Bread Log 14: Sourdough Semolina

Sorry for the long time away folks, it's been hard to find the time to sit down and write!  The opera season here in Minneapolis is in full swing, and that means the baritone part of my title is getting more of my time than the bread portion.  That being said, in spite of not hopping on here to write about it I have done a bit o baking in the past month.  I'm going to try and hop on every Monday night and at least post a quick blurb about one of the breads and of course some pictures. Well enough yammering . . . on with the bread!!

For number 14 it was back to Semolina bread.  For those of you who missed my first semolina bake and are curious as to what exactly that means HERE is a link.  There are were a couple of notable differences between this formula and the former, most notably the use of a sourdough levain rather than a commercial yeast preferment.  This doesn't have a drastic effect on the way the dough handles, but it does make it a bit slower to rise, and gives it a bit of a tangy flavor which compliments the seasame seeds.  I suppose I just gave away the second difference, that being, this formula incorporates seasame seeds in the dough itself.  As I am wont to do I toasted the seasame seeds before the mix, to bring out their flavor.
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There they are just roasting away.  Because I did this just before the mix, I compensated for their heat a bit with cooler water temperature.  Here is a pic of the mix itself, gotta love that golden color of the durum flour.
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This bake was really pretty cozy,  I hit my target temp and the dough acted pretty much as I expected.  I spent most of my energy working on the shaping of the loaves.  After my first braiding attempt I was excited to try it again with some new patterns.  So this time I created a partially seeded 4 braid, different 5 braid, and one tapered seeded batard in the style we used to make at the bakery.  Slide show time!

We'll start off with the 5 braid.  This was the most complex braid I've done and all things considered I think I managed it fairly well.
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Once the braid was done it had to be flipped on its side to present the proper side.  Did I mention that all of these braids and a TON more are in Hamelman's book?  I swear if I don't have you all sold on that tome yet . . .  
Here is a picture of the finished loaf
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The quad braid was my favorite, not only because I corrected my seeding error from my first attempt, but because the pattern gives the loaf a lot of height.  Here is the sequence:
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Quad braid final shots
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Last but not least here are some before and after shots for the batard.
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The second shot shows loaf just before I put it in the oven, you can see the single slash from the curved lame running down the middle.  In the last shot you can really gauge the expansion of the loaf by how much unseeded area is exposed . . . plus it makes it purdy.

All in all a successful bake!  Thanks for bearing with the low post volume of the past few months, but I plan to start making up for lost time with a double header next Monday.

-Vino

Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp:  71.6
Water Temp: 62.6
Flour Temp:  69.8 (averaged between the two)
Preferment Temp: 73.7
Final Temp: 76.3 (target 76 BOOYAH!)
Autolyse: None
Mix: Standard incorporation + 3 minutes at speed 2, cut on bench, 3 minutes at speed 2, 1.5 minutes at speed 3
Bulk Fermentation: 2 hours, one fold at 30 another at 1:15
Bench Proof: shape, 15 minute rest, shape, 1 hour post shape then in the fridge over-night
Bake: 45min for the boule, 28 for the braid @ 460 degrees
Steam: Tried parchment wrapping, also steamed on entry.

Bread Log 12-13: The longest post EVAH!

Sorry for the long absence, it has been an exciting month in many ways.  New jobs, GREs, trips to Portland, and the new season at Minnesota Opera have all conspired against my time to write.  I did however, manage to do a bit of baking so to make up for lost time, this post will cover 2 different breads: Golden Raisin bread, and Olive Levain, with a brief aside about a trip we took to the Pearl Bakery when we were out in Portland. . . well ON WITH THE SHOW!

Act I: Golden Raisin Bread

This bread is the first mixed yeast bread I've done on the blog, utilizing both instant yeast akin to the first posts and my starter like the most recent breads.  This serves not only to ensure a lively dough with a quick development, it also mitigates some of the acidity we would have from using levain alone.
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Like the currants used in the currant hazelnut bread, I chose to rehydrate the raisins, which gives them a better texture and decreases the likelihood of them turning into little charcoal briquettes in the oven.  This isn't asked for in the formula, and is definitely not required, but it was the way we always dealt with our raisins at the bakery, and I'm used to the way they incorporate when they've been hydrated so I stick to what I know.  The other addition for this dough was rolled oats.
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Like most grains, the rolled refers to the level of processing it has been put through. put in order from least processed to most processed it would look something like:

Whole Oats => Steel Cut Oats => Rolled Oats => Instant Oats => Oat Flour

In this case processing doesn't necessarily mean there have been mad scientist-esque experiments run upon it, just that it has been ground, par-cooked, or cut to facilitate quicker cooking.  Being toward the middle of the spectrum you can deal with rolled oats in a number of ways depending on the end result you have in mind.  If you want for instance to have more textural difference you could incorporate your oats with the rest of your dry ingredients.  For this bread, we were looking for the flavor of the oats and not necessarily the texture, and so the oats were allowed to soak in the doughs water for 15 minutes prior to the rest of the dry ingredients being added.
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The raisins were added after the full mix had been done.  I cut the dough and added the raisins incrementally to speed up the incorporation, but I still wasn't able to get the kind of overall distribution I would have liked.
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It does however make a rather pretty picture so I thought I'd include it :).   The bread turned out well.  With the luck I have had volume wise in the past few logs I thought I would try again for a fendu style loaf:
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Fendu Can Do!  For those of you just happening upon the blog a Fendu loaf, is a boule which is bisected with a rolling pin then put in a proofing basket.  This bisect acts as a natural weakpoint during the bake so the bread expands naturally from that line, without needing to be slashed with a razor. For the second loaf I made a batard which I slashed with a straight lame, I was pretty happy with the look.
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Before                                                                         After

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Last is the obligatory crumb shot:
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All in all it was a tasty bread.  I would be curious to try it a gain using levain alone, adding perhaps a small amount of honey to work in tandem with the raisins to offset the tartness of the starter . . . ach ruminations for another day! If you want to see the details for this bake it will be with the other details at the close of the post.

Curtain Falls - End of Act I

Intermezzo - The Pearl in The Pearl
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Whit and I recently got back from a trip to Portland, OR to see my sister / brother-in-law and meet our brand new nephew Ollie.  Though that may have been the main purpose for the visit no visit to Portlandia would be complete without heading to the pearl district to oogle things we can't afford, go to Powell's City of Books, and get some bread at The Pearl Bakery.  The last of which brings back memories of my bakery days.
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Here I am with a mouth full of ham and gruyere croissant.  Though it is a larger operation, the Pearl makes some very similar breads to what I used to make back in the day, from baguettes with poolish to large rustic Italian loaves.
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That is the mezzo pugliese we bought to go with the mushroom risotto I had in the works for dinner that night.  Tis a very pretty sight, and delicious to boot! I also picked up part of a pullman loaf of Vollkornbrot.  Pullman pans are long sealable metal loaf pans that are used for certain kinds of rye breads. The name roughly means whole-grain bread, and they aren't kiddin':
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Apart from being packed with seeds and grain, it is INCREDIBLY dense.  That 4x4x7 loaf weighed in at two pounds!  Not surprisingly buying a whole loaf would be a bit overkill, so you actually purchase the bread by weight. I have some pullman loaves of my own to look forward to in the months to come, that's right, Rye is on the horizon.

End of Intermezzo

Act II - Olive Levain

In addition to galavanting about the countryside, we had a visit from one of our closest friends the past week.  In honor of her trip I let her pick the bread, thus Olive Levain!  This was another nostalgic bread as it is quite similar to the Kalamata Olive Bread we made back at the bakery.  The base dough is pretty similar to the Vermont Sourdough from a few posts back, but substituting whole wheat for rye flour, and reducing the salt content to compensate for the saltiness of the olives. 
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There are the stars of the show.  After checking them to be sure the pits had all been removed, I spread them out on some paper towels to get rid of some of the extra moisture, to lower the likelihood of them becoming projectiles as the loaf starts to bake.

I also opted to go for a long cold rise in the refrigerator, rather than allowing them to fully proof at room temperature.  Particularly with sourdoughs, this can really enhance the flavor of the bread.  In order to do it well however you need to know what kind of temperature you have in you fridge.  Enter the fridge thermometer:
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This was far fancier than I had originally aimed for in a thermometer, but it does have some nice features, such as tracking the high and low peak temperatures, so you can seen what range your fridge runs at. As for how to retard your bread, just be sure it is covered well so as to avoid drying out, and chuck it in!
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Ultimately though the crumb looked good  I didn't get the volume I would have liked, and I suspect it has to do with the proofing.  The next cool proofing I do, I will let it do 1/3 of it's proof at room temp before committing it to the chill chest.
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Here are the finished loaves followed by a final shot of the two loaves side by side:
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For some reason the last photo made me think of a famous bit of art, so I had a little bit of photo shop fun.
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Coincidence?  You be the judge . . . I'll leave you with that haunting image and a promise to be back more regularly as things calm down here at the homestead.  Thanks for reading.

Curtain Falls

Credits

-Vino
-Grant Wood
-Yeast

Here are the details from Bake 1, Golden Raisin:
Room Temp:  75.2
Water Temp: 62.6
Flour Temp:  73.5
Preferment Temp: 75.6
Final Temp: 79.3 (target 76)
Autolyse: None
Mix: Standard incorporation + 3 minutes at speed 2, cut on bench, 2 minutes at speed 3
Bulk Fermentation: 1.5 Hours
Bench Proof: shape, 10 minute rest, shape, 1:15 total
Bake: ~28 min @460
Steam: Spritzed bread, steamed on load and for 30 seconds after.

Here are the details from Bake 2, Olive Levain:
Room Temp:  76.3
Water Temp: 57.7
Flour Temp:  73.9
Preferment Temp: 77.0
Final Temp: 76.5 (target 76)
Autolyse: None
Mix: Standard incorporation + 3 minutes at speed 2, cut on bench, 3 minutes at speed 2, cut on bench, 2 minutes on speed 2 +1 minute on speed 3, Incorporation of olives by hand
Bulk Fermentation: 2.5 hours with folds every 35 minutes
Bench Proof: shape, 10 minute rest, shape, 16 hours in the fridge
Bake: ~45 min @ 460 degrees
Steam: Spritzed bread, steamed on load and for 1 minute post

Bread Log 11: A small post for a large bread

Technical difficulties have delayed the breaducation video post for the time being, but the bread logs shall continue unabated.  My most recent bake was Hamelman's "Miche, Pointe-a-Calliere", and voila:
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There it is in all its glory.  No before you think that I've lost my recently acquired knack for getting decent volume out of a loaf, this bread is actually supposed to have a low profile.  In fact, most of the elements of making this bread lend toward that goal.  First, it is a VERY wet dough, 80% hydration, where a standard dough is in the upper 60's. The second is an extremely high percentage of whole wheat flour.  Up until now the whole wheat loaves you have seen have hovered around equal parts bread flour and whole wheat.  This formula officially asks exclusively for high extraction wheat flour, a flour in which a small percentage of the bran has been removed.  This puts it closer in spectrum to whole wheat (0% bran removal) than bread flour (100% bran removal).  Because I couldn't get my hands on any high extraction flour I followed Hamelman's substitution suggestion using 90% whole wheat, and 10% bread flour.  The higher whole grain content makes mixing to develop gluten a slower process thanks to all those sharp edges puncturing the gluten network.  To counter this I gave the loaf an extra long autolyse, which gave the dough an extra boost of development without having to use the somewhat counterproductive mixer.

The third element contributing to the flatter loaf, and the most definitive is the shaping.  Rather than a tight first shaping followed by a tight second shaping, this loaf only received a rough first shaping followed by a light second shaping, similar to the rustic loaves from early posts. 

The final reason why this loaf is flatter is because:
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It's HUGE.  Miche is a term for a large round loaf, emphasis on large.  For the production version of this formula the suggested scaling weight is 5 pounds, and it's not uncommon for a miche to weigh more than that.  The home formula is just shy of 4 pounds and it still nearly exceeded the width of my pizza stones. Another point of reference shot:
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And here is a shot of the crumb.
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I was curious to try the loaf as Hamelman insisted that the loaf be allowed to rest for 12 hours before eating, and stated that it's flavor would gradually change over the course of a few days.  While I know this is common enough for large naturally leavened loaves with a high percentage of whole grain, I have a hard time waiting an hour to cut into bread so this was arduous.  After letting it cool on a rack, I wrapped it in linen to rest the remainder of it's time.  My initial impression was that it was a dense, highly acidic bread with a strong undercurrent of wheat.  True to his prediction however this balance shifted over the course of the next 3 days, the sourness receding and the wheat flavor coming to dominate the impression.  I went from shrugging over the results to loving them, it makes me more excited than ever to get to the heavy rye breads some of which require a 24 hour rest.  Next week will be a light one again, as Whit and I are going to visit my new nephew, but I am in the process of baking as I type this, and will try to post the results while we are on the move.  Who knows, perhaps I'll even bake out there! 

-Vino

Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp:  74.5
Water Temp: 51.8
Flour Temp:  75.6
Preferment Temp: 80.1
Final Temp: 75.7 (target 76)
Autolyse: 50 minutes
Mix: Standard incorporation + 2 minutes at speed 2, cut on bench, 2 minutes at speed 3
Bulk Fermentation: 2.5 hours with folds at 30, 1:15, and 2:00
Bench Proof: shape, 10 minute rest, shape, 2:15
Bake: ~45 min @ 460 degrees for 20 min then 420 for the rest
Steam: Spritzed bread, steamed on load and for 30 seconds after.

Bread Log 10: Vermont Sourdough

Yes my friends, the time has come to embrace the natural . . . to shake off the yoke forced upon us by the tyranical commercial yeast barons. . .

You'll have to forgive me, this is why my wife doesn't allow me sugar after 9:00 pm. 

Bad jokes aside, it is a nice change of pace to be working on sourdough breads again, they are wonderfully flavorful and have a longer shelf-life than their commercially yeasted cousins. This is all thanks to the use of natural yeast in the form of a starter also known as levain.  As I was preparing for this post I realized that while I have explained many aspects of technique and materials I have failed to talk at ALL about one of baking's most important ingredients: yeast. Every formula you have thus far seen on the this blog has used commercial yeast as its only source of leavening, but there are a number of types of yeast available on the market:

Cake Yeast - comes in foil wrapped blocks, and before I got more experience as a baker I thought of this as the real-deal yeast that was probably used at all the professional bakeries.  Turns out not to be the case. Why not? It is highly perishable, and as a result can yield less consistent results.  You still may see older recipes which ask for it, but I'd google some conversions rather than worrying about getting your hands on it.

Active Dry Yeast - This is the only yeast I interacted with growing up, in its iconic little foil packets. It contains little oblong granules of live and dead yeast cells with some growth medium thrown in for good measure.  It is the least perishable form of yeast living for up to a year at room temperature, or over a decade frozen.  It does however need to be rehydrated (or "bloomed") before incorporating it in a recipe, and can suffer thermal shock if this isn't done at the right temperature.

Instant Yeast -  This is what I (and the bakery I worked at) use.  It is very similar to active dry yeast, but has smaller granules and a better percentage of live to dead cells.  It is more temperamental than active dry about storage, but when kept in the freezer like I keep mine . . . well lets just say I bought a pound of it when I left the bakery 2+ years ago, and haven't had to buy more.  It also has the considerable advantage of being able to be added directly to the dry ingredients without having to concern yourself with blooming it.

 Here it is in all its not very impressive glory.  I store the majority of it in a big mason jar in the deepest part of the freezer, and keep a small supply in a small mason jar at the front.  If you can't find instant at your supermarket, you can get it online, a single vacuum packed pound of the stuff will last you for a mighty long time.







So if I'm not using my beloved tyranical instant dry yeast what am I using? This:

If you guessed a blob at the bottom of a piece of tupperware, you get a gold star for the day!  This is my starter, and though it may not look like it, it may older than I am.  I received a bit of starter from one of my colleagues at the bakery which he had been using regularly for many years.

Keeping a starter alive is not a terribly complex process, though it does take consistency.  At the bakery the main levain we used (both white and rye varieties) were fed 3 times a day every day, and over time that yields an amazingly consistent culture.  When I am not using my starter regularly (as has been the case for the past few months of bread blogging) I refresh it a handful of times a week.

A refreshment involves moving a small amount of the developed levain to a new tub, adding fresh flour and water, mixing it together then letting it ripen for 6-8 hours. If you aren't planning on using it for a while it can be placed in the fridge after it has ripened.

In order to get my starter back up to speed for the coming formulae, I have been refreshing it 3 times a day 2 to 4 days a week for the past few weeks.  Most importantly I always refresh it at least 3 times consecutively before the final build for a recipe.

The final build is very similar to the preferments used in the earlier bread logs.  They vary from liquid builds (much akin to the poolish) to stiff builds (like the biga).  Unlike their predecessors however, they comprise the entirety of the yeast used in the formula.


 . . . enough with the back story. The formula for this week is a predominately white flour dough with a bit of whole rye added for flavor and extensibility. By in large, the process of working with a naturally leavened bread is like that of what you've seen in prior posts.  The only really changes are that of degree.  The extra enzymatic activity and acidity of the dough slows down the doughs development which requires extra autolyse and mix times and possibly additional folds during bulk fermentation.  Beyond that, the bulk fermentation and final fermentation tend to be a bit extended.

I chose to make 5 smaller loaves so that Whit could share them with her co-workers.  It also allowed me the opportunity to play with my shaping and slash patterns.
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These are the 3 batards.  The outer two were a longer pointed shape the inner obviously more stubby. I did a single slash on the stubby one, a double slash on one of the tapered:
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Then I decided to try something different with the last tapered batard and tried some cuts with scissors:
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Yeah that didn't pan out so well, but it still tasted delicious! The cuts I made were at too steep an angle and their own weight resealed them before they could spring open in the oven.  This yielded an overly dense loaf.  It is easy to see the difference in volume in this side by side shot.
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Lastly, I made a couple of boules and was sure to give them decently deep slashes:
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My moderate scissor technique aside, the bread turned out quite well.  Baking it also reminded me how much I love the smell of sourdough bread fresh out of the oven.  That tangy acidity courtesy of the cultures lactobacilli is unmistakable even in the aroma.  In the next few days I'll be posting a video breaducation post of the mixing process I taped during this bake, so keep your eyes peeled.  One last thing before I go.  I need a name for my starter, so I'm going to open it up to my 5 or 6 readers out there to propose suggestions.  Just leave your ideas in the comments below!

-Vino

Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp:  75.7
Water Temp: 65.7
Flour Temp:  78
Preferment Temp: 85.2
Final Temp: 80.5 (target 76)
Autolyse: 30 minutes
Mix: Standard incorporation + 2 minutes at speed 2, cut on bench, 2 minutes at speed 3
Bulk Fermentation: 2 hours with folds at 30, 60, and 90 mintues
Bench Proof: shape, 15 minute rest, shape, 2.5 hours for the batards, and around 3 hours for the boules with  0 minutes in the chiller
Bake: ~25 min @ 460 degrees
Steam: Spritzed bread, steamed on load and for 30 seconds after. and added skirts of tinfoil inside the oven to slow the venting.

Bread Log 9: Semolina (Durum) Bread

Back in my days at the bakery one of my favorite breads was a semolina bread coated in sesame seeds. The formula I baked from for this entry is fairly different than what we used back then, but the resulting bread still made me nostalgic.

Semolina is a flour milled from Durum wheat.  It is a pale gold color, and is used throughout the Mediteranian and surrounding regions for everything from bread and couscous to pasta.
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I put some semolina flour side by side with an all purpose flour so you can see the difference.  What you can't tell from the picture is that Semolina also has an unusual texture, more coarse but not jagged.  The less milled varieties feel a LOT like ball bearings when you roll it between your fingers.  This is probably why the flour is often used to dust the bottoms of proofed loaves to facilitate sliding them into the oven. The finished dough retains that lovely pale gold color, and has a light almost buttery flavor.  Sesame seeds are often paired with the bread and add a nice nutty flavor as well as a striking visual appeal.

The first Semolina formula in Hamelman's book uses an unusual preferment called a flying sponge.  I will let you conjure your own mental image for that.  It differs from other preferments featured thus far in that it contains the yeast for the entire mix (usually some is added during the mixing stage as well), includes a small measure of sugar, and only gets made an hour and a half before the mix as opposed to 12-16 hours prior.

Because the preferment represented 40% of the doughs flour I chose not to add my customary autolyse.  Despite a final temperature of 4 degrees warmer than I had aimed for, the mix went quite well.  When it came time for the bake I opted to try something new.  Half of the dough was shaped into a standard boule, and the other half I divided into 5 strips.

Here you can see I have already shaped 2 out of the 5 strips into longer baguette-like shapes.  While making the strips into boules before turning them into baguettes wold have yielded a more even mass, it would have also required three shapings to achieve the final shape. I didn't want to over handle the dough.

Here you can see the fist shaping in the middle, with the elongated second shaping below it.  The one at the top has been seeded.

Speaking of seeding, here was my seeding set up.  The shaped loaf is rolled on the wet paper towel in the left pan, then transferred to the sesame seeds on the right.  I did this with 2 out of the 5 strands.

This was the result!  I looked up how to do a 5 strand braid and voila!  Ideally I wanted the two sesame strands to be separated, but in my braiding naivete I alternated them at the onset.  A mistake my wife assures me I would have known not to make if I had gone through grade school as a girl.







Regardless, I was quite happy with the end results.  After the great volume I got in the beer bread, I tried to achieve a similar level of mix this week and I was rewarded for the effort!  Here are some shots of the finished boule slashed with the straight lame:
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The volume is really good, and if you look close you can see a speckling of little bubbles on the side of the loaf.  That is a sign that I was getting good steam!  In addition to my fancy steamer I also chose to mist the bread lightly upon loading to see how that would effect the results.
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Yeah, that's my high-tech misting apparatus.  I used it on the braided loaf as well.  The braided loaf didn't grow tremendously, but it was still nice and light relative to it's size so I was satisfied.
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It was a fun bake and a delicious bread.  The next time I encounter Semolina it will use a sourdough starter, and I look forward to seeing the differences.  I was going to be baking my first sourdough bread on Monday, but it looks like it will have to wait a day, because I have a job interview!! Wish me luck, and thanks as always for reading.

-Vino

Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp:  77.7
Water Temp: 51.3
Flour Temp:  75.9 (averaged between the two)
Preferment Temp: 81.2
Final Temp: 79.9 (target 76)
Autolyse: None
Mix: Standard incorporation + 3 minutes at speed 2, cut on bench, 3 minutes at speed 3
Bulk Fermentation: 1.5 hours with 1 fold at 30, and 1 at 60
Bench Proof: shape, 15 minute rest, shape, 1.25 hours for the boule, and around 1.75 hours for the braided loaf  no time in the chiller
Bake: 35min for the boule, 28 for the braid @ 460 degrees
Steam: Spritzed bread, steamed on load and for 30 seconds after.