Seasoned Salt Bread

 

I made this loaf using the breadmaker that has been on the shelf for years. I used it to make the dough on a rainy day where I couldn't work in the garden. It is a plain white bread with a bit of sugar and butter and using seasoned salt instead of regular salt. I used A. Vogel Trocomare Original Organic Herb seasoning salt. This is a mixture of vegetables and herbs including kelp that are infused in a brine solution, then dried to make the salt. This is also the first loaf I have baked on my new Fibrament baking stone I got from Breadtopia.com. The bread is crusty with a soft crumb and a mild herbal flavor. Good.
 

Poolish Bread for Thanksgiving Dinner

I made a couple of loaves of bread to eat over the Thanksgiving holidays. I goofed.

I began making the bread using a poolish that was in the refrigerator for a week or so. This poolish is 50/50 flour and water by weight with 1/4 tsp of yeast. It rests on the counter until it has doubled, then is placed in the refrigerator until needed. When I took it out, it had a nice tang and was ready to use.

I began to build the bread using the standard ratio for a 65% loaf and calculated the amount of flour and water to use for about two 2 pound loaves. Here is my calculation:

2 loaves @ 900 grams each = 1800 grams total for flour and water (ignore the salt and yeast).

I weighed the poolish and got 510 grams, so that is 255 grams of flour and 255 grams of water.

The total amount of flour I want is 1800 x 0.65 - 1170 grams of flour, and

The total amount of water is the remainder or 1800 - 1170 = 630 grams of water.

But I already have some the the amounts I need to add are 1170 - 255 = 915 grams of flour and 630 - 255 = 375 grams of water.

I calculated 1% yeast as 1800 grams total x 0.01 = 18 grams of yeast. I measured it out into a small dish and did the same with the salt at 18 grams. (Oops!)

I mixed the poolish with warm water and added the yeast and began adding flour. Then I added dry milk, one whole packet, enough for a quart of milk. My thinking is that the milk will give a more tender loaf. I also added 1 Tbs of honey. I put the dough in the mixer with the dough hook and continued to add flour until the consistency was about right. It did not take all the flour.

I put the dough on the floured board and kneaded and stretched it, then covered it with a large bowl and set my time for 40 minutes.

When I came back the dough had lifted the bowl off the board and it was growing like mad! It was huge! I knocked it down and pulled and stretched it again. I looked at it and said it is done and cut it in two and shaped it and put it into two bread pans and covered it lightly with plastic wrap. I turned the oven on to 400 F. It took 20 minutes to heat the oven and when the bell rang that it was hot, the dough was a inch above the pan rims.

I seeded the loaves with flax seed and cut the tops about 3/4 inch deep. They sprang open. They went into the oven with steam and bloomed like you see in the picture.

What happened? I clearly used too much yeast. The calculation should be on the flour, not the total and instead of 18 grams, it should be 12 grams.

The bread was done in 30 minutes.

The bread was good and did not have too much salt. It toasted nicely and was somewhat too tender. Next time I will use the right amount of yeast and half as much milk powder.

Dusquane Light Company Utility Bread, 50/50 wheat bread

  This bread is another try at the soy rich, dried milk rich whole wheat variation of the Dusquene Light Company bread seen here before. This time I used agave syrup instead of honey. It didn't work as well as I had anticipated. The honey really comes through and the agave syrup does not. I miss the flavor. I used one envelope of dry milk powder for this batch. I started with 500 grams of aged poolish from the refrigerator. This is 50 percent water and 50 percent by weight white bread flour with a pinch of yeast, mixed and let rise till double or so and then refrigerated until needed. It really looked yucky when I took it out of the refrigerator but the bread came out almost great. I rolled the loaves in a 5-grain cereal mix with added oatmeal for looks. There is some of the cereal in the bread also. The full recipe is posted elsewhere on this blog. http://johnsbread.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html

5 Grain Bread

This bread is an experiment using the Easy Bread method that can be found on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E68iNfRHBpI. (I can't stand the song.)  The method is similar to the New York Times No-Knead Bread that many of us are familiar with.  I used the easy bread recipe:

 3 cups of all purpose flour
1-1/2 cups water
2 tsp salt, and
1/4 tsp yeast.

To this I added 1/2 cup Red Mill 5 Grain Cereal and the remaining, about 200 grams, of the 50/50 poolish living in my refrigerator. 

Everything is combined until the flour is wet, then set aside to rise for a long time.  In this case it was until the dough tripled.  The dough was then stretched and folded twice and placed in a bowl to rise for a couple of hours.  I turned it out onto the peel with parchment and baked it for 10 minutes at 450 F, then for 10 minutes at 425 F, and finally for 10 minutes at 350 F.  I used steam, a cup of hot water in the cast iron frying pan in the bottom of the oven.

The loaf needed a little more salt, but tasted delicious and the crust was crackling crisp.  Really good.  All in all a good loaf that is easy to make and tastes good.  Next time I will put the 5 Grain Cereal on the top of the loaf.  Make it look nicer.

Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

I have been working with a poolish of 50 wt percent flour and water with about 1.2 tsp of yeast, no salt, aging in the refrigerator. Today's experiment was to make a loaf of whole wheat bread, or more like half whole wheat and half white flour with a texture more like store bought bread or plain white bread. this loaf is the result and worked just as expected. All the ingredients are weighed in grams.

I began with some dough scooped out of the refrigerated container. 365 grams said the scale. That is about right, because I wanted about 1.5 pound load or about twice that for the final quantity.

Plain white bread uses milk, butter and sugar in the recipe, so I will need to add milk. The amount needs to be half of the poolish, or 187 grams. I weighed out this quantity and warmed it. I did the same with the whole wheat flour which lives in the refrigerator, too. I added 1 TBS of vital wheat gluten and about 2-1/2 tsp instant yeast to the flour and about the same quantity of sea salt. This all got stirred together and added to the poolish with the warm milk till all of the flour was incorporated. At this point the dough is very wet and about a 50% bakers percentage. It needs more flour. The question is: How much?

I started with 365 grams of 50% poolish and doubled it with WW and milk. Now there is 365 grams of flour and 365 grams of liquid. For the kind of bread I am trying for the ratio should be 60 bakers percent. The final amount of liquid should be 0.6 x the amount of flour. If we divide the amount of liquid by 0.6 we get the total amount of flour needed, or 608 grams. We already have 365, so we need 243 grams more. I weighed it out. Today I am using White Lily Bread Flour. The whole wheat flour came from a local Tennessee miller and was in a white paper bag at a country fair near Pigeon Forge. The snippet of the bag in the plastic container in the refrigerator doesn't say who the miller is.

I scooped 3 or 4 TBS of sugar into the mix, and added 2 TBS of melted butter and stirred these in, too. Then this was put on the mixer with the dough hook and kneaded. As the dough began to be kneaded in the mixer I incorporated most of the additional white bread flour. I set the remainder aside to knead in by hand as needed. The dough kneaded in the mixer for about 7 minutes. I then kneaded in the remaining flour on the board, shaped it into a ball, greased my big plastic bowl and turned the ball in it to grease the whole thing. I covered it and went outside to mow the lawn. August it HOT this year.

When the lawn was done, I shaped the risen dough into a loaf with rice flour on it and put it in a pan to rise again. I turned on the oven to 400 and went back outside to do some trimming. That done, the loaf, now nicely risen, [unlike the last time when I forgot and it flowed over the rim of the pan] was slashed and popped into the oven with steam for 30 minutes. I sat and watched it rise and drank a beer as I cooled down from the HOT outside work.

The loaf looks a little darker at one end than at the other. I should rotate the loaf during the baking cycle. [The convection oven is worse with the tiles in place.] I could have let it cook for another 5 minutes with the door open and the oven off, but the crust looked done so I didn't. Also there was a little too much oil on the surface of the risen dough and the crumb shows the swirl marks if you look closely.

My college student grandson says even the crust is good! He liked the bread and the sliced ham enclosed in his sandwich. I will do this again. It is pretty easy.

The new Ratio Book

I've been reading and playing around with the recipes in the new book, Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman. This is an interesting book because it talks about the ratios of the principal ingredients in recipes, including bread, of course. The basic ratio is 5 parts flour to 3 parts water, with salt and yeast. This works pretty well I found out by trying it and failing a couple of times.

This loaf is made with the basic ratio. I mixed it up, kneaded the dough for 5 minutes in the Kitchenaid mixer and then let it rise till a little more than doubled. Then I refrigerated it for a couple of days. In fact, yesterday, I took 75 grams of the dough and made myself one English muffin in the frying pan before I cooked an omelet for my breakfast. Good. Today I took all the remaining dough, about 2 pounds, and shaped it into a boule while cold, then let it warm up covered until it rose a little. My wife and I went for a walk in the cold while the oven heated up to 450 deg F. When we returned, I brushed the loaf with milk and sprinkled it with sesame seeds and slashed it, then popped it into the oven. It sure looks good to me. I'll cut it tomorrow and show the crumb and let all know how it tastes.

Couronne for Thanksgiving

This crown-shaped loaf is made with a chef starter, which is fermented for at least 2 days and up to a week; the longer it is left, the more it will develop the characteristic sourdough flavor.

For the Chef

1/4 tsp instant yeast
50 grams/1/2 cup bread flour
45 ml/3 Tbs water

For the 1st Refreshment

65 ml/4-1/2 Tbs water
115 grams/1 cup bread flour

For the Couronne Dough

240 ml/1 generous cup cold water
325 grams/scant 3 cups bread flour plus extra for dusting
1-1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp rapid rise instant yeast

(Note: I adjusted this recipe to use my 50/50 poolish from the refrigerator.)
(Note: I adjusted this recipe to use 20 grams each of butter, sugar, and powdered buttermilk to provide a finer crumb for this meal.)

Prepare the Chef several days in advance. Mix the ingredients in a small bowl using a metal spoon, cover with plastic wrap and leave on the counter for several days.

Prepare the refreshment by breaking the crust on the chef and adding the water and flour for the refreshment. Mix thoroughly and recover with the plastic wrap. Leave on the counter for 2 days.

To make the dough, mix the refreshed chef with the cold water, then stir in the salt, sugar and yeast. Stir in the flour until the dough is together, then knead for 5 minutes in the mixer or 10 minutes by hand until the dough is elastic and no longer sticky. Turn out the dough from the mixer and knead into a ball. Grease a bowl and place the dough into the bowl, turning to cover the dough ball with oil, then cover with plastic wrap and place in a warm place to rise until doubled.

Punch down the dough and turn out onto a floured bench. Shape the dough into a flat round, then open the center and pull the dough into a large donut shape. The center should be 5 to 6 inches in diameter. Use a dish that will fit into the hole and grease it on the outside to prevent the dough from sticking to it. Cover your peel with parchment, then transfer the donut to the parchment. Place the greased dish in the hole and cover the whole thing with greased plastic wrap and put it in a warm place to rise for about 45 minutes to an hour or until almost doubled.

Preheat the oven to 450 F. Prepare the oven for baking bread. I use tiles on the grid in the lower 1/3 of the oven or the pizza stone in the upper 1/3 of the oven. I use a cast iron frying pan in the bottom of the oven. I put one cup of hot water in the long nosed pitcher to add to the frying pan when the bread is placed in the oven.

When doubled, remove the plastic wrap, flour the surface of the couronne, and slash the dough 4 times around the donut. Slide the dough on the parchment into the oven onto the tiles or pizza stone (lower 1/3 of the oven), pour the water into the frying pan and close the oven door. Bake 35-40 minutes or until the bread is golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.


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Adapted from "The Bread and Bread Machine Bible," p386.