Bread Tutorials on iTunes

Servia discovered this wonderful series today. It is a podcast from a culinary institute on bread making called Stella Bread. The first episode goes into a useful tutorial on bakers percentages. I did my own written tutorial, but the video tutorial is very helpful because it lays out the math very simply.

Crisis-Averted Focaccia

Focaccia in an iron skillet

So while we had company here, we decided to make some of my semi-sourdough pizza crust and have everyone add their own toppings. My mom decided to help out, because I was making some other bread at the time. She forgot to measure the water and ended up with what appeared closer to sourdough soup than anything else. We estimate the volume she put in, weighed it, and recalculated the 68% hydration for the dough and estimated the rest. It was about 2.5 times the volume, so instead of making 6 pizzas there was enough dough for about 15. We made the pizzas for dinner-- they went like hotcakes-- and we froze most of the rest of the dough.

Two pieces of dough managed to escape the freezer, so we decided to make some focaccia. Servia got some rosemary from the garden, minced some garlic, and drizzled the bread with olive oil and a little garlic salt. After letting it rise for an hour, we baked the focaccia for 20 minutes in an iron skillet, the first 5 minutes under a pan lid to let it rise sufficiently in the oven. The focaccia seems to have made Servia feel a little bit better. The whole family seems to have come down with a cold or the flu. Even with my clogged sinuses, the roasting garlic smelled great.

Confessions of a Snob: Two Book Reviews

I recently acquired two bread books: Tartine Bread (from which I have attempted one partially-successful bread) and The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I am going to review both of the books and include a few comments about the value of the books and what I have learned from each of them.

Tartine Bread is fantastic. I recommend it most highly as an exceptional bread book. Unlike the science background present in Peter Reinhart's books (especially Whole Grain Breads-- which is great), Chad Robertson introduces bread as more of a narrative. While Reinhart bombards his reader with science, while claiming to want to form a "spirit-of-the-law baker" (Reinhart BBA), Robertson uses pictures, notes about texture, and anecdotes to push his reader toward a more intuitive grasp of bread baking. I do love the baking science, but Tartine Bread manages to do something different that is also fabulous. The writing is engaging and the pictures are beautiful. Sadly, just over half of the book is bread recipes (although the recipes which he does include seem well worth it) and the rest of the book is taken up with recipes for day-old bread, many of which are not to my liking. I would have gladly given up some of the recipes for more variations on formulae or more of Robertson's commentary, but at least the french onion soup recipe looks fantastic (minus the duck fat).

I also learned three vital lessons from Tartine Bread. I am sure that there will be more lessons as I continue to practice this bread, but these are the first three.
For fermentation: bread can rise in a warm, moist environment if you put it in a closed space (like an oven) with a pot of boiling water and this will safely decrease the time it takes for the bread to rise (as I mentioned previously).
For fermentation: There are negative consequences to letting bread rise for too long. According the commentary section, "if you let bulk fermentation go too long, the final rise will be sluggish as the food that fuels the fermentation has been exausted. The glutensin the dough also begin defrading after a certain point due to increasing acidity, which results in a tighter, more uniform crumb"  (Italics are mine. Robertson 75). Although he is speaking about wild yeast, I am almost positive this was part of the problem with my attempt at a 70% White Whole Wheat Pain de Campagne.
For baking: Home ovens, even with methods like Reinhart's Double Steaming method (Reinhart 92-93). This is the reason that I have had so much trouble with inconsistent oven spring, especially since I started using the convection setting on my oven. Modern home ovens are designed to vent steam and the remaining moisture is not sufficient for the necessary oven spring (Robertson 79). I think this was why my artisan loaves had better crumb at my alma mater: our ovens were terrible, so they did not vent steam adequately. This was great for bread baking. My results here have been significantly compromised by this fact (with the notable exception of two loaves of ciabatta that had wonderful oven spring (but even they sprang very unevenly, yeilding strangely asymmetrical loaves). I will at some point acquire a combo cooker, but for now I will use my oven stone and my overturned broth pot in order to provide and enclosed environment for the number of minutes under steam.

I am making my second loaf of Tartine's Basic Country Bread this weekend (the essential recipe can be found here). Wish me luck!

I have been wanting to own or even see a copy of Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice since about one week into my first attempts to make bread. This book has more hype than any other book I know of in bread-baking circles. I have a confession to make: I don't think it's that great. I like Reinhart's work--I love the two Reinhart books I recieved as gifts: Artisan Breads Every Day from which comes my fantastic pizza recipe and Whole Grain Breads which was my first real introduction to bread science. I am just not a fan and I think it's partially because I am becoming a snob. Here are my following objections:

1. The introduction (Reinhart 1-25) is really self-aggrandizing and annoying. I like bakers talking about their backgrounds (for example, the Introduction to Tartine Bread pages 8-32), but Reinhart just sounds so arrogant.
2. Out of the 40+ recipes, less than 30% are lean doughs (i.e. doughs without sugars or fats added) and only three are with wild yeast. To me, the most impressive thing about bread is the flavor that can be pulled from the simple ingredients of flour, water, and salt without having to add a whole bunch of "rich" ingredients to enhance the flavor. I primarily make enriched breads/rich breads for holidays and I would not want them lying around on a regular basis.
3. Reinhart focuses primarily on machine mixing, unlike in his other two works I mentioned above where he seems to give hand and machine mixing more equal weight. Standing mixers are expensive and sometimes ineffective and they take away the kneading of bread which (I feel) is essential to making bread baking a relaxing and interactive process. Not to be cliche, but I feel like I taste my own labor in a wonderful loaf of bread I kneaded myself, which is why I made the bread instead of buying it. I know some doughs, usually high-gluten doughs, require a machine for adequate mixing, bu many if not most of these doughs can be made just as well by hand.
4. The baking instructions are in ounces. Yes, I know, ounces are a common form of weight measurement. However, grams are much smaller than ounces and weighing by grams on my digital scale is probably more accurate than if I were to weigh the same ingredients in ounces (also, I like using the round numbers rather than e.g. 0.11oz). In Reinhart's later books, he uses volume measures, ounces, and grams which seems like the perfect compromise to me.
5. There is a lot of focus on shaping. I know aesthetics are important, but I would rather have more instruction on how to make the bread taste wonderful than how to shape it into three different variations on a braided loaf. I want my breads to have wonderful flavor hidden in rustic crunch crusts and which reveal a beautiful open crumb-- it doesn't matter to me whether that bread is in a fancy couronne or a simple boule. Furthermore (and probably more importantly) a lot of the shaping instructions are incoherent, either because there are not enough pictures or because they seem to leave out important steps.
6. Finally, if one eats with one's eyes before one's tongue (Reinhart says something along these lines), I cannot imagine why there are not only so few pictures of the crumb of the different breads but so few pictures of the final products. many of these formulae have no pictures at all, which is a little worrying.

Despite my objections, I have found some useful advice in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. For example, I assumed that wonderful open crumb could be achieved in any bread if the baker was skilled enough. Apparently (although I cannot find the page number right now), hydration percentage determines the crumb structure and only higher hydration doughs (60-85%) can produce the irregular large holes that I covet. Furthermore, I now know one of the reasons I sometimes end up with very strange looking (almost marbleized) crust, like on the More Sour Sourdough I made this week. Reinhart explains that one should mist the sides of the oven with water, rather than "wet the dough, which causes splotches" (Reinhart 93). I realized that in my attempt to generate steam, I was misting the dough as well as the oven. Much of the baking science was also helpful: the more I keep the chemical processes in mind, the better my bread can be. I can use this science to help trouble-shoot my bread mistakes. Overall, unless you are a king or queen of enriched doughs or are desperate to try shaping your bread in many different ways, Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day is a better book because it includes the famous Pain a l'ancienne recipe as well as the amazing sourdough pizza recipe, uses grams/ounces/volume, has a great section on slow, cold, fermentation, and provides a useful index of baker's percentages.

Peter Reinhart's Whole Wheat Hearth Bread

Whole Wheat Hearth Bread

This is my first hearth bread that actually came out as bread instead of a gummy mass [1]. I stuck pretty close to Reinhart's recipe from Whole Grain Breads, so I won't replicate the recipe here (Reinhart 153-155) [2]. If I tweak it some more, I will probably add it [3]. If you are new to bread baking (like I am or newer) and you like whole grains, this book is fabulous, not only for it's fabulous introduction on whole grains but also the incredible glossary in the back.

I thought I would use this bread to remember some lessons that I learned (and am learning) about baking. A recent comment from a wonderful friend (who is, in fact, the person who gave me Whole Grain Breads in the first place) reminded me that I am guilty of not providing adequate information to those who are self-teaching in breadmaking (which is what I did). So, I will go through my process making the bread and discuss the different techniques that I learned. I will omit a discussion of baker's percentages because I discussed them in a previous blogpost.

This bread starts out with a soaker and a biga, each at 75% hydration. Biga and soaker are both types of pre-ferment or "old dough." Pre-ferments are used to increase the flavor of the dough without having to spend a long time and lots of space increasing the flavor of dough through a slow, cool fermentation process. In this particular case, almost all of the dough goes through this long-fermentation process (only enough flour is added the next day to move the dough from 75% hydration soaker and biga to 70% hydration dough and no water is added). Biga is "the Italian name for pre-fermented  dough. It is usually a stiff dough with a small amount of yeast and no salt" (Reinhart 299). By contrast, a poolish (not used int his bread) is "a French-style, sponge-type pre-feremt, usually made of equal parts water and flour and a very small amount of yeast" (Reinhart 300). Soaker is an "old dough" but a non-fermented one,  "containing grain, along with water or other liquid, and sometimes salt. Soaking the grain initiates enzyme activity in advance of fermenting the dough" (Reinhart 303).

Instead of a biga (made with baker's yeast) I used wild yeast (better known as sourdough starter, sourdough culture, or levain). I keep my sourdough starter at 100% hydration, so I modified it by adding enough extra flour and water to give it the 75% hydration of the biga.

Baker's yeast is the yeast that you can buy at a grocery store. There are two kinds: instant yeast (or bread-machine yeast) is Reinhart's preferred yeast. It does not require hydration before it is mixed into the dough. The alternative is dry active yeast, my preference, which requires a small degree of hydration before use. In this case for the final dough, I added a little bit of water to my yeast so it became a paste when I put it in, and I added a in small amount of flour to compensate for the change in hydration. This dough uses a large amount of baker's yeast (2.25 teaspoons) so that it can rise rapidly. Even with the large amount of yeast, I doubled Reinhart's rising times because my house is at a lower temperature than the ideal conditions for rapidly proofing bread (which I believe, but I could be wrong, is about 80-85 degrees F for bakers yeast and about 70-75 degrees F for wild yeast [4]).

In the morning after the overnight fermentation of the old dough, you have to allow any old dough that has been in the refrigerator to warm to room temperature, and then mix the final dough. My final dough included honey, which sweetens the flavor of the whole wheat. It also softens the crust and means that the crust and brown or burn at a lower temperature. Reinheart gave the option of adding oil or butter as well and instructed that the baker roll the dough in oil later in the process. The oil/butter also compromises the hard crunchy crust, so I decided to omit it. After mixing, the dough rests so the flour can fully hydrate. Reinhart suggests five minutes. A longer period is called an autolyse, and usually allows the dough (or the dough except for salt or oil) to sit for often 30 minutes in order to allow the flour to hydrate and the dough to gain the silky texture of well-worked dough more quickly (Reinhart 299).

Kneading is the most important part of the process. At this point, you develop the gluten structure that will allow the bread to rise and gain an open crumb, that wonderful light, airy, holey texture of artisan bread, and incorporate some air into the bread. I think the air incorporation helps because it adds some air into the dough but it also means that the yeast that is raising your bread during the proofing are in aerobic respiration-- i.e. they eat faster and produce more carbon dioxide. If it lacks oxygen, it respires anaerobically, which is slower and produces ethanol which will eventually kill the yeast [5]. Bread Cetera describes the slap-and-fold technique as a way of mixing bread which incorporates air. I agree and I used it for a while on this bread, but I find that slap-and-fold tends to work best for breads over 70% and under 80% hydration. At 70% hydration dough, like this hearth bread, the momentum of slapping the bread against a surface does not seem to stretch the dough sufficiantly. Because of this, I used a combination of first slap-and-fold and then stretch-and-fold. Stretch-and-fold is Reinhart's technique of stretching the dough and folding it in half away from you, and then the same toward you, then folding the left half in a third of the way, and then the right half in a third of the way, and then flipping the dough so that it is seem-side down. Repeat four times in a 40 minute period. When the dough is ready, it becomes silky and elastic.

Another way to test is called the window pane test: stretch one corner of the bread in front of a light to the point where you can see light through it. If it works, gluten is developed. If the dough rips, it requires more kneading.

Before first fermentation

After kneading comes the first fermentation or the first rise. The dough usually rises in a clean, lightly-oiled bowl (although Rayner alleges that even this small amount of oil slightly compromises the crust) covered with plastic wrap or some material the will keep the dough air-tight so it does not dry out. Using a moist towel does not help (Rayner 78).

The end of first fermentation

Once the first fermentation is over, round the dough by placing it on a floured surface and pre-shape it without degassing so the shaping will be easier. Let the dough relax for 15-30 minutes so that it does not try to shrink back into it's old shape. The comes shaping. Shaping is my least favorite part of the process because it is my weakest area. Servia actually shaped my Pain au Levain for me while I was at work. The most important thing for a free-form loaf (one not cooked in a loaf pan or similar) is making sure the "skin" is taught to hep ensure a crunchy crust and open crumb. I put my boule (the round shaped loaf) into my banneton (a wooden bread basket which I sprayed with a little bit of oil and dusted with flour) to rise for the final proofing.

After the pre-shape

I may have been a little over-zealous putting flour on after the pre-shaping. This is not advised.

Shaped and in the banneton

After the final proofing

The final proofing allows the bread to rise again after the partial-degassing that happens during the shaping process. Then I placed a floured peel over the banneton and turn it over so the dough falls onto the floured peel. I use a peel, because I bake my bread on an oven stone. You can use a traditional oven stone or you can use an unglazed terra-cotta tile. My first baking stone, which I still use although I now have a more traditional oven stone, was a granite tile ($4) that I turned so that the polished side was facing the bottom of the oven. I oiled my stone with olive oil before I used it and dust it with flour immediately before the bread goes on it. An oven stone helps mimic the stone ovens that bakers use to bake their bread and it helps to more evenly distribute the heat to the baked goods.

On the peel.

Then I scored the dough. I did a particularly sloppy job this time. Scoring the dough provides that great artisan look and allows it to expand. It also, according to Understanding Baking, allows some of the gasses to escape so that the bread does not swell too much in the oven and end up with gigantic air pockets (Amendola 165). I think there are other reasons for it, but I do not remember what they are. I use an exacto-knife, but traditionally one scores dough with a lame. Let the knife do the work, and cut at a shallow-ish 45 degree angle for that textured scoring. I did not know this when I scored my Pain au Levain.

Scored

Then I baked the bread for 15 minutes under steam. As I mentioned in my comment, baking under steam means that, in imitation of a real baker's oven, you make sure there is some steam in the oven. My preferred way is to fill a small pan with 1-2 cups of water in it. You take the pan out partway through just as a baker would release the steam from his/her professional oven. I put my pan on the shelf under the stone. Peter Reinhart suggests placing it above, but this caused my oven light to burst. For similar reasons, do not use a glass pan to hold the water. I am told it will explode. The guy who runs Bread Cetera uses a metal steamer thing and injects steam. He has a great video on his blog.

Baking under steam improves the crust and crumb of the bread, because according to Understanding Baking, "steam...has the principle purpose of keeping the crust soft during the first part of the baking so that the dough can expand rapidly and evenly" (Amendola 141). The bread can be cooked at a high temperature and once the steam is taken out, the bread's crust will harden into the wonderful rustic crust.

Out of the oven

In the oven, the bread should rise a little bit more. This increase in size is called oven spring. My breads (until this one) tend to have a lot of oven spring at home. The reason that this one did not spring was probably because we used the oven on convection and the temperature was too high. A convection oven blows the heat around. I noticed my breads were rising more on one side than the other on the regular setting so I put it on convection this time. However, the crust browned far more quickly, meaning that it was not soft enough to allow the bread to rise. I think I will put more water in the pan and put it in when heating the oven in order to make it steamier so the crust stays soft and allows it to spring before hardening.

Apparently it takes at least 30 minutes for the crumb to set, so do not cut into the bread before then, no matter how tempting it is. The flavor improves as the bread cools. For this bread, Reinhart recommends waiting one hour (Reinhart 153-155). The crumb was a little more dense than i had hoped due (most likely) to inadequate oven spring, but it was not significantly denser than Reinhart's own version. I personally like a more open crumb, so I may try another whole wheat bread.

Crumb

Crust and crumb (odd because of the flash)

Anyway, the bread was great with brie. Servius said it had a "malt" flavor (probably from the honey) and it will certainly go well with almond butter for breakfast.

Endnotes

1. The gummy mass happened a few months ago when I first tried this recipe. I covered the soaker and biga wrong and they completely dried out overnight, making the bread an icky mess and making it impossible to develop proper gluten.
2. Although I will discuss baker's percentages.
3. For anyone who has a copy of the recipe, I used the stretch-and-fold technique after some more traditional kneading to develop the gluten (which seems to have worked). I also doubled the suggested rising times (so the first one rose for two hours and the second rise was for 1.5 hours). I omitted the butter/oil, used honey as the sweetener, and used sourdough starter instead of biga (although I used the recommend 2.25 teaspoons of instant yeast in the final dough).
4. This comes from Wild Bread and Rayner actually says 65-75 degrees F (Rayner 78), but the dough will rise more slowly at 65 degrees F than at a slightly higher temperature.
5. I remember this from 10th grade honors biology, so I might be over-simplifying a bit.

Hydration Percentages, Demystified

When I first started making bread, I read a lot of different bread blogs. One of the things I noticed was that people talked about the percentage of the hydration of the dough, but I had no idea what that meant and I had trouble finding a coherent explanation, even though I am sure they were right under my fingertips. I also thought using grams rather than volume measurements to weight the dough was a ridiculous waste of time. Now I know better.

The clearest explanation I have ever found comes from Lisa Rayner's Wild Bread, which I have discussed in previous posts (Rayner 56-57). First off, baking percentages are based on grams. They are not particularly useful if you are only using volume measurements (although if you're willing to do a lot of math it could help you out).

So flour is always considered to be 100%. Let's say that you are using 500 grams of flour for your recipe, 100% is 500g. Water, or "hydration percentage," is calculated by it's comparision to the flour. For example,  375g means that to get the "hydration percentage" you divides 375g/500g=75% hydration. At this point the bread itself is 175% hydration. For most breads, salt should be between 1.8-2%, therefore between 9-10g of salt.

As a note, this flour and water includes any flour and water in your poolish or your sourdough starter. For example, if you use 100% hydration sourdough starter (which is what I have, meaning that I feed it with equal parts flour and water), then you can divide the weight of your starter in half. For example, if you use 200 grams of sourdough starter at 100% hydration, this means you consider it in baker's percentages as 100g water and 100g flour. So if you were to add 200g starter to your 500g flour and 375g water, then your bread would be (375+100g water)/(500+100g flour)=79.1%. The overall dough was 180% (if we use 1.9% salt). This would be a very wet dough-- maybe a ciabatta or focaccia. Lean European white doughs are around 65% hydration and whole wheat lean doughs are closer to 75% (because whole wheat flour absorbs more water).

Baking percentages are important because they allow you to easily scale the amount of loaves up or down. They also allow you to decide how to modify recipes based on changing recipes from regular yeast to sourdough starter. Rayner says making the starter equal 20-60% of the total recipe's flour and water, and then subtracting that amount of flour and water from the recipe (Rayner 57).

If you are interested in using volume measurements but are willing to do the math to use baker's percentages, I found this tool to convert flour. Also, for water, 1g=1ml and ml can be converted into other volume measurements.

Today, while I try to translate Horace, Medea, and do my math homework, I am making two recipes using weights (in grams) instead of volumes trying to increase my understanding of baker's percentages. Wish me luck!