Sunday, May 26, 2013

A Little Poolish

I woke up last Sunday morning and decided to jump into a recipe from my new book. The recipe is called "Saturday Bread"...the idea is to mix it up and the morning and you have fresh bread for dinner. It is supposed to ferment for about 5 hours at around 70 degrees...room temp for someone living in the Pacific Northwest like the author. Well the room temps in my house are quite a bit warmer than 70 degrees, so I wasn't sure exactly how long it was going to take for the mix to triple in size, but I had no plans for the day so I would just keep an eye on it...

"Are we going to see Star Trek today?"

"Uh...uh...but...uh...I'm making bread..."

So I am two hours into the fermentation and it could go for another 3 like it is supposed to or it could be done in 2...my only option was to park it in the fridge till we got back from the movie. After the movie it took it a few hours to warm up and finish the fermentation. Then shaped and baked it was done a bit later then dinner, but it was decent bread. Consider the minor hiccup.

Later in the week I tried to make a "weekday" bread that ferments overnight at room temp. In the morning I had dough soup, so I am not exactly sure what went wrong, but my guess is that I didn't properly account for the ambient temps and it over fermented.


But let's not dwell on that...let's talk about poolish. Pretend for a minute that you have a bakery and you want to make good flavor filled breads. Fermentation creates flavor, longer slow fermentation creates more flavor. So you mix up dough before you go home at night and leave it to ferment overnight. So far so good...but you have limited space to ferment enough dough to make all the bread you need to make. It turns out the solution is pretty easy, you just make a "pre-ferment". This is basically like a flavor concentrate that you ferment overnight then mix in with the dough in the morning.

Last night I made a pre-ferment called a poolish. It was equal parts by weight of flour and water, with just a tiny bit of yeast. (I mixed it up just before I went to bed hoping that I would be awake well before it went "too far"...)

When I got up this morning I seemed to have something that looked like what the book described so I went ahead and mixed up the rest of the dough. I am pretty sure I have mentioned before that I do not like working with "wet dough"...well this dough is wet. It actually seemed too wet to me even after it tripled in size it seemed like it would be too wet to hold a shape, but as I worked it into a ball it seemed to come together. An hour later it was in the oven baking...a few hours after that and half of it is already being digested.

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This might possibly be the best tasting bread I have made yet, but I do have a bit of a nit. This book recommends baking the loafs inside of a dutch oven that has been heated in the oven. This helps develop a thicker, crispier crust. I am not sure I am sold on this just yet...The biggest issue for me is that the bottom of the loaf gets really crispy...aka hard. The partial solution is to park the loaf in a plastic bag for a bit and it will soften up the crust, but the bottom is still a bit tough. I also prefer the batard over a round loaf, but a batard isn't going to fit into a dutch oven all that well, so for now I will continue to work the recipes as the book instructs...

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Party On...

Based on the state of the this blog it is entirely reasonable for you to assume that I have stopped making bread. You might even assume that I have "become bread", but I am not so sure that is all that reasonable of an assumption...

Anyway...I have been making bread about once a month or so, but did see the need to blog about it since I am pretty much at a plateau. I can make pretty good bread. I don't think I have achieved great yet, but I can definitely do pretty good. Good enough that even people that don't have to live with me say it is "really good". And I can do it without much fumbling around. I know how to do what I am doing, but it is time to get better...

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It is time to make bread that is not just "pretty good"...I want bread that is "I need more of this now good"...

I am not sure if I mentioned this before, but when I started making bread I wanted to make it as simple as possible. I knew that bread could be made with just a few ingredients, but wasn't 100% sure until I start looking for recipes. It turned out it wasn't all that easy to track down these simple recipes online, but eventually I figured it out. I think the first bread I made had 5 ingredients...flour, water, salt, sugar and yeast. The bread I am making now doesn't use any sugar. There is enough "sugar" in the flour to make the yeast happy so the only reason that recipe would have had it was to speed things up a bit, and speeding things up is only good for making "bread"...not good for making "good bread".

But I digress...flour, water, salt, yeast...that is all you need to make bread. The book I have learned from is great, but it is a book about making all kinds of bread, so there are only a handful of recipes in the book that make the kind of bread I want to make. Then about 6 months ago I heard about another book...a book I knew that I needed to have just from seeing the title...Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza


So a couple of weeks ago when I came into some "amazon money", I jumped on finally order the book. And after reading through the first few chapters it seems like it should be just what I need to go from pretty good to at least "almost great"...