Barry’s Artisan Bread Baking

A blow out is a loaf that expands wildly, a lot more than the baker wants it to expand or in areas where the expansion isn’t wanted, like along the sides or out an end. 

Blow out expansions may be caused by one of several things or a combination of them.  It’s not usually an indication of a wet dough.  Wet doughs will give you larger holes in the dough or a spread-out loaf during final rise.

If you have been plagued with blow outs, try these tips.

1.  Next time, check the dough as you put it to start to do final rise.  Poke it gently with your finger.  The dough should spring back quickly.  This is a mark of young dough.  When you think it is finished rise, do the same gentle poke.  The dough should not respond or respond weakly. This is the sign of fully developed dough.  If the dough isn’t fully developed, it will have an explosive oven rise, as you have seen.

2.  Make sure you have water/steam in the oven.  Also make sure the crust does’t dry out as it rises.  Cover the doughs with a tea towel and spritz it with water from time to time.  A dry crust will crack and split in unpredictable places.

3.  Make sure you slash the dough properly.  You might try slashing along the side of the dough.  I’ve done this from time to time and it makes for an interesting bread.  The other slashing trick is to make the slash a bit deeper than usual; this will give the bread a good vector to expand along.

Any or all of these tricks should at least tone down the blow outs.

I posted this on the bread newsgroup, alt.bred.recipes, and thought it might be helpful here, too. 

When I’ve converted recipes from English to metric or vice-versa, I’ve always been aware of the two methods of doing it.

1. Exactly. This results in some strange amounts, like 563 grams or 14.45 ounces, but if you can hack the units, it will work as well as the original.

2. Proportional. This means that you round the flour or water up to the nearest whole unit, like 500 grams of 32 ounces, and scale all the others accordingly.

You can test these methods by looking at a book like “Cook’s Guide to Bread,” by Ingram and Shapter. They post all recipes in English, metric and volume. The amounts are not exact conversions, but the amounts are all scaled to work no matter which units you use. You do have to be careful with a recipe, since working partly with metric and partly with English can give you some errors if you aren’t careful.

I don’t think that a few grams here and there will be make-or-break in most cases.

When I work with salt and yeast, I keep a few numbers in mind:

A tablespoon of salt is 22 grams and also 0.80 ounce.

A packet of yeast is 1/4 ounce and also 7 grams and also 2 1/4 teaspoons.

Good starting point for salt is 2% of the total weight of flour.

Good starting point for yeast is 1% of the total flour.

Both by weight.

There has to be something distinctive in the recipe for me to get too far away from these numbers.

I don’t think the difference between dry and damp kitchen affects the salt too much, so I don’t worry about it. I’m sure a p-chemist could make a convincing case for allowing for it, but I simply can’t be bothered.

As for the cup problem, that’s a real poser. The “traditional” methods of filling a cup range all over the place, from scoop and dump to fluff and fill. I use weight. When I have to convert a cup recipe to weight, I do the following.

1. Consider what I am trying to bake. Is it a ciabatta or a bagel? Is it a dry bread or a wet bread? Is it a lean bread or an enriched bread?

2. Does the recipe rely on “sprinkles of flour” to achieve the final dough? This is backward of what one should do. The final adjustment, as figured out long ago, should be done with the liquid, not the flour.  If one uses extra flour, there is a risk that it won’t get properly hydrated going into fermentation.  The other consideration is that the proportions of the ingredients are worked out with a specific amount of flour.  Changing the amount of flour by adding more can imbalance the recipe.  Adjusting with water is a bit of a mess, but it’s worth it.

3. What does the recipe say about final dough condition? Most of them say something like “smooth and elastic,” which is misleading most of the time. Don’t forget that flour and water make paste, so all dough will be sticky, some just more so than others.  My hunch is that all those recipes that call for “smooth and elastic” are really saying “Have a coating of un-hydrated flour on the surface to mask the stickiness.”

Once I have these in hand, I have a pretty good idea of the final hydration I should have. I then figure out how much liquid there is in the final recipe, making allowances for eggs, butter, oil, rum, whatever. From there, it’s easy to figure out how much flour I need. For future reference, I divide the amount of flour by the number of cups in the original recipe to find out what the recipe writer was thinking a cup of flour weighs. It’s interesting to work with a book and find that the writer is using different equivalents in different recipes. And that most of the time, when a writer has a table in the back of the book that gives equivalents, the numbers are not congruent with what he uses in the book.

I then make the dough. I keep track of any extra flour I add and modify the recipe to take this into the recipe at the start.

That’s my method. It works for me and prevents me from having a lot of problems. I still get blindsided sometimes, especially when there is an error in the recipe, but I no longer make dumb mistakes like I did when I started out.

Sometimes it seems I can’t lose for winning.  Not often, but sometimes, and this is one of those happy times.

I  bought a bag of stone-ground rye flour and found I had another one, unopened, on the shelf and a partial bag in the refrigerator.  Hear me say, “Gotta use up some of this stuff.”  So, into the Rye file and out pops a recipe from May 8, 1997, from the Star-Ledger paper in Newark, NJ.  Sharon’s Bread, by Sharon Cook.  Mostly rye or whole wheat flour.  Looked good.

On further investigation, it looked to need a bit of work.

Here’s the recipe; see if you can figure out what’s wrong with it.

1 cup warm water
2 packages yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
3 cups hot water
1/3 cup honey
6 cups whole wheat or rye flour
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 cup white flour, or more.

1.  Mix together warm water, yeast and sugar and let stand for 10 minutes in a container that holds at least two cups.
2.  Meanwhile, prepare the sponge mixture:  In a large bowl, stir together hot water, honey and the 6 cups of flour.  Let stand until yeast is ready.
3.  Beat batter well and add yeast mixture.   Let stand 15 minutes.
4.  Add vegetable oil and salt to mixture, stirring well.  Stir in enough white flour to make dough easy to handle. 
5.  Turn dough onto a floured surface.  Knead for 8-10 minutes.  Divide into three equal portions and place in greased loaf pans.  Let rise to top of loaf pans, place in cold oven, then turn thermostat to 350 degrees.  Bake loaves until golden brown.

If you guessed that the recipe is hopelessly optimistic about the amount of white flour and the handling qualities of the dough, you get a gold star.

I weighed a cup of rye flour and got 6.4 ounces.  Six cups would weigh right at 39 ounces.  I used this weight for the rye and the whole wheat.  White flour weighs about 4 1/2 to 5 ounces.  Call it 5, and the total flour is 44 ounces.

The liquid is 32 ounces of water, 2 ounces of oil and 2 1/3 ounce of honey.  Call this 35 ounces of liquid.

Hydration is thus 35/44 or right at 80%, hardly reasonable when one is expecting a dough to be “easy to handle.”  This called for Super Adjuster.  Here’s what I wound up with.

I used a poolish of 10 ounces of water, 5 ounces rye flour, 5 ounces white bread flour flour and 1/4 teaspoon yeast.  I let this sit on the counter over night.  It lifted the top of my large Tupperwear container. I know the poolish isn’t in the original recipe, but since I was rewriting the recipe, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add the poolish.

Today I added the following:

17 ounces rye flour (22 ounces total)
17 ounces whole wheat flour
4 teaspoons dry yeast
1 Tablespoon sugar
20 ounces hot water (2 1/2 cups, for those counting)  (30 ounces total)
1/3 cup honey
4 Tablespoons vegetable oil
4 ounces white flour (9 ounces total)
1 1/2 Tablespoons salt.

1.  Add the yeast and sugar to the poolish.  Let stand for 15 minutes.  It will activate.
2.  Mix hot water, honey and the two flours.  Let this stand until the yeast is ready.  This takes the place of an autolyse, sort of.
3.  Beat the batter, add the yeast and the poolish and let stand for 15 minutes.
4.  Add vegetable oil and salt.  Stir.  Add the white flour.
5.  Knead for 8-10 minutes.  This is a very soft, sticky dough, but it will hang together.  It will gradually tighten up and make a good dough.  really.  I wouldn’t kid you.
6.  Divide into 3 pieces, 28 ounces each.  Place in greased loaf pans and cover with a tea towel.  Let rise until the loaves are at or slightly above the tops of the pans.

N.B.  I wondered about using an egg-yolk wash to enhance the color.  I didn’t do it this time; I’ll do it one to one of the loaves next time.

7.  Place in a cold oven.  Turn the heat to 350F and bake until the loaves are golden brown.  Internal temperature should be over 190F.

I got some very good-looking and great tasting loaves. 

This should be a great fall and winter loaf and it’s pretty quick and easy to make.  If you discount the time for the poolish, which is only about a minute the night before, the total time isn’t much more than two hours; pretty quick time to make good bread.

I’ll make this again and post the whole process on the site, but for now, give this a try and see if you don’t think this is a super recipe for whole wheat and rye bread.

Here in New Jersey, the weather is just about what it usually is in July, hot and sticky.  I bake a bit, but it’s a real challenge to bake bread without getting agonizing looks from the air conditioner.  Lots of people eat outside during the summer, either on a picnic or a backyard cook out, and these events need bread.  What to do?

Ahhh.  Try pita and naan.  Both cook very quickly, so the kitchen won’t heat up too much, and they are both just wonderful with picnic fare or barbeque.  And I just happen to have good recipes for both with picures of me making them.  (Isn’t that a coincidence?)

Pita recipe with pictures

Naan recipe with pictures.

Not only are they good breads, but the pita is a good recipe for children to make, they love rolling them out and watching them puff up in the oven.

I spotted this recipe on the back of a bag of King Arthur Bread flour and decided it would probably make a good sandwich bread.  I’ve found that food company recipes are usually very good, since it’s in the best interests of a company like King Arthur to have the recipes turn out well.  This bread proves the point.

It’s a very easy, quick recipe that turns out a very nice bread.  I made two loaves, and added raisins to one of them, althoughthe recipe says you can use currants, too.  I recomment this loaf for just about anyone.  It’s light, tasty and makes great sandwiches and toast.  It’s so easy that beginners and children should be able to make this easily.

http://www.artisanbreadbaking.com/breads/oatmeal/oatmeal.htm 

Way to go, King Arthur!

Once again, no bread in the house and all sorts of opinions about what I should make.  Argghh!

Everyone loves a sweet bread (no, not sweetbreads).  The question is, which one?  Taking a look through some bread books, I decided to adapt the basic sweet dough recipe from J.A. Wihlfahrt’s “A Treatise on Baking,” a comprehensive baking manual from 1928.  It’s available online, here It’s Formula 55 on page 328.  He has two sizes, huge and Don’t Ask.  I cut the huge down a bit and wound up with a little over 5 pounds of dough, enough to make two very large of what I was planning, which were stuffed braids.  I also made a little over a pound of filling.

I divided the dough into six pieces and rolled out three of them into very long ribbons.  I then put a stuffing made of poppy butter, chopped walnuts, honey and a little vanilla down the center of each ribbon and sealed it carefully.  (But not carefully enough, as it turned out.)  I braided the three strands into a loaf and formed it into a circle, let rise 45 minutes, baked at 350F for 35 minutes and viola!  Here it is.

I’ll make it again in a few weeks and post the whole process.

	Here are the two loaves on the cooling racks. They are really quite large, a lot larger than I thought they would be.
	Another shot of the two loaves.
	Here’s a shot of the inside after cutting it open.
	Here’s a shot of a piece of bread cut open in slightly different lighting. This shows the surprise inside very well.

Here it was Monday and no bread it the house.  What to do?  Then The Word came down that any bread I made had better be whole wheat and, better yet, good for sandwiches.

Step one, get out the “to do” file and see if anything fits.  I found a recipe that I had cut from a magazine years ago for Lady Redesdale’s Bread, a mostly-whole wheat bread that looked to be very quick.

So here it is, 2 1/2 hours later, Lady Redesdale’s bread.  And it’s good, to boot!  This recipe is really easy and turns out a nice pair of loaves.  If you need good bread in a hurry, this just might fill the bill.

It won’t keep for a long time, but the loaves are fairly small and the bread so good that keeping shouldn’t be a worry.

Here’s the finished loaf

	The finished loaf.
	The finished loaf, the crumb.

Here’s the link for Lady Redesdale’s Bread

I’ve been under some heavy pressure in the casa to make a beer bread.  I’d looked and looked and hadn’t found a recipe that looked like it had a chance of working, not that there are that many of them out there.

Then a few fays ago I was sorting through some stuff and found yet another beer bread recipe.  This one was from Weight Watchers Magazine from  the Dark Ages, 1994.  But the more I looked at it, the more interested I was. 

A little background.  I’ve been reading Daniel Leader’s “Local Breads,” and have fallen in love with it.  It’s a great book!  But the interesting thing is that several of the more interesting recipes call for all-purpose flour, not high-gluten flour, not even bread flour, just plain old all purpose.  Well, this fits my own research bias, since I’ve been working with all purpose more and more lately.  End of background.

The recipe called for 2 1/4 cups of all purpose and, get this, 1 3/4 cups of cake flour.  When I read this, I checked my yeast supply, since I thought I’d need about a quarter of a cup of yeast just to make this thing behave.  Here’s the recipe, see for yourself.

1 packge yeast (I used 2 1/4 teaspoons, it’s the same.)  12 ml or 7 grams.

1/4 cup warm water.  57ml.

1 teaspoon sugar.  5 ml.

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour (I converted this to 10 ounces.)  285 grams.

1 3/4 cups cake flour (I converted this to 8 ounces.)  227 grams.

1 1/4 cups warm light beer (One 12-ounce bottle with a swig left over for the hard-working baker.)  285 ml.

2 teaspoons salt.  10ml.

I took a few shortcuts with the wording for the method.

• Put all the ingredients in the bowl of a large mixer and mix for a minute.
• Cover the dough and let it rest for 20 minutes to get all the flour wet. (Autolyse, better than a manual lyse)
• Knead for 6 minutes on a notch above slow.
• Put the dough in a very lightly oiled bowl and let it ferment for 1 hour.
• Prepare a banneton or other basket by either flouring the basket heavily or putting heavily floured parchment paper in it.  Any kind of wicker basket will work, a regular banneton, a small basket you have sitting around . . . this dough is very soft, so you’ll need some sort of form or pan.
• Pour the dough onto the counter and round it up into a ball.  Spread a handful of flour on the counter and roll the dough in the flour.
• Place the dough in the basket and sprinkle the rest of the flour on the top of the dough.  Cover the basket with a towel and let it rise for 30-40 minutes.  It should just about double.
• Heat the oven to 450F / 232F.  Have a baking stone, tiles or a baking sheet in the oven.
• Put parchment paper on a peel or the back of a cookie sheet.  Place the parchment paper and the peel/sheet over the basket and gently flip the dough over.  You should feel or hear a sensation like the dough has left the basket.  If you don’t, juggle the basket a bit.
• Cut an X in the dough and slide it into the oven.
• Bake for 20 minutes, turn the heat to 400F / 205C and bake another 10 minutes. 
• Remove the bread from the oven and let it cool on a rack.

So what is this bread?  It’s a straight dough, 67% hydration bread with 44% cake flour and 55% all purpose flour.  And it rose nicely, expanded in the oven and had a nice, tight crumb.   The crust was properly crunchy and chewy.  We had turkey sandwiches made with it and they were wonderful.  What a pleasant surprise!  Here are pictures of the loaf and the crumb.  The crust isn’t as dark as I like; maybe next time I’ll brush with water or an egg-white wash.

	The finished loaf. Look at that oven spring! from All Purpose and Cake flour!
	The crumb. The streak isn’t evident in the loaf in person.

I made 24 bagels the other day, a double batch of the recipe from Peter Reinhart’s “Bread Baker’s Apprentice.”  I’ve made this recipe once before, but my normal bagel recipe is from Julia Child.  I’ve been a little dissatisfied with both of them, so I wondered if there was a way to use bits and pieces of each recipe to get a superior bagel.

Pictures of the first effort are at www.artisanbreadbaking.com/breads/bagels/bagels.htm.

The main differences in the two recipes are

1.  Peter forms the bagels first and then refrigerates the formed bagels on trays over night.  Julia ferments the entire dough as one entity and forms the bagels cold the next day.  I think Peter’s handling leads to a slightly airier bagel, one with more holes. 

2.  Peter’s baking time is wildly inaccurate.  He says to bake for 5 minutes, then shift the bagels and bake for another five minutes, until the bagels are a golden color.  Julia says to bake for 20-25 minutes, then leave the bagels in the oven with the power off for five minutes, then to open the door and leave the bagels in for five more minutes.  Julia’s method leads to a darker, thicker crust.  I’m probably biased, because I like dark,thick crusts, but I think Julia’s method may yield a better bagel.  That’s the subject of the next trial.

I like Peter’s ingredients; they seem to be closer to the old fashioned bagels.  I think Julia’s handling of the dough is better, it will probably lead to a denser bagel.  I also like her baking instructions.

The pictures represent the results of using Peter’s ingredients and dough handling, and both Peter’s and Julia’s baking.  The taste, texture and chewiness were all outstanding.  The goal now is to move from outstanding to perfection.  Stay tuned, this promises to be good.  I’ll make one or two more trials and publish the full series on the web site.

Carol Field has a recipe in her book “The Italian Baker” for Pane di Como Antico o Pane Frencese, Como Bread of the Past, Known Today as French Bread.  I’m not sure if this is an adaptation of French bread developed by the Italians in the Lake Como region or an attempt by the Italian bakers to take credit for French bread.  

No matter where the truth lies, this is an interesting bread.   It is a 67% bread, which is borderline sticky, but the dough isn’t difficult to handle.  It uses a 65% biga and no additional yeast.  In fact, it’s a very simple bread to make.  It forms two short logs that bake up into very nice small loaves.

Pane di Como Antico