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.


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...

Into the Wild

Let's talk about micro-organisms...

So you have "quick breads' and "flat breads", but really...these are not bread. If someone says to you "hey you want some bread" and they hand you a pita, there is a good chance you are going to throw it at them. Of course there is a caveat...a big caveat...there are some regions of the world where bread is flat...all of it. So take note of the region you are in before you start playing frisbee with their "bread". I assume however if you are reading this particular blog then you are like me and when you say "bread" you want bread that has life.

So to give bread life we need yeast. The easy way to get life into our bread is to use a "commercial" yeast. Go to the store and pick it up in handy little packets that you dump into flour. The yeast that most people are familiar with is called active dry yeast. Essentially it is yeast that has been put into suspended animation. This gives it a pretty decent shelf life, you have to wake it up before you can actually use it and the process generally requires about 25% of the little guys to give up the ghost. The bread I have been making has all been made with instant yeast. Instant yeast is mostly alive, but it is also much more perishable. When you are looking at a bread recipe make sure you know what kind of yeast the recipe is expecting because you are going to need more active dry yeast than instant yeast.

But I digress...tonight we are going wild. I am sure most of you have heard of sourdough, but what makes sourdough different. Well, as you might have already figured, sourdough breads are made with wild yeast. The term "sourdough" is often used to describe any bread made with a wild yeast even when the bread isn't really sour. I haven't really wrapped my head around that bit just yet, so let's get on with rounding up some wild yeast.

First of all the way I understand it we don't actually have to catch the yeast, it is already hanging around in the flour. So we just have to give it a happy place to live and it will grow and multiple. I started the process of cultivating the little guys last with with some all purpose white flour. Apparently I didn't do a very good job at building the habitat because nothing happened...well actually something did happen, I grew mold.

Thinking that maybe the flour was the problem I started over with some organic whole wheat flour. Last night when I checked on it I found a stinky bubbly blob...in other words I had some happy yeast. At the current rate I should be able to take this starter and turn it into a mother by tomorrow night. The mother is our long term housing. With proper care mother will keep the whole colony happy indefinitely.

So in summary...this weekend we should be eating sourdough.