Bread Log 6: Sonnenblumenbrot

BAM!  Pictures right off the bat . . . this way you know what you are reading about, plus it makes my link more appealing when I link this to other sites ;).

I opted for the German name for a little flair.  Literally it means sunflower bread, and that ain't an understatement.  Between the toasted sunflower seeds in the dough, and those used to coat the loaves there is just shy of half a pound of them in this formula.  As per Hamelman's recommendation I toasted the sunflower seeds before they were incorporated into the dough, to bring out the nuttiness in their flavor.  Similar to the hazelnuts from last time, it was a simple process of spreading them out on a sheet pan and letting them warm themselves in the oven for a few minutes.
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Apart from the seeds the formula features two more additions not yet featured here on the blog.  The first is Rye Chops . . . or it would have been if I had been able to find them.  Believe me when I say I did my damnedest to track some down.  Poor Whit got drug to about 5 different co-ops and grocery stores last night in their pursuit.  Ultimately I was forced to use a substitution. Before I get to what I used, here is a brief little aside to help you all understand why I used it and a few terms I'll be bandying about for this as well as future posts.

After grains such as rye are hulled what you are left with is the rye berry (or whole rye), comprising endosperm, germ and bran.  If that whole rye is put under rollers and coarsely cracked it is appropriately called cracked rye. As near as I've been able to tell rye chops are what results from the whole rye being cut more finely into pieces (as in steel cut oats), though it is possible it has been par-cooked.  And if it is par cooked with pressure and rolled out you flaked or rolled rye. The more the grain has been cut, or flattened the faster it will be able to be cooked, which is why you can use a cold water hydration with rolled rye and rye chops, but must boil cracked rye and rye berries.

Because rye has a distinct flavor I wanted to use that grain.  The closest ingredient I was able to find was rye berries.  I soaked them over night in water, and this morning I boiled them for around an hour.  Here are some shots of the process.
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Here are the unsoaked/boiled rye berries
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Here they are again, post boiling
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This is a picture of the fully cooked rye berries beside their raw counterparts.
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As that last picture makes clear, the rye berries absorbed a great deal of the water.  So much so that I was forced to reduce the volume I added to the mix by 25%.  To help approximate the texture the finer rye chops would have added to the bread I pulsed the berries the food processor before incorporating them.

The second new addition with this formula is the use of malt syrup, which I was able to buy at a local home brew store called Northern Brewer.
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It's a sweet syrup created from malted barley, and while Hamelman makes it clear that in its absence honey can be substituted, it has such a distinct flavor I wanted to use it if I could.

For the mix I decided to add the toasted sunny seeds, as well as the rye berries at the start of the mix rather than as an addition at the end.  This was a change for me.  At the bakery we always added additions such as grain mixtures at the end after the gluten in the dough had been fully developed.  Adding the grains earlier, can slow down that development as the sharp grains can puncture and tear the gluten network.  However, adding them early allows you to see how they affect the overall hydration of the dough before the final steps of the mix process.  Which in turn, affords you the ability to correct the hydration of the dough more easily.  Both ways have their merits.

For today, since I was unsure how much (if any) the rye berries would add to the doughs hydration, I wanted to get them in the mix as soon as possible.  So I opted for the latter method.  It was definitely a change of pace, there was a lot more volume in the mix bowl than I am used to, and the grains created additional friction during the mix which resulted in a higher final temp than I had desired, which had an effect on the bulk fermentation and bench proof times.

You may have noticed from the initial picture, that the outside of the bread is also covered with sunflower seeds.  In order to achieve that effect your roll the freshly shaped dough on a damp towel then again on a bed of seeds.
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Here was my terribly fancy set up
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and here are the loaves proofing after being coated.  Notice I didn't cover the side facing up.  This is because that side will eventually be on a pizza stone, and as much as I like toasted sunflower seeds, charred sunflower seeds are a wee less desireable.
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Lastly here are some pictures of the individual loaves as well as a nice shot of the crumb, courtesy of Whit.

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Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp:  73.6
Water Temp: 73.4
Flour Temp:  71.1
Preferment Temp: 74.1
Final Temp: 81.3 (target 75)
Autolyse: 20 min
Mix: 3 minutes on speed 2, followed by cut on bench, followed by 1 minutes on speed 2 + 1.5 minutes on speed 3
Bulk Fermentation: 1.5 hours (shortened from 2 due to high temp) with one fold at 30 minutes and one at 60
Bench Proof: shape, 10 minute rest, shape, 60 minute bench proof with the latter two loaves spending ~35 minutes each in the fridge to retard development
Bake: ~15 minutes @ 460 degrees followed by ~15 at 425
Steam: New Steamer used pre-load and for ~30 seconds post load

This will be the last post for a few weeks, as we are packing up to move across town, and it will take a while to get settled in the new place. Rest assured they will continue.

Thanks for reading!

Vino

Bread Log 5: Whole-Wheat Bread with Hazelnuts and Currants

'Ello again all.  In spite of the fact that I have never made this particular whole wheat bread recipe, I feel like I am stepping back on to more familiar ground.  Like one of my standby sourdough formulas, it is at its core, a whole wheat bread utilizing 50% whole-wheat flour and 50% bread flour.  The major difference is that this uses commercial yeast and a pate fermentee preferement totalling 25% flour weight, while my sourdough uses only my starter for leavening and only has 15% of its volume prefermented.

Now that I have alienated most of my readers by geeking out on preferement percentages in the first two sentences I'll get back to the task at hand.  I opted for the second set of additions Hamelman suggested for this dough, Hazelnuts and Currants, as I have used neither nuts nor fruit on the blog so far.  As far as additions go, they are pretty easy to deal with. 
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I roasted the Hazelnuts and then rubbed them to remove the outer skin (like the skin of a peanut), and made sure they were cool before adding them to the dough.
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  As for the currants, I soaked them in water for about half an hour and then drained them in a colander, to help keep them from becoming overly chewy or miniature charcoal briquettes.
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I mixed the dough as per normal, that is, without the additions, to bring it to the desired development.  Once that was done I cut the dough one final time and added the currants and hazelnuts in stages with each chunk of dough, to expedite the incorporation.  With all the ingredients back in the bowl it only took about 20 seconds of slow speed mixing to ensure they were well distributed.

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The dough came out a bit warmer than I had intended and so I shortened the hypothetical 2 hour bulk fermentation by about 20 minutes, and it seemed to stave off the doughs attempts to balloon up to epic proportions.  Apart from that the dough was very easy to work with and everything came off with little calamity.  Because it is difficult to capture the process of shaping the dough through pictures I asked Whit to use our lil' flip video to film me shaping the batards for todays bake.  Prior to the clip you'll see, the dough had been divided into thirds, degassed, then rounded into rough boules (dividing and first shaping).  Here is the footage of the second shaping of the third batard:
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As part of my continuing quest to increase the finished volume of my loaves, I followed through on my promise from Breaducation 2.  The recommended bench proof for the loaves was 1-1.5 hours.  So I baked off the first loaf after ~40 minutes, the second at ~1:10, and the third at ~1:40.  Here are some pictures to compare the results, I slashed the first loaf once, the second twice, and the third thrice so you can see which is which in any photo:
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This is loaf 1
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This is loaf 2
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This is loaf 3
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On the left is loaf 1 pre-bake and on the right is loaf 3.  The difference in pre-bake volume is quite large.  To give you a point of comparison, that is the same piece of parchment paper under both loaves. You can see loaf three is actually spilling off of it.
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Here is a side by side from the front of loaf 1 (on the left) and loaf 2 (on the right).  The volume for both loaves is pretty good, though loaf 1 has the lead.
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Finally here is an overhead shot of all three loaves side by side.  All three loaves were within half an once of weight of one another, so you can see how what a difference the extra bench proof time made in total size of loaf. Loaf 1 is definitely underproofed, and loaf 2 may have been as well if only slightly.  Loaf 3 by contrast was a bit overproofed by the time his turn came around, but not so much so that it bottomed out completely.   Here are 2 final shots of the 3 loaves nicely arranged and the crumb from loaf 1:
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Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp: 71.6
Water Temp: 86.0
Flour Temp: 71.6 (WW) & 70.7 (BF)
Preferment Temp: 74.3
Final Temp: 80.6
Autolyse: 20 min
Mix: 3 minutes on speed 2, followed by cut on bench, followed by 3 minutes on speed 2, followed by cut on bench, followed by 3 minutes on speed 2, finished with incorporation of currants and hazelnuts
Bulk Fermentation: 1.5 hours with one fold at 20 minutes and one at 55
Bench Proof: shape, 10 minute rest, shape, 40, 70, 100 minutes respectively
Bake: ~30 minutes @ 450 degrees
Steam: New Steamer used pre-load and for ~30 seconds post load

One last note to my friends around the Twin Cities metro.  If you would like to eat some of the breads you are reading about on the blog, shoot me an e-mail and I'll add you to the bread queue.  I am making more than Whit and I can use, and I love to spread the love.  So just say the word if you are interested.  Thanks as always for reading.

-Vino

Breaducation 2: Fendu Faildu Redux

Hiyo all, this is the promised follow-up to the Roasted Potato Bread post from yesterday, but since it wound up being less of a "huzzah!" moment and more of a learning experience I'm filing it under Breaducation ;).

Given that my first attempt at this bread lacked the volume that I was aiming for I wanted to take a second crack at it while the dough was fresh in my mind.

When I mention volume in the context of a finished loaf, I am not referring to the doughs growth during bulk fermentation, but rather the burst of growth which happens in the first few minutes of loading a bread into the oven, known as oven spring.  Proper oven spring can be the result of many variables, and can be thwarted by even one of them. A lively (or not) yeast culture, good gluten development during mixing and folding, enough tension during shaping, correct timing for the bench proofing, proper slashing of the loaf, heat of the oven, and the presence of steam all play a part. So when I wanted to correct my earlier mistakes I went through this list based on the bread I had made:

Yeast- I am using commercial yeast and the bread is developing at a decent clip, so that's probably not the cause.
Mixing- I have noticed my doughs feeling somewhat slack when it came time for shaping which points heavily to me not developing the gluten well enough during the mixing and folding. 
Shaping- Most of the time I worked at the bakery I was responsible for shaping bread so I can pretty safely rule this out as the culprit
proof time- I followed the timings as listed in the the formula
Slashing- The slightly sticky nature of the dough had caused the bisecting of the Fendu loaf to re-seal, so that was a problem.
Heat of the oven - While this could have been an issue, my oven has been fairly consistent, and I load it with enough pizza stones to ensure it doesn't fluctuate too excessively temperature wise.
Steam- I can safely say I am getting better steam now than I ever have in the past home bakes thanks to my new contraption so this can be ruled out as well.

The end result of this parse:  I decided to increase the mix time by 50% and add a second bench cutting between the second and third times in the mixer, and when it came time to shape I would flour the bisected loaf more heavily to ensure the slash opened when baked. 

I did manage to get better gluten development, and for what it's worth this made working with the bread easier from dividing through shaping.  Thanks to my handy dandy note-taking I was able to maintain as many aspects of the bake as possible.  Today was a good deal colder than Sunday and as such I had to use a warmer water / potato temperature, but I managed to pretty much hit the mark on final temp.  And apart from the addition of thyme and roasted garlic, the other stats were nigh identical.  Yet, in the end I still wound up with a Fendu loaf which more or less refused to budge in the oven, only splitting slightly more than attempt one. Here are the pictures of the loaf and the crumb:
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So the culprit remains at large, but we have checked off a few more names from the list.  Looking back through the earlier check list I suspect that the prime offender is the bench proof time in between shaping and the oven.  In reference to this step in baking Hamelman has this to say:

"Just as we fall onto our noses if we lean over 100 percent, so too will the loaves tend to collapse if they receive a full 100 percent proofing before the bake.  It is difficult to quantify  with unvarying certainty the perfect degree of rise, since there are so many variables involved; however, 85 to 90 percent rising is a fair approximation to begin with.  With careful and consistent observation of each bread, the baker's eyes and hands will soon learn the parameters that work best."

And there we hit upon the real challenge presented by this finding.  The goal of this project is to make a bunch of different doughs which I have not made before, and my lack of experience with each dough will impact my ability to decide whether or not said dough is properly proofed. To address this I will be dividing the next few breads I make into 3 loaves and baking them at intervals at and around the prescribed proofing time.  For example if the proof time is 1:30 , I will bake one loaf at 1:10, one at 1:30, and one at 1:50.  I promise to take pictures so you can learn along with me. 

Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp: 66.6
Water Temp: 93.6
Flour Temp: 66.2 (WW) & 66.3 (BF)
Preferment Temp: 69.5
Potato Temp: 104
Final Temp: 74.9
Autolyse: 20 min
Mix: 3 minutes on speed 2, followed by cut on bench, followed by 3 minutes on speed 2, followed by cut on bench, followed by 3 minutes on speed 3, finished with incorporation of garlic and thyme
Bulk Fermentation: 1.5 hours with one fold at 20 minutes and one at 55
Bench Proof: shape, 20 minute rest, shape, 90 minutes (15 extra to account for cooler room temp)
Bake: ~35 minutes @ 450 degrees
Steam: 1/2 cup plus misting

Thanks for reading!

Like Websters but TASTIER!

Because I know there are a lot of terms on this blog I've added a "Dough-ctionary" to the pages on the right.  I will still endeavor to explain concepts as the crop up in the course of writing, but should an older concept slip your mind, or should you happen upon the blog after something has been introduced, just look there for definitions. 

Also if any of you out there are confused by a term or concept, or just want to know more about something specifically, please let me know and I'll try and address it!

-Vino

Bread Log 4: Roasted Potato Bread

For my fourth bread log, rather than make another rustic bread variety, I decided to skip ahead a few formulas to Roasted Potato Bread. This was a definite departure from the past loaves using a different preferment, pate fermentee, part whole wheat flour, and the first substantive addition I've used, potatoes.
Of course I have additions in bread before, olives and garlic, herbs and grains, but these additions predominately add flavor or texture and are seldom (in my experience) incorporated at the beginning of the mix, nor do they generally represent a substantial percentage of the overall flour weight of the bread.  Roasted potato bread is both of those things.  I baked Yukon Gold potatoes the evening before the bake and cut/smashed them into smallish pieces.   I took Hamelman's suggestion of roasting (as opposed to boiling) the potatoes which yielded not only a more intense potato flavor, but also helped to control the water content they added to the mix.

Apart from the spuds the formula only calls for 61% hydration, which in any ordinary bread would be very stiff.  Because I was unsure of how fast the potatoes would part with their moisture, I tweaked the formula adding a 20 minute autolyse after reaching full incorporation to allow them extra time to work their magic.  After that I added the salt, yeast, and pate fermentee, and it was back to a more or less normal bake!

Pate fermentee, in some ways is the most basic of preferments.  In a bakery setting it would literally be old dough left over from yesterdays mix.  For those of us not baking on a daily basis we make it from scratch, but it's not an onerous process.  It's hydration is somewhere between the ultra-stiff Biga and the liquid Poolish, but it differs from both in one important addition: Salt.  Anywho, on with the pictures, beginning with said pate fermentee!
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Pate fermentee at hour 16.
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Here is the dough merrily autolysing.
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This is the process of making a fendu loaf.  You bisect the loaf before putting it in the proofing basket.  Having created such a strong weak point during the shaping causes the loaf to split along that fault during it's ovenspring . . . or at least that's the intention ;).  Fendu faildu:
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In another big change from my previous bakes, I got all Macguyvery on my oven and rigged up a contraption for helping steam my bread. 
Here was my process up until now: preheat my steel pan in the oven, boil some water in the electric kettle, after loading the bread splash some of the boiling water into the pan and close the door of the oven as fast as I could.  As you would imagine this is less than ideal.  The pan itself doesn't have much mass, and so it would only create a small amount of steam before it's temp dropped below the boiling point.  What's more the vast majority of the steam it did create would just come right out the open oven door.
My new setup bypasses both of those issues.  For the mass I bought some cheap stainless steel silverware.  Stainless steel is really not ideal, as its poor conductivity causes it to cool down very quickly, but it has the advantage of not rusting (like iron) or possibly shattering (like rock) and there is less risk of odd fumes if used scrap metal.  To help route the water into my steam pan I ran flexible copper tubing through the oven vent at the rear of the cooking range, to which I added an adapter to fit a funnel, and VOILA! I can now pour the boiling water straight into the steam pan with the oven door closed :).
These photos detail the process:
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Lastly here are some pictures of the batard (oval loaf) in process, and the crumb for the bread
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This bread was VERY tasty and a nice change of pace from the last few loaves.  I however was a bit disappointed in the overall volume of the loaf, and after reviewing some resources online I think that I am simply under-mixing a bit.  To test that theory I'm going to be making this bread again tomorrow and I'm going to up my mix time by 50% and add a second cutting of the dough on the bench.  I am also going to add roasted garlic and thyme.  I know this may well invalidate my mixing experiment, but it will be tasty none-the-less.  It also gives me a second crack at a fendu boule.  I'll post the results here so check back in a few days!

Here are the details from the bake:
Room Temp: 70.4
Water Temp: 85.8
Flour Temp: 71.8 (WW) & 70.2 (BF)
Preferment Temp: 71.4
Potato Temp: 72
Final Temp: (I forgot to take this . . . fail)
Autolyse: 20 min
Mix: 3 minutes on speed 2, followed by cut on bench, finished with 3 minutes on speed 2
Bulk Fermentation: 1.5 hours with one fold at 20 minutes and one at 55
Bench Proof: shape, 20 minute rest, shape, 75 minutes
Bake: ~35 minutes @ 450 degrees
Steam: 1/3rd  cup for the batard with light misting and pre-steam, 1/2 cup for the boule w/same


Thanks for reading!

Bread Log 3: The Rustic sort of Pain

. . . More of the top shelf humor comin' out to shine.  For the third Bread Log I made, Pain Rustique, which (as the name implies) is a rustic bread very similar to ciabatta.  However the formula differs a great deal in it's preferment. The ciabatta used a stiff biga, and the preferment only accounted for 20% of the total flour weight for the dough.  Pain Rustique in contrast used a poolish (like the baguettes from the first bread log) and the preferment accounted for 50% of the total flour weight. 

I know this probably doesn't sound dramatic, but in practice it was pretty surreal as it is far and away the most preferment / per flour weight I have ever used in a dough.  When I went to scale the ingredients on the day of the bake the remaining ingredients were less by weight and volume than what I had already had in the form of poolish. 

I'm not going to lie this dough gave me some hassles, partly due to this high percentage of preferment and partly due to issues of my own creation.  Firstly, one thing preferments add to a dough beyond flavor and yeast is extensibility.  Two of the primary characteristics applied to a developed dough are elasticity and extensibility.  The idea of an elastic dough, one which when stretched will return to it's original position, will come as a surprise to no one.  Extensibility, however, is often overlooked.  Extensibility refers to a doughs ability to be stretched without tearing or breaking.  Different factors affect these attributes, mix time, preferment, autolyse and the variety of flour.  For instance higher protein flours (milled from different varieties and extractions of wheat) add elasticity, while some flour (rye in particular) can add extensibility to a dough.

Between the prefermentation percent, and a cool dough which I probably under mixed, I was faced with a very slack dough when it came time to transfer from bench proof to the oven.  I botched two out of the four loaves in this process and was forced to reshape them into a boule and loose batard.  Of the two remaining loaves I did a little experiment.  the first loaf I baked completely without steam, and the second I spritzed with water and steamed the oven as much as I could.  The results can be seen in these photos:
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Here is the loaf without steam.
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Here is the loaf with steam.

The right amount of steam while baking allows for several things.  First, a better oven spring, as it helps to keep the outer crust of the dough from setting before it has finished it's rise. Second, better color to the crust.  The coloration of crust can be attributed to enzymatic activities which are go into overdrive when a loaf first enters the heat of the oven.  Adding steam allows the surface to stay cooler longer, which in turn gives the enzymes more time to do their work before the environment becomes inhospitable.  Third, proper steam can give the loaf a nice shine to it.  This is because the moisture allows the starches on the surface of the loaf to gelatinize.

Sadly I did a fairly poor job of demonstrating this with my bread.  While the coloration is much improved, the side view clearly shows that my second loaf has less volume than the first.  In this I have illustrated what can happen when a dough gets OVER steamed, or in my case over misted.  Over steaming results in a flatter dough with a tougher chewy crust and slashes that won't open.  Though to be fair the time it spent in the fridge waiting for it's turn in the oven could have impacted its rise as well ;). 

The crumb texture was perhaps the most open I have ever made, here a couple of pictures.  One with flash to see the color properly, and one without so that you can fully see how open it is:
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All in all it was an interesting bread. And while the results were similar in many ways to the ciabatta, it was interesting for me to see just how much a few tweaks to the formula affected the dough during the process.  Here are the details from the bake:

Room Temp: 70.5
Flour Temp: 68.1
Water Temp: 80.3
Preferment Temp: 70.7
Final Temp: 73.5
30 minutes Autolyse
Mix: 2 minutes speed 2, followed by cutting with bench knife, finished with 2 minutes on speed 2
90 minutes bulk fermentation with 3 folds at 20, 40, and 60 minutes.
Baked at 460 degrees for 22 minutes with steam indicated above

Thanks for reading!

Vino

Bread Log 2: Ciabatta with Stiff Biga

I must admit I modified this formula in a couple ways to mesh more closely with the ciabatta I made at the bakery, rather than adhering strictly to Hamelman's recipe. First, I chose to add 3% flour weight in olive oil, and second I added a 20 minute autolyse in between incorporating the ingredients and the mix proper. 
**The autolyse technique is basically a way of shortening the eventual mix time, while allowing for better texture, flavor, and better oven-spring.  The best part is, all you have to do is . . . nothing!  When autolysing a dough, you add your flour and water (and if you are using a liquid preferment like a poolish you can add that too) and then let it rest from 20 minutes to an hour.  This allows time for the flour to fully hydrate, and in spite of no physical activity gluten begins bonding.  It is important to take note of the things you DON'T add before autolysing: Salt, non-liquid preferments, and yeast.  All of which will at least partly negate the benefit of the technique.**
Ciabatta is a high hydration dough, with a water content equal to 73% of the flour content, which gives the crumb an open texture and a good deal of lightness relative to it's volume.  On the flip-side the high water content can make it a bit of a pain to deal with, as learning to manage the dough once it's time for shaping can be it's biggest challenge.  Compared to the final dough the preferment, called a biga [bee-gah], is very stiff coming in at a scant 60% hydration.  Here is the biga at hour zero:
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A far cry from the 100% hydration poolish used with the baguettes:
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Another change to the Hamelman instructions I made was to the mix time and number of folds I gave the dough during bulk fermentation.  I have found that wetter doughs are slow to develop in my kitchenaid, thus, both of these things were done to compensate for the lack of development of the dough while in the mixer.  I took the opportunity to take a picture of the dough at each interval of the bulk fermentation minute 0, 30, 60, 90, and 120, so that you could see the total rise.
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Here are some pictures of the final ciabatta loaves and their crumb:
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It is a very versatile dough, and can be used not only for the standard ciabatta loaf, but also for focaccia, rustic round loaves, as well as a tasty pizza dough. 
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With just a rough shaping and a bit of extra bench proofing time, I made this large rustic boule I made from the same batch of dough.
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This is my lovely wife with her, chicken chive and gorgonzola pizza, also made from the same dough.

Here are the details of the bake:
Room Temp: 68.7
Flour Temp: 67.4
Water Temp: 90.5
Final Temp: 79.0
20 minute autolyse
3 minutes mix at speed 2, followed by cutting with the bench knife, and finished with 2 minutes at speed 3.
2 hrs bulk fermentation with 2.5 folds
~30 minutes bench proof for the ciabata and 1 hour+  for the rustic boule
Pre-steam, + as much steam as I could manage.

Thanks as always for reading!

Vino