Hands On

I guess I need to make a slight clarification...apparently when I said "I made bread by hand" there was a bit of ambiguity there. I realize now that I might have given the impression I used only my hands to make the bread...

So here's what really happened...I put the flour in a bowl with the yeast and the salt. Then I took a big spoon and stirred it up. After it was mixed up pretty good I made a little well in the center and dumped in some of the water. Then I took the big spoon and started pulling flour into the water, stir, pull in some flour, stir, pull in some flour, stir, and more water, stir, stir, stir. Eventually it started to become dough and I couldn't really stir so I used the spoon to just kind of moved the dough around in the bowl. Then I did the kneading bit with my actual hands.

In order to make up for my lack of clarity I figured I should make some bread using only my actual hands. I could copy and paste the previous paragraph to right here then replace "stir" with "squish", but I think I will just let you pretend that's what I did. It worked, but I think the spoon did a better job and my hands were less messy. It turned out to be considerably less messy than I expected, but yeah the spoon is better.

Anyway the results were pretty much the same, so I guess since the bread doesn't seem to have a preference I will stick to using the spoon.

I am also going to need to work on some more creative ways to photograph all this bread...

Still Baking

Yes, I am still making bread. I have just been a bit lazy about posting. The problem with being lazy about updates is that I have to remember what's been in the oven since the last update...

I guess I should start with the pain au levain. I think that is frenchy for sourdough. About a week ago I had what I figured was a good healthy sourdough starter so I started on the first sourdough recipe in the book. Everything seemed to go pretty well up to the baking. I made up both loaves figuring I could just bake them at the same time. The first sign that there might be a problem was that they didn't seem to grow quite as much as they should. After baking them for a very long time they never cooked all the way through. I am not sure exactly where things went wrong. Could be that the yeast just wasn't as healthy and strong as I thought, but there was something else odd. The tops halves had big air pockets like you want to see, but the bottom were very dense. So the problem could just be that I screwed up the shaping. The last potential gotcha was whole wheat. The recipe had a some whole wheat flour and I have heard that whole wheat flour gain be a bit more difficult. There was some good news...the bread had great flavor.  

So last night I started up a batch of "San Francisco Sourdough". The big difference is that this recipe has no whole wheat flour. In theory my starter is a bit healthier and stronger so it should perform better. I also only made half a batch, so if things go all hinky again there will be less wasted flour.

After the sourdough failure I was a bit discouraged so I decided to make another batch of french bread. I can't quite make it from memory yet, but I am getting pretty comfortable with the process. One area that I am still not real happy with is the shaping. What I am doing seems to work, but I know that it isn't quite right. I have been watching some videos and think that I am on the right track, but the thing you can't really learn from a video is touch. I am not sure how much pressure I am supposed to be using, so I just need to keep practicing. 

Batch #3-1

At around 7:30 PM this evening the nagging stopped...we had a loaf of fresh french bread, a couple hours later there is less than 1/4 of the loaf left. Based on that I think this french bread recipe is a winner. I don't think that proofing the loafs in the fridge made any significant change to the crust and crumb, but it did make the baking bit pretty easy. When I got home from work I took the loaf out of the fridge and set it on the counter, and turned on the oven. An hour later the bread was baking. So in theory I could arrange for someone to take the dough out of the fridge and fire up the oven while I am driving home and speed things up even more...

Anyway, keeping in mind that the goal is to eventually "master" one of these recipes, this one is for sure a potential candidate. Thinking about it now though, ideally there will be two recipes that I attempt to master. One recipe that uses commercial yeast (like this one) and one sourdough. Of course making sourdough will depend on get a starter to start...more on that at some other time.

And it has already started up again..."When are you making more bread? This one is almost gone..."

<imagine a picture of the empty cutting board here>

French Bread - Part 2

This morning I baked the second loaf of french bread...overall uneventful. However I didn't get a crispy crust like I wanted. When it came out of the oven it felt like it was going to be crispy, but once it cooled it was soft. Not sure what I am missing. The flavor of the this loaf seems to be exactly the same as the first, so I don't think there were any real issues with the primary fermentation of the first loaf. At this point I am pretty sure that the first loaf was just a bit smaller.

OK, so at this point I am already making good bread, but...I still don't think it is great bread. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't be ashamed to serve this bread to anyone, but I doubt it would leave a long lasting impression. The next recipe in the book is "Rustic Bread". It includes instructions for turning it into ciabatta or focaccia and is very similar to the recipe for pizza dough. This sounds like the kind of recipe that would be good to know.

However...to really get into some really interesting flavor, I think we are going to have to explore the wild yeast option...aka sourdough. For sourdough the first step is to make a starter. It takes about 6 days to build a starter and then another day or so to turn the starter into the mother. Once you have your mother you are ready to make some sourdough. Since today is the last day of vacation I expect it will be a couple weeks before the oven sees a loaf of sourdough. Even though the book says "artisan breads every day", I am not sure that I will be up for any weekday baking just yet.

Oh yeah...when building the starter up to a mother you only use half of the starter, so you are supposed to throw out the other half or pass it along to someone...just figured I would put that out there in case anyone is interested. 

French Bread - Part 1

December 30, 2011 - French Bread...flour, water, yeast, salt.

The French Bread recipe is very similar to the Lean Bread, more salt and less water. There is also some slight variations in the technique. Mixing starts the same, this time using the dough hook instead of the paddle, and it worked much better. Then he wants us to do some hand kneading...I am thinking "I have a fancy mixer why do I need to get my hands all gummed up?". OK...so I was wrong, not about the gummy hands...that is definitely something to work on. Also the dough sticking to the table, but it really was nice to work the dough...with my gummy hands even.

Another interesting thing with this recipe...for some reason the last step reads a lot clearer to me...it says if you aren't going to bake everything at once divide it now and stick it in the fridge overnight. This actually was a bit of a hiccup because first of all I only have one glass bowl that I figured to be big enough to hold the doubled up dough. So I put half of it in a stainless steel mixing bowl. Next I didn't have room on the shelf for both bowls, so the stainless bowl went in the crisper. This morning it appeared that the dough in the glass bowl was significantly bigger than the metal bowl. Either of these variations could have caused the difference or it could be there was no difference and not being able to see into the bowl from the side distorted things. Also I just eyeballed "half" so it is possible that there was just less dough in the metal bowl. I am not really stressing about it, but I am looking into getting two matching "fermentation vessels".

Lean Bread

So the family is sending me a message that reads something like..."hey we think it is cool that you are making bread...now make some that doesn't suck". Maybe that is not the message they intended to send, but that is the message I received...

They gave me two books...artisan breads every day by Peter Reinhart and another one put out by a chain restaurant. I was not all that impressed with the chain book so we took it back to the store. I wasn't planning to get another bread book, but I found another one by the same author called Crust and Crumb that looked interesting and was sporting a James Beard award so I went ahead and got it. When I started this bread baking journey one of the books I looked at was The Bread Baker's Apprentice also written by Peter Reinhart. I guess this is like THE book to have if you are serious about becoming a baker, so I figure this guy Reinhart knows his stuff. The problem for me with The Bread Baker's Apprentice was information overload...it is like an encyclopedia of bread making knowledge and I just want to make a loaf of bread.

See I am not looking to become a master baker, I just want to be able to make some good bread. OK, that is understating it a bit, because I do want to master one or two recipes, but I am never going to make pumpernickel  or any other kind of rye for that matter. And I really don't care about the differences between European and North American flours. I just need to know that basics. So far it seems that artisan breads every day is exactly the kind of book I need. Crust and Crumb goes a bit deeper into stuff so for now I will just be using it as reference material. ABED will most likely be doing all of the driving for the first leg of this journey.