Flour	40%	270
Warm Water	45% (with starter hydration, total dough hydration is 75%)	300
Salt	2%	14
Dry Yeast	0.15%	1