Artisan Bread Course Day 3

Yesterday was all about sourdough, one of the trickier and unfathomable subjects in bread making. (We also interspersed our work with folds of our croissant dough, which will be ready to bake today). I have tried starters before, and even got a decent one going last summer with rye flour after the Kneading Conference lectures. We each received a small dollop of starter on the first day of the course and began feeding and building it out until we had 1 pound four ounces of starter in the morning. We put one pound in a bowl and the rest in small containers for us to take our starter home with us.

The bread we made was a sunflower sourdough that was probably about 25% whole wheat and the rest all-purpose flour. I have been a bit surprised at how much we use all-purpose flour in this course -- we have not touched bread flour, and used whole wheat and others sparingly.

The big change with the sourdough is how wet and sticky the dough is, which makes handling it tricky at times, but the kneading techniques we have learned and using the autolyse method (whereby we mix the starter, flour and water until it is only partially incorporated, then let it sit for 20 minutes to hydrate) actually makes it easy and builds structure without spending forever over the bench, throwing dough around.

After some resting and a fold, we were ready to shape the dough and retard them for a final time in some baskets (or couches as they are called). Shaping this dough actually requires a clean, un-floured board to create the friction needed to create a nice, tight ball. I have a video that I am working on uploading in the near future (Blogger for Android was not uploading video from my cell phone for some reason).

We are baking our dough today after retarding in the refrigerator over night, but we did bake some yesterday that will be an interesting contrast. Retarding in the fridge allows the acetic acids to build up, creating that sharp sourdough tang, but it also slows yeast growth, so should only be used at the end of the process.

Bread pudding

Maybe it's just me, but I expect two things from my chocolate bread pudding. (At least two.) First, it must be served warm. Second, it should not look like beef stew. The other night it was bone cold and definitely looked like it came out of the stew pot. Shudder.

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Artisan Bread Course Day 2

Day two was baguette day! We took the poolish from yesterday and added flour, salt, and yeast, followed by mixing, kneading and preshaping the dough. Pre-shaping is basically taking the kneaded dough and making it into a log shape or small round, as you can see at the picture to the left.

While we let the baguette dough proof (sit around and feast on sugars in the dough to produce CO2), we started our croissants by creating a dough of approximately the texture of cookie dough and pounding out our butter into a quarter-inch thick square. I think I may have gotten some of the paper wrapper from the butter in there, but I don't think it will hurt the final product. The important thing is to have a standard thickness, and a reasonably standard rectangle, which involves cutting off the edges and laying them on top to re-roll into the square. Once we finished these two pieces, they went into the fridge until tomorrow.

Back with the baguettes, we shaped the dough, completed four folds and then put them in a linen couche (cloth) for a final proof, as you can see at right. Then it was off to look at the huge oven the education center has -- steam injection, inward-swinging doors, and fed by what I can only describe as a surgical gurney.

The oven is heated to about what you would use at home -- 450-475 degrees. Then we used our lame to slash the bread. The lame is basically a straight-edge razor that is either curved or straight. I hadn't realized that you use the two types for different breads. The curved razor is for slashing baguettes and batards to produce an "ear", which is a nice lip of crust that opens up as it bakes. The straight lame is for boules (round loaves) and similar breads to create a more even opening on top of the bread.
You can see in the picture at the right a couple of examples of slashed dough before going into the oven. The slashes need to be pretty deep (perhaps 3/4 of an inch) to really open up, otherwise there's also no ear.
The results of my bread, which is in the picture below, was okay, but I need more practice. My baguette is the lighter-colored one, which probably resulted from being in part of the oven that had less steam injection.

Artisan Bread Course Day 1

Today was day one of a four-day bread-making course at King Arthur Flour's Education Center in Norwich, Vermont. There are eleven of us in the class with two teachers, some students having come from far away (two from Washington State, two originally from Scandinavia, and some from just down the street). Being the first day, we focused on straight breads; that is, breads that can be mixed, kneaded, shaped and baked on the same day. We made a semolina-based dough that we later turned into both a foccacia (below) and a pane siciliano (left picture). We also made an American-style lavash. As opposed to the old world lavash (flat bread), this one had a little bit of sugar and some fat (either butter or oil) in it, whereas the original from places like the Middle East will not have either. We rounded out the day by prepping our poolish (water, flour and yeast) for tomorrow's baguettes and taking a small amount of sourdough starter and "feeding" it with equal parts flour and water. It was a great start to the four-day course, and I headed off to my room at the Norwich Inn with far more bread than I should ever eat in one week, let alone a day.

Measure twice, cut once

In cooking there is the concept of mis en place - pre-measuring your ingredients and having everything set before you start cooking. The same goes for baking. Suffice it to say I have learned a valuable lesson in mis en place this weekend. My less than attentive reading of my bread formula led me to read the amount of yeast for the amount of salt. Not a horrific error but it did mean the bread was about three teaspoons short of salt yielding a fine but bland loaf. So anyone out there on a low sodium diet, I have a couple of spare loaves.

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Winter lager in spring

Yeah, it's supposedly spring, so why am i tasting Sam Adams Winter lager? As Normy would say on Cheers, What else are you going to do with it? This one has that gorgeous deep red color. The spices are pretty mild; in fact the nose is a little sweet. Might be the orange peel. This is a lager with some bite but is mild compared to some of the craft brew out there. It's enjoyable but not particularly reminiscent of roaring fires or holly boughs.

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It may not be pretty...

This week's bread is a ciabatta made with an overnight poolish. Recipe courtesy of Ciril Hitz. The shaping needs work but the flavor is excellent and internal structure is well developed.

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