Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

[SCChris]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

The last batch was 80 AP 14 Spelt and 6 Rye, this was a small shift from the last batch where I ran AP/Spelt at 80/20 but the feel of adding in the Rye is marked. I do like the change that the other grains bring to the table. My plan has been to get comfortable with a formula and move on to some next bread. Poilane / country whole grain breads is where I imagine I'm heading, but time will tell..

Chris

[texassourdough]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

80 percent AP will work! That will be a delciate loaf though!

Funny you mention Poilane. I just got back from France about a week ago and went to Poilane for the first time. I found the trip rewarding enough that I finally followed through and started a bread blog. My goal is to blog on breadmaking in general and to build a library of recommended bakeries around the world. Two of my four posts so far involve Poilane. One is on Eric Kayser. You can find the blog at jayonbread.wordpress.com/.

I really like miche. I think they age far more gracefully than smaller loaves and have more flavor. (I think less aromatics leak out during the proofing! There are VERY serious bakers - like SFBI - that believe bulk fermentation in batches below say 2.5 kilos or so have less flavor. My experience suggests it applies to the loaf too.)

Thanks!
Jay

[WJW]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

Thank you Chris.

I'm going to try some of these miche loaves next...and maybe see if I can improve my baguette technique...and maybe get some additional grains in.

Jay: The blog is great!

Bill

[Faith In Virginia]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

Bill, Just wanted to chime in. Looking good, you really have stepped up your game in such a short time. I can see Jay is guiding you along nicely. Great job Jay. But I can tell you will have many more successful bakes as time goes on.

Happy baking, congrats Faith

[SCChris]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

As Jay has pointed out many times before, it’s easier to know why some good thing and not so good thing has happened if small, single item, changes have been made to a recipe. My motivation has been to work in this mode. I start with a recipe, formula and do my best to make it my good friend before changing the percentages of water or swapping in whole wheat, or spelt or a bit of rye for some other flour. I want a specific quantity of dough so that the shape in my hand is known and the shaping is known and the proofing time at a temp is knowable. 800g is my current dough ball weight. This also helps me feel the difference that a particular flour has changed the dough. This normalization allows me to have a better feel for what temp and how long the bread needs and to adjust it next time if the bake needs adjustment. I should be better about taking notes, but for me, as long as I get a baseline recipe solid then making little changes and taking mental notes seems to be working..


At this point I want to broaden my sourdough country boule to include more whole grains. Some soaked cracked wheat, sunflower seeds, caraway etc..

As I tell my wife, bread making is a cheap diversion from the daily grind. We couldn’t afford a boat. Boat being an acronym for Break Out Another Thousand.

:-)

Chris

[gundlrak]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

WoW That looks great would you please post or send a PM for recipe for your bread and the steps to setup the oven for bread after pizza, I know the temp has to come down and clean or mop the oven floor remove coals ??? Your oven looke great take a look at my WFO (gundlrak) Thank you. Gary DeMarco.

[texassourdough]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

Good comments, Chris! I love it when someone sees the light for it really pays off in the long run!

I am baking today - my standard, signature country boule. (Only uniquity is 6% WW) Today's dough is frustratingly slack and sticky. I underdeveloped it a bit! I like to live on the edge, but I fear these loaves may become a mess when I dump them from the bannetons! Crossing my fingers!

It would be SO much easier to settle for lower hydration loaves! But it ain't gonna happen!
Jay

[SCChris]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

For home bread bakers the hands on time with the dough is so much harder to come by. I’m guessing that a morning at an artisan bakery would have you handling four or more types of dough and bread and a hundred or more pounds of these differing doughs.

If I could spend a morning shaping boules, miches and baguettes I’d be light years ahead of where I am in short order. Internet, youtube, lessons on shaping is helpful but it can only go so far. How much to De-gas? and how should the dough feel when doing stretch and folds, and when is dough proofed properly? all of this comes down to time at the table.

I guess I can relate it to my skiing experiences. If I only ski a few days a year, the first few days is about getting back what I lost over the summer, getting better takes a lot of time.

If I get a few Kg of dough mixed and baked a week, I’m doing good. Bit by bit I’m learning and getting a feel.

Chris

[texassourdough]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

My week at SFBI was amazing. 85 loaves in a week. Mainly baguettes but boules, epis, and even pan bread and challah. Great for touch! And for learning how violently one can degas dough and still make wildly open crumb. I need to do videos to show that! Highly recommended if it at all makes sense!

I just uploaded my description of today's bake on my new blog at Jay on Bread | Great Breads, Bakeries, and PIzza. Given this discussion I think you will find it interesting.

It was kind of interesting. I was kind of nervous for i REALLY wanted these loaves to be pretty since I talked about bread a lot in our tour group in France and I will be serving these loaves to a group reunion dinner on Friday. And the dough was sticky enough that I knew I was a bit precarious. But...my touch came through. They are almost exactly what I want. If I were to do anything different it would probably be to bake them 5 degrees cooler at 450 so the bulk of the loaf is just a tad lighter. But I like the look. Lots of controlled rip! They will rock!

For Bill, the loaf in the picture is just about what I like. It has huge oven spring as evidenced by the expansion of the slash, but it doesn't rip beyond the slash. This loaf is from my second batch (same dough - just baked 45 minutes later). The first loaves had a bit more "rip" and the trunk of the "tree" I slash in the plaque on top of the loaf tore into the slash but the slashes still held so it was not too badly under. On the seocnd batch the trunks held their shape so I consider this under but not excessively. If it was overproofed the slashes would tend to be smoother with minimal or no rip. I like rip!. It creates a sense of action and sets the loaves apart from "normal" bread.

Bake on!
Jay

[WJW]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

Very cool. That loaf is amazing looking.

I feel the same way about the "rip". The underproofed bake I did last weekend came out of the oven and I was stoked. I now know it was underproofed (if fits all the signs), but compared to my previous three bakes this one looked cool...not grey...no blow outs...good carmelization (maybe because of all the residual sugar )...but I was stoked about how they looked.

Now to seek to... control the rip....

That could be a good name for a bakery or blog.

Bill

[WJW]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

Faith, thanks for the nice words...jay has been helping me out to be sure, but there's no doubt that I have attempted to sponge a few crumbs of knowledge from you as well. (How was that? Two bread puns in one sentence!)

Seriously though...I do appreciate the help you, Jay, and others have given me. I wouldn't have even attempted doing sourdough without the help from you guys. I hope I can keep improving but I'm sure I'm due for a big flop any time now.

Chris, Thanks for the tips and encouragement and tips.

Gary...I'll take a look at your oven as soon as I finish this post. As far as the recipe I'm using, it is a combination of what Jay and Faith shared with me although I am now increasing the hydration (percentage of water in relation to flour) a bit to experiment. See post #5 in this thread...I reposted them there. But before you can do sourdough you need a starter. You can either buy one or start one from scratch. I did the latter. It was usable after a bit over two weeks....but the starter got dramatically better and more active at around three weeks. That is feeding twice a day.

You will see discussions elsewhere on the web where people talk about keeping the starter in the fridge after a certain period of time. (I've seen people recommend refrigerating a starter as soon as five days after begining.) I'm a beginner with bread but was a biology major in college. One thing that seems correct to me is that the point of growing a starter is to "cycle" through as many generations as possible to allow the beneficial yeasts and bacterial to ultimately "out-compete" the less desireable organisms present (either in the flour or through introduction from the environment outside the starter jar). Assuming proper care, in the vast majority of cases, the good yeast and good bacteria will out-compete the other stuff and you will get an active, starter which will do its part to produce good sourdough. But process of out-competing (or survival of the fittest to put in biological terms) requires many generations. Fortunately, we are talking about yeasts...so a "generation" might only be a few hours...at room temp. But at refrigerator temps...a generation might take days. So the longer you keep a starter at room temp and feed it twice a day, the faster you will get a good starter IMO.

As far as changing from pizza to bread...it depeands on your oven. If I cook pizza the night before and leave my oven good and hot (say 780-800), my oven will be around 575-600F the following morning. (The thermocouple stuck below the hearth bricks, between brick and insulation, will read around 625F) So if I wanted to do bread the following day I could clean the oven out, mop the bricks, etc., the temp will fall to the low five hundred range. But if I then put the door back on to re-equalize, in twenty minutes or so the heat stored in the bricks will reheat the oven and I'll be back up to 560 or so. Good for the bread I've been doing I think.

I've been doing it backwards though. I've been heating the oven in the morning while my dough fermented...letting it cool enough for afternoon bread baking...then re-heating for a pizza party that night. Ass backwards and wasting wood, but that's how my schedule has been working lately.

Bill

[Faith In Virginia]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

You bread head Bill, thanks for the chuckle. The puns were perfect. I'm back working at hard labor so my time available to post is reduced.

I noticed you increased the hydration of your dough. Not really to ask why, but I think you need to know what the increased hydration does to your bread. I find that it changes the bite of the bread along with the storage life. It's difficult to describe the higher hydration changes in the bread. I think for your own knowledge you should make two sets of doughs one higher and one lower hydration and do a side by side comparison. I think you would be quite surprised by the difference of dough, dough handling, the baking, finished bread, bite and all that good stuff. Just a suggestion.

Happy baking.

[Lburou]

Re: Biggest Sourdough Bake Yet!

Subscribed, and trying to get some of this to sink in.