Too Hot for Bread

Waffles

It has been too hot for bread over the last two weeks. The heat is ridiculous and I never want to turn on my oven. However, I have a bunch of sourdough starter languishing in the refridgerator. So I decided to make waffles.

Recently I've been on a big waffle kick. I started over the last 4 months or so making waffles on the weekends with my sourdough starter using a slightly modified version of this recipe from Wild Yeast. I usually half the recipe when I'm just making waffles for two people, but this time I doubled the recipe and made enough waffles to store in the freezer and toast whenever I wanted a nice crispy waffle. They are delicious!

Waffles on the Cooling Rack

Recipe for Sourdough Toaster Waffles:

1. Make sure your sourdough starter is viable but also that it is young and sweet smelling like overripe fruit. If it smells wine-y or vinigar-y, your waffles will taste like vinegar. If it is not young smelling, refresh it and leave it out on the counter for a few hours until it's ready.
2. Heat a waffle iron and grease it (I use a small amount of spray canola oil)
3. Follow the Wild Yeast pancake batter recipe (I put in 2 tbsp of honey instead of maple syrup and I made the waffles half with whole wheat starter). The batter should be slightly thinner than muffin batter but thicker than crepe batter. I usually have to add a couple of splashes of nonfat milk to achieve my desired consistency. If you want a large stash, double the recipe.
4. Ladle in enough batter for one waffle.
5. Cook until it is cooked through, but not until it is crispy.
6. Take out and let the waffle cool completely. Repeat this process until all of the batter is used up.
7. Place the cooled waffles in freezer bags (air tight) and remove all excess air from the bag.
8. Throw them in the freezer and stick them into your toaster as needed!

Bag of cooled waffles for the freezer

I have been really enjoying them. I'm planning on trying sourdough crumpets before the heat dies down.

Bread: Back After a Short Respite

Spirally Loaf!

So I have been on a bit of a bread hiatus because of finals and then not being home much over spring break because I was catching up with friends. I am really sad that a lot of these people are going off to different places at the end of this year. But I will enjoy the time that is left. Anyway, I made up for it by making some loaves yesterday. I baked the first three this morning and will bake the last two this afternoon.

Three Loaves: Norwich More-Sourdough

The first three were Susan from Wild Yeast's Norwich More-Sourdough with some modifications:

• I used about 75% whole wheat sourdough starter (just using what I had around)
• I substituted course-ground whole wheat for the course-ground rye
• I added about 50g water (up to 610g) and then splashed in a little extra when the Kitchen Aid didn't seem to like the stiff dough, so maybe up to 640g all together.
• I added in 40g of wheat germ and 10g oat bran
• I also readjusted the timing, because the temperature in my kitchen is 70 degrees F instead of 76 degrees F.
• I added one extra stretch-and-fold during the bulk fermentation

This set of loaves is magically delicious. Maybe it's just because I haven't had homemade bread in two weeks. Feast your eyes. More to come...

Spirally loaf (Loaf #1)

Loaf #2

Loaf #2

Crumb of Loaf #1, tight but not bad.

Loaf #3 (scoring experiment)

I am hosting my next bread lesson this Saturday. I think we are going to make spelt ciabatta, pumpernickel, and croissants. Yum!

The Holy Grail: Quick and Crispy Sourdough Waffles

Crispy Waffles

 These are delicious! I mentioned I've been looking for some sourdough waffle recipes that aren't too sour and not too unhealthy. I found it. This one uses no butter and is fantastic and it only takes a few minutes to make. For the recipe, see the Pancake Recipe on Wild Yeast. I exchanged the maple syrup for honey, I used a combination of white and whole wheat starter (about 50/50) and I added a tiny bit of skim milk in order to make the batter a little easier to spoon into the waffle maker. The waffles were extra crispy (although I changed the timing on them to make them that way--approximately doubling the time they were in the waffle maker) and I cut the waffle recipe in half. It made about 3 servings with the half recipe. Enjoy!

Note: 03/07/12: I made these as pancakes the other day as well. They were terrific. I hope everyone with a sourdough starter tries this recipe either as waffles or pancakes.

Dry(ish) Dough Success

I made a version of Wild Yeast's Norwich More Sour Sourdough again. I was determined to get it right this time. So I only added 35 grams of water extra. I mixed it together with the normal head on the Kitchen Aid instead of the dough hook and saved the dough hook for kneading process. However, the Kitchen Aid seemed to be having a lot of trouble kneading the dough so I added another 50g of water and it seemed to work out much better.

Loaf One

I've noticed I have an impossible time walking away from the Kitchen Aid while it's mixing or kneading. I like that it doesn't make a mess, but I just feel like I can't leave the baking process. I guess old habits are hard to break.

Loafs Two and Three

The bread turned out beautifully. Really stunning. My only complaint is that it tastes a little more like store-bought bread than my usually fare. Obviously it's much fresher than it would be in a store and no commercial yeast and a little added whole wheat for flavor, but it doesn't have the same depth of flavor that for example the Tartine Loaf has or even that of my own easy sourdough.

Loaf and Mini Loaf

I also made a couple of the mini loaves (see above and below). They were silly but really cute.

Happy Holidays!

Broken Philosophy?

The title of this blogpost is in response to my previous post: "The Philosophy of Baking." I've been using the kitchen aid a lot, mostly because it makes baking significantly less messy than baking my hand because everything is contained in a single bowl. This is especially helpful when I am making bread because usually kneading the bread is a rather messy process. However, it is a learning process.

I decided to make Wild Yeast's More Sour Sourdough with my Kitchen Aid, as the recipe calls for a mixer. However, I didn't account for the requirements of the mixer at all. I made a dough that I amped up to 77% hydration, because this is a reasonable hydration to knead by hand. At this point, the dough hook hardly seemed to work at all. I also did not properly account for the temperature correctly; the bread ended up having its bulk fermentation cut short and it produced loaves where not all the water cooked out of the bread.

Next time I will know better. Perhaps even the dryer dough will work better with the Kitchen Aid.

Bread: Some Thoughts

Yay Bread!

It was finally cool enough to make some bread today and my sourdough starter was begging to be used, so I made some bread while I wrote the first draft of my paper on the Parthenon Frieze.

So it may not be my prettiest loaf, but it was quite a success. I took it out of the oven and it was light as a feather, which means that it actually worked. I have had little success with this recipe, Norwich More Sour Sourdough from Wild Yeast, and this is the first one that turned out perfectly I scored it with the new beautiful lame that I got for my birthday. It was hard to use because the blade was curved and I wasn't used to it, but it made a beautiful ear on the bread.

The Ear

The crust sang beautifully. It crackled nicely when I bit into it and looked lovely, although I might have left it in the oven for a few more minutes. I did change the cooking time. The steaming was 27 minutes and the crisping was 10 minutes (took out when the internal temperature reached 212 degrees F).

Crumb

The bread was fabulously flavorful. 75g of the starter I used were whole wheat in order to increase the flavor and it was miraculous and I increased the hydration percentage to 78% instead of 68% in the original recipe. Unfortunately this meant that I did not develop quite the interior crumb that I wanted, but it still was nice and airy on the inside. Yum!

I did realize that I may need to recalibrate my thermometer that I use to check whether the bread is ready after reading a blogpost today, but I will just have to do that before the next loaf.

Note 09/02/11: We finished off the first loaf today. Further in the crumb looked a bit better.

When I made this loaf, I made a second one which I putin the refrigerator for 16 hours. Servia cooked it while Propertius II and I talked about the beginning of Iliad Book 14. She slashed it in the shape of a sun and I thought it was very cute.

The differences between the two: 1) both had flavor, the cold fermentation loaf was more sour a and a little more flavorful but a little less wheaty. 2) I baked the cold fermenation one slightly longer: 30 minutes under steam (because it came right out of the refridgerator) and 10 minutes crisping. The crust was a little thinner and it was more crispy than crunchy. Still lovely. 3) The crumb was better on cold fermentation. 4) There was less oven spring on cold fermentation.

Servia's Sun

Cold Fermentation Crumb

Bagels: A Fun, but Questionable Enterprise

So I decided to go wild and make some bagels. I now realize while some authors caution people about bagels: they're really hard. A bunch of the mistakes I made were from attempts to alter the recipe. However, most of the problem was that I was simply not prepared for the difficulty of the boiling process. I tried to make a modified version of Wild Yeast's Potato Peppercorn Bagels and a modified version of the whole grain bagels from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads.

Soudough Potato Peppercorn

Spiked Sourdough Whole Wheat

You can see that the bagels were not exactly perfect. I accidentally did not let the Potato bagels rise enough before they went in the refrigerator, and consequently there were very small and dense. I changed the whole wheat bagels so that they used sourdough starter spiked with 3/4 teaspoon of baker's yeast. I left them out for slightly too long and they overproofed. They became really wide and did not rise very much. However, they still taste fairly decent. I need to add more honey next time.

Maybe I'll try again some time in the next few weeks.

An Extremely Modified Transitional Multigrain Hearth Bread

Multigrain Bread

I love whole grains. More and more I find that white bread without at least 15% whole wheat is just too bland and I savor anything above 50% whole grains, with the 70% Whole Wheat Tartine Loaf being my favorite bread that I've made. I realized recently that I have a lot of unbleached starter sitting around and I needed to use it for something. So I decided to make Peter Reinhart's Transitional Multigrain Hearth Bread from Whole Grain Breads which is one of the few multigrain breads I have seen that does not require high gluten flour.. Instead of the Biga, I used my white starter.

Here is how I modified the recipe (it is now about 71% water instead of 61%):
Day 1: Soaker and Starter
Soaker

• 170g water
• 56.5g red whole wheat flour
• 56.5g rolled oats (I used steel cut by accident)
• 56.5g semolina flour (I didn't have any cornmeal around)
• 42.5g white whole wheat flour
• 7g flax seeds, whole or ground (I used toasted whole flax seeds)
• 7g wheat or oat bran
• 4 salt

1. Mix soaker ingredients together in a bowl for about 1 minute. It will form a dough that resembles thick porrage.
2. Cover loosely with plastic wrap at room temperature for 12-24 hours.

Starter

• 200g mature starter (unbleached flour)
• 100g unbleached bread flour
• 128g water
• 28g whole wheat flour

1. Blend ingredients together until fully hydrated.
2. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 12-24 hours.

Day 2:
Final Dough

• 456g starter (all of it)
• 400g soaker (all of it)
• 100g whole wheat flour
• 5g salt
• 20g sunflour seeds
• 20g pumpkin seeds
• 20g sesame seeds
• You may need a little bit of extra whole wheat flour for adjustments

Two hours before making the dough

1. Take the starter out of the refrigerator
2. Toast the sunflower, pumpkin, and sesame seeds. Let them cool.

For the final dough

1. Mix together the starter and soaker until fully combined. Warning: this was an oddly challenging process, but it does work. I used a danish dough whisk. The dough will be very wet and sticky.
2. Add in the whole wheat flour a little bit at a time and mix it into the dough.
3. Let the dough rest for 5 minutes.
4. Mix in the salt and the seeds. Make sure the dough fully absorbs the salt.
5. Using wet hands (the dough is very sticky) need the dough for two to three minutes.
6. Use the Peter Reinhart stretch-and-fold technique, but do two stretch and folds in a row every ten minutes for 40 minutes. This dough is very troublesome. Note that it will probably not come completely together until the second stretch and fold and it should become significantly silkier by the fourth stretch and fold. [1]
7. Let the dough rise between 78-82 degrees for four hours. Do a stretch-and-fold after the first, second, and third hours of the rise.
8. After four hours, turn the dough out onto a floured surface and fold it in half so both sides are lightly floured.
9. Then gently stretch it into a rectangle. Fold it up 2/3 of the way, and then fold the left side over 2/3 of the way. Fold the right side directly over the left side and pull the top down over the bottom to develop surface tension. Turn the dough seam side down and let rest under a large overturned bowl.
10. Let the dough bench rest for 20 minutes.
11. If the gluten structure seems weak, repeat this process again. If the dough spreads out with fairly even thickness, proceed to the final shaping.
12. Shape the dough any way you like for the final shaping. I decided to make a large batard. My shaping skills are pretty terrible, so I would suggest looking at some videos (e.g. Bread Cetera) for shaping suggestions. Place in a banneton or in a bowl or pan lined with a floured dishcloth.
13. Let the dough sit out at room temperature for 1 hour under plastic wrap or similar
14. Then, place the dough in the refrigerator for 8-16 hours.

Day 3:

1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees with a combo cooker or brothpot and stone. 
2. Take the bread out of the refrigerator 20 minutes before you are ready to bake.
3. When you are ready to bake, turn the bread onto a floured peel and score it.
4. Put the oven down to 450 degrees F and bake under steam for 20-25 minutes.
5. Remove the lid for keeping the steam in and bake for another 20-30 minutes until the outside of the bread is a rich brown and the internal temperature reads 212 degrees F.
6. Wait at least 1 hour before slicing.

Crust

Crumb

The bread is great. It's very hearty and seedy and it has a lovely, rich, nutty flavor. I will most definitely make it again.

I am sending this into Yeast Spotting. I hope it doesn't look like too much of an ugly duckling among the beautiful breads.

Endnotes

1. I did mixing techniques by trial and error which is why I don't think my bread rose as much as it could have it did not develop quite the crumb I was hoping. I am hoping to have better luck with this technique as written.

Three Breads in Three Days

Tartine Bread

Over the past three days I made three different types of bread. Each bread had its own failures and successes. None of them were perfect, but none of them were bad either. They all need work and I learned a lot. Luckily, we had a friend from out of town to help us taste all of the breads.

The first bread to be ready to eat was the More Sour Sourdough from Wild Yeast. As the temperature in my house is not ideal (even though the bread was rising in the oven with a pot of boiling water), I increased each of the rising times by about 1/3 and I chose the refrigerator option for the bread. I made one big mistake that came close to ruining the loaf. I used the "poke test" to try to determine if the bread had risen enough when it came out of the refrigerator. The poke test involves poking a small indentation into the bread with a finger; if the bread rises back up, it's not proofed enough. If it remained indented, it needs to proof longer. Anyway, the bread seemingly failed the poke test so I let it sit out for a few hours. The dough became softer as it warmed to room temperature and it ended up sticking to the banneton in such a way that I had to reshape the dough and let it proof again for a few hours. I think that if I had taken it out of the oven for about 20-30 min and then baked it, the bread would have come out a bit better. As it was, it was a bit dense but pretty nice, especially with brie while warm or toasted with brie in the morning.

Crumb

The crumb is still obviously far too dense, probably from the reshaping with not enough re-rising and not enough steam at the initial part of the bake. I will get it right one of these days. The crust is problematic. Although it is nice and crunchy, it has that serious dappled/multi-colored look too it which indicates that something went wrong. Probably because the dough re-rose. I think this might be the change in temperature from rising in the refrigerator (post being shaped) and then rising again at a warm room temperature.

Crust

The second bread that I made was a 70% finely-ground white whole wheat modified from Bread Cetera's Pain de Campagne. I changed the rising times, increased the hydration slightly (to compensate for the whole wheat) and replaced 70% of the flour with white-whole wheat. I thought this would make a whole wheat version of the exceptional bread i baked all through my senior year at my alma mater. Something did not quite work. The bread was reasonably light, but not as flavorful as I had hoped and it also had the small even air-bubbles of the my version of Peter Reinhart's Whole Wheat Hearth Bread instead of the large irregular holes of my original attempts at Pain de Campagne. I am not sure if this is because it was a 70% whole wheat bread or whether I did something else incorrectly in the process. I may try again with a 50% whole wheat or similar at some point.

Crust

 The crust was nice, but the crumb was just...wrong. I am not sure. I think I might need to add more water and try a different shaping technique. Thoughts will be forthcoming.

Crumb

 

The final bread was the crown of the bunch, although not a polished gem by any stretch of the imagination. This was the Country Loaf from Tartine Bread. Once again, this book is absolutely incredible. I finished reading it this weekend in between doing other things and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Anyway, the bread had a few problems in the process of making it, including (I think) adding too much levain, having to leave it longer than intended and changing the temperature during the initial bulk fermentation, and extreme trouble during the shaping process. Worst, I don't have a combo cooker, so I improvised with my stone and an upside-down angel cake pan. The angel cake pan was not nearly large enough, as it turns out, for the way the dough wanted to oven spring, and obviously hampered the oven spring. On the other hand, the dough was moist and flavorful and the crust was wonderful and crunchy.

Crust

Crumb

The crumb has lovely irregular holes, but obviously the bread did not have enough oven spring (because of my faux-pas with the cake-pan), but I can see the potential for this bread. I am very excited. I think this bread is going to be my new wonderful go-to artisan loaf. I found that I have a large broth pot that can be overturned and put in the oven which should allow for enough room for the bread to expand while I look for a good and cheap combo cooker.

In the process of making this bread, I realized that part of the reason that my breads have such uneven oven spring is that they really are not getting enough steam. The home oven is meant to vent steam and it's good at it. My oven at my alma mater was designed to vent steam, but it was really awful at it, which meant that the bread could be steamed much better in that oven than my home oven (hence some of the problem with early loaves). So, except for baguettes and pizza, I will now try the upside-down broth-pot method over my stone to see if I can accomplish better steaming. Results forthcoming.

One other thing I realized making this bread is that my approach to bread baking is not very systematic. At school, things worked about 80% of the time by either fluke or beginner's luck and so I just kept trying new things. When I was having trouble shaping the Tartine Country Bread, I complained that I needed a baker to hang around in our kitchen for the day and help troubleshoot, or at least someone who made successful bread. My mom mentioned that a number of her friends could make one great loaf, but that's all they did. She reminded me that most people perfect a loaf and stick with it. I have never done this. So, my new approach will be to perfect one loaf at a time, starting with the Tartine Loaf (while making the amazingly successful pizza dough in between). When I have perfected the loaf, I will move on. Wish me luck!