Bread Shortage

I don't really know how it happened but I actually ran out of bread. Normally my freezer is quite well stocked. Well at least it give me the inspiration to try some different stuff. One of which is a recipe I've been working on that is 100% whole wheat flour. Well, technically it is not 100% but close enough. Basically I start with the smallest amount of white starter and just double its weigh many times using whole wheat flour. My technique seems to work ok, but the crumb is still a little more dense than I would like it to be, but it is improving greatly. I use a 100% hydration starter and also make a 100% hydration soaker before mixing the dough. I figure this will allow for the maximum amount of time for the bran to soften, giving the dough the best chance to form a proper amount of gluten. The taste has always been marvelous but the texture is still a little dense. I would like a thicker crust to, but I think that has to do with the inadequacies of my oven.


Then there is the never fail recipes of the bread bible. Still in the mood for whole grain breads I found myself stuck on the pages of the french sourdough boule. The mild mixture of rye and whole wheat flour makes for the most perfect small loaves. Rose's recipe comes through flawlessly once again.

Conquering my baking fears

So, I've made pie dough before but very rarely and I've never been satisfied, long story short I've avoided the whole thing like the plague for a long time. Whenever I would read about how to make it, it seems so intimidating. I mean you have to cut the butter into the flour, but not to much. Then you have to make sure all your ingredients are super cold, and don't warm up while you are try to get the butter incorporated into the flour. I don't know it just seems that every step of the process there is so much that could go irreversible wrong. But with that said I feel my skills have improved with bread so I should go back and give it a try. I decided to go with the spicy spinach quiche from the pastry and pie bible. And, yes I pretty much own all the books rose levy beranbaum has written. Well I thought that the best way to try this time would be to go about it by hand, that way I may have a sense of how the dough feels and if the butter starts to melt I would have some clue and could throw it into the freezer. Its also pretty cool to know you can get the job done without real fancy tools. So following rose's instruction as much as possible, I have cold butter ready for the flour mixture.

I just cut the butter into the flour mixture by rubbing the butter with my finger tips, seems to work pretty well. Then back into the freezer for about 10 minutes to let the fat hardened up before bring on the liquid.

Once the butter was really solid again I felt it was safe to work in the liquid. I just used the minimum amount of water that rose's recipe calls for. Adding to much water is one of the biggest fears for me I guess. This step is of making a well and incorporating the liquid is not quite what is explained in the recipe, but its one of the few things I'm fairly comfortable with so I went with my instinct.

After very little mixing, it seemed like there is not nearly enough water but I wasn't going add any more because with my little experience in this area I decided I better stay on the original plan. If it doesn't work, well at least I know what doesn't work for the future. After an hour in the fridge wrapped in plastic wrap the dough looked much different, it actually looked right.

I wasn't to worried about rolling the dough out as it quite similar to making rolled cookies which I done before. But how to get the dough from my counter top to the pan??? I used with success the roll the dough over the rolling pin method. This is where I was becoming very excited as there are only a few more things to go wrong, like baking to long or something, but thats easy to control, just don't fall asleep. I think one thing that doesn't drive me crazy is measuring out all these ingredients, I mean baking bread only requires four. I think the quiche will be worth it though.

Mix it up and bake the crust and prepare the filling:

Oh and never waste leftover dough, I just laid it on top of the quiche in random spots.

Again, we're talking easy part now, just bake until a knife comes out clean.

I can actually see the flakey layers in the crust. All and all, I am finally satisfied with my ability to make pie dough, it wasn't nearly as bad as I feared.

A Forgotten Favorite

We're approaching the anniversary of the birth of my sourdough starter which has given so many wonderful loaves of bread. I can't remember exactly when I started it but I know it was in June. I have decided that I would remake the first loaf of true sourdough bread I ever made. That specifically being the Basic Sourdough from The Bread Bible by Rose Beranbaum. I have to say it was much easier now than it was nearly a year ago.
There something more special about this bread than just the fact that is was my official entrance into the sourdough baking world, if there was a perfect bread and a recipe for it, this is it. Its really fun to make breads with lots of stuff in them and different flavors, but it is just magical how much flavor can come from simple flour, water, and salt. Rose really nailed this recipe down. So I start like normal, measure everything out ( I highly recommend doing this no matter how serious you are about baking ), and putting it together. In the picture below I have already mixed the water with some of the flour.

Oh, and there one more very special element to making this bread. A friend has just come back from his travels around Europe. Being a bread nut like myself he had to visit the Poilane bakery in Paris, and he was able to get the baker who was there at the time to give a huge batch of the salt that they use. Its the salt Lionel Poilane used to use himself. Its the called Sel Gris I think and when all said and done, it taste like salt, and I personally can't tell a whole lot of difference but its quite cool to be using the Poilane approved salt in my very own breads! Here a quick pic:

So basically I like to get the salt into the water and let it dissolve a bit, especially this Sel Gris because its very coarse, but seems to dissolve nicely, it even seems at little wet. How can salt be wet? I don't know but whatever, lets move along. I always let the dough rest a bit after getting the dough roughly together as such:

Then just put the stiff starter in once when you start kneading and make a nice smooth mass of dough. A couple of rises later, then shape and let it rise for the final time. This is where I got really worried. I have doing a lot of work around the house lately and as such I let the dough overproof, you know just a little ( ok it was way overproofed ). Anyway I went about transferring the dough to the dough as carefully as humanly possible and I skipped any idea of slashing. I think this is where some experience has paid off because they came out of the oven all puffed up and beautiful!

Oh and just once more thing I love about this recipe, they make the perfect little one pound loaves which are just wonderful. And the crumb:

I really wasn't going for the big holes thing but I guess the long fermentation and VERY carefully handling made for a great texture:

And of course the very best part about this recipe, the taste is fantastic, personally remaking this bread has reminded me what I love so much about baking in general. In fact I'm just about out of this batch so I'm going to get so starter going for another.

Happy Baking everyone!

Baked Potato Bread - Now I'll I need is some soup

This bread should be served at every steak house in america. It is AWESOME! The first recipe was put together by the creator of the The Fresh Loaf website and was the result of some freestyle baking. But I just made it last night and I wanted to get a recipe down that was a little more exact than the first version given. Before I do that, I want to take a second to thank Floydm for giving this a try and coming up with it. I just needed a metric recipe by weight and now I feel I have it. So I converted the best I could the volumetric recipe to weights than I scaled it up a little bit but since I knew I was going to have to play with the flour amount I didn't know how much the dough would weigh. When I make this again I will probably scale it up a little more to make two slightly larger loaves. But I kept track of how much flour I added so I feel very confident that this formula is pretty good.

This gave me a very wet dough, the water content seems very low but I guess a lot of water comes from the mashed potatoes and sour cream because I did get a very wet dough. Pictured is the all the ingredients laid out and then the dough after it comes together:


Some important notes: I measured the bacon first then fried and chopped it, I put the bacon grease into the dough as well. The grocery store was strangely out of chives so I felt green onions would work as they are also commonly found on baked potatoes. The potatoes were boiled until soft, the potatoes were then drained, some of the water for boiling the potatoes was reserved to be used as the water in the dough, the remainder of the water was discarded. Then the drained potatoes were mashed. I think thats all the important stuff. Here's how it turned out.


And believe me its so good you'll want to eat the dough before its baked. And yes it really does smell and taste like a baked potato. Like I said now I need to find some soup.

demegrad