Anxiety is a luxury when one is making one bread at a time
Even at bread #68, I hover over doughs, mired in pondering whether a dough is ready in one way or another. What has improved, I think, more than the accumulation of knowledge is the development of instinct. Though experts differ on ways to handle and develop doughs, the instinct that whispers wait or move forward is never wrong. Really - though not before seven in the morning.
The luxury of hovering over one piece of dough is the reason why I should never open a bread bakery. I would be in over my head dealing with 20 pieces of dough, and that per type of bread - AND every single day. Gives me a sinking feeling of gloom in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it.
I felt at one with my ancient foremothers with this bread of spelt and teff. Teff is the flour used to make the Ethiopian bread (pancake-like) injera. Both grains were used throughout the ancient world because they are easy to grow and to work with. Everything I have read endorses the view that ancient grains are healthy. There are plenty of sources that explain the details about health benefits. I won't waste time on that.
There is some white flour in this bread via my sourdough starter. I was not sufficiently ahead of the curve to grow a spelt sourdough starter, though that is easy and only takes a few days (taking a bit of the mother starter and feeding it with spelt or whatever flour you wish). [Photo: "bread" translated into Hebrew. An ancient language for an ancient set of flours. Rough transliteration is lechem for the word bread.]
Ingredients
Table with ingredient amounts and phases below.
Hydration percentage: 67 percent
All whole grains except for starter, which at 100 percent hydration, would be 26 grams of white flour; not too shabby.
Soaker
40g teff flour
46g water
I was going to do 100 percent hydration in the soaker, but some extra water spilled out of the cup into the bowl and I decided to let it stay. Mix and cover. I let the soaker sit for just under four hours (3.85 hours). I could see letting this soaker sit overnight.
Autolyse
225g water
380g spelt flour
Mix and cover. Let sit for 15 minutes. Then I added the salt because I went off for a few hours and I did not want further gluten development. I let this mixture sit for 3.75 hours. For ease of understanding, the salt is listed in the dough list.
Dough
soaker
autolyse
51g starter
10g salt
I mixed everything together, which took hands-on effort because the autolyse is pretty cohesive. I did two stretch and folds about 15 minutes apart. I covered the dough in between, of course. At 10:30 on a Saturday night (exciting nightlife), I covered the dough and left it on the counter in a cold, winter kitchen, which might as well have been the refrigerator. There was little dough progress.
On all other mornings ...
Why is it that on any regular day of the week I can hardly drag myself out of bed before seven, but on a morning when a dough is waiting I pop up at five or six in the morning? I have an internal alarm that goes off and prods me with curiosity to look at the dough. Even when I know little or nothing has happened because the kitchen is cold, I question whether the dough has over-risen because the dough is flat, though in this case because it has barely started to rise. And this after baking at least 200 loaves. Sometimes it feels like I am just as anxious as when I handled the first dough, as if I am gambling with time for a good bread.
At six a.m., the dough was flat and the bubbles seemed to be disappearing. It took hours of being in a warm kitchen for the dough to progress and for bubbles to emerge and for the dough to begin to appear airy. I am talking 2.5 hours. In total, I let the dough rest, covered, for 16.5 hours. At 16.5 hours, the dough was positively puffy. No doubt, the rest period would have been half that in a warmer kitchen.
Let's get outside
I did a stretch and fold, covered, and let the dough rest for 15 minutes. I then shaped it, put it on a well-floured kitchen towel, in a small round wicker basket, covered. I refrigerated the dough to give myself a chance for a nice long walk on the sole warm day this winter. Could not miss that.
Three hours later, I removed the dough basket from the fridge. I let it sit out for 90 minutes.
Preheat the oven one hour prior to baking at 455 degrees. I preheated the oven with the dutch oven inside. Even prior to putting the dough in the oven I was second-guessing the decision to mix teff and spelt. As teff is not a flour to expect any rise from, I was already curious whether better results would come from mixing it with wheat flour.
Carefully handle the hot dutch oven. Plop the dough inside without burning yourself. Make that cross slash in the dough. I am having slash envy as I see artful designs on twitter photos of breads; some intense creative dough slashing at those English bakeries.
Baking
Heat at 455 degrees for 15 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 420 degrees. Bake for another 29 minutes. Total baking time of 44 minutes. I actually removed the top of the dutch oven for the last four minutes.
What is perfection anyway?
Not the most fantastic oven spring, but respectable. Fantastic taste. Lovely color. Found myself missing a platonic ideal of oven spring, something I should let go of. Again, taste, taste, taste. Can't get enough of this one. Maybe I would add less teff if mixing with spelt again. Curious to try teff with whole wheat and even with white flour.
Here is the ingredients table, which lists when each ingredient was added.
| INGREDIENT |
SOAKER |
AUTOLYSE |
DOUGH |
TOTALS |
| Water |
46 |
225 |
|
271 |
| Spelt flour |
|
380 |
|
380 |
| Teff flour |
40 |
|
|
40 |
| Starter |
|
|
51 |
51 |
| Salt |
|
|
10 |
10 |
P.S. Spouse's verdict: He likes the breads that rise more. Not a fan of density, even delicious density. All so subjective. I was actually pretty impressed with my handiwork.
P.P.S. The Escali scale is working perfectly fine and was miffed that I insulted its tare function (getting back to zero and staying there) in the previous post. Still, the scale is pleased with my dependence and has gotten over its irritability. I believe this is because I treat it well by keeping it clean and trying to be gentle with it. The scale is aware of my need for it, but knows that our situation may change. It fears that like my grandmother and great-grandmother before me, who never employed any type of scale, that I could graduate to the level of instinct. It wants to be the shiny, dependable gadget, likely jealous of the Danish whisk.
Radical for me.
This recipe was adapted, pretty much on the fly, from the River Cottage Bread Handbook, which seems to always produce a dough with a massive flaw that I believe will result in a totally terrible bread. This time I became convinced that the author had intentionally left out key instructions or ingredients. Evidently, something other than the dough on this one was dark. Anxiety, however, produces good results. (I do believe worrying wards off the worst. Hey, I read my Zen calendar each day, but this is a different perspective.)
Ingredients
Sponge
100g rye flour
100g water
20g starter
Mix well. In a warm, summer kitchen (probably 75 to 80 degrees), I left this mixture (covered with plastic) out on the counter for 12.5 hours.
Dough
510g water
225g bread flour (That's after the extra flour was added. Add this much from the start.)
340g rye flour
12g salt
7g caraway seeds, plus extra to put on top before baking
This works out to a dough that has a hydration percentage of 90 percent. I had intended to make an 80 or 90 percent rye dough, but it ended up as 65 percent after I added extra bread flour to save the mucky, wet mess. The recipe stated this dough would be "very sticky." That term does not do it justice.
Next to "wet" in the dictionary is a picture of this dough
Mix all ingredients well. The book's directions called for five minutes of kneading, but I have read rye should not be kneaded and kneading a wet mass that was dough-like in name only was problematic. I kneaded, if one could call it that, for two minutes and I spent the extra three minutes trying to get the dough off of my palms and fingers.
I let the dough rise for an hour and 40 minutes. I did one stretch and fold, also difficult due to the lack of cohesiveness of this dough. Again spent three minutes scraping the dough off of my hands and another two washing my hands so that it did not feel like my hands were covered with drying cement. I let the dough rise another for another couple of hours.
Shaping and baking preparation
There's no way to shape a blob. I placed the dough in a large loaf pan instead. First, spray the loaf pan with non-stick spray. I sprinkled more caraway seeds on the top of the dough and covered the pan with plastic. Left out on the counter for on hour.
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. I also heated the top of my oblong la cloche to place over the dough while baking. Wait an hour for sufficient time for oven to heat up and for the dough to be ready.
After placing the dough in the oven, immediately reduce the temperature to 450 degrees. Reduce again at 35 minutes to 415 degrees. Total oven time 46 minutes. I kept the loaf pan covered the entire time with the top of the oblong la cloche.
Take the loaf out of the pan and let rest on a rack for two hours.
Startling results
Not only did this bread rise, it looked picture perfect, medium-brown color, and it emitted those fine crackling sounds upon being removed from the oven. A very hearty taste with a much stronger rye flavor than my minority-rye breads. Made me think of my long line of ancestors during their centuries of life in Eastern Europe. I had the first slice with a pickle. This would go with borsht if I liked that. Great with homemade jam (thank you to my friend for bringing over the jar of jam made with community-garden-grown strawberries). Excellent.
I became crazed the moment I realized the digital scale was not working. It was literally right in the middle of mixing together a sponge for the third try at bread #46. I must have been leaning on it while I was talking on the phone and mixing the sponge at the same time. Early the next morning, I ran out for batteries, but new batteries did nothing. The error message kept appearing. The scale was broken. There was no troubleshooting chapter of the brochure, nor a page on the website with a miraculous fix. There is, however, a lifetime warranty on Escali scales, but the employees are not elves; they don't work weekends or respond to emails after five on Fridays.
I feel like I am in withdrawal.
I actually went back to old recipes for volume measures and for recipes where I translated my volume measurements for weight measurements - then worked backwards. I am hoping for a quick Escali response and an invitation to mail back the scale and have it fixed. My fragile balance of life is thrown out of whack.
Bread #46 in development
I am stuck on bread #46, a sourdough challah that I have already made three times. I want this to work. I feel close, but no cigar.
Rules
1. Do not make a dough, a sponge, or any pre-ferment at the same time as doing something else. I forget where I am in the recipe or I neglect to write down a measure or a time. Or something else, definitely something, will go wrong.
2. Do not talk to your best friend from high school, who lives half a world away - that's 12 time zones - in a high school-like chattering, wonderful conversation, and expect the bread not to suffer.
3. A dough is like a baby; it needs attention, especially at first.
4. After nine o'clock at night is as bad as five in the morning in terms of brain operations.
5. The aforementioned phone call was at about 9:30 at night. Two strikes against that bread. Still, the dough came out well. It was the overheated spot in the kitchen that precluded perfection.
6. Perhaps my family is using a challah voodoo doll to jinx this challah series because they already love my regular challah and they do not want to taste or become accustomed to anything else.
7. I apologize for using the word "addicted," because I read a few of the articles about the death of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, may he rest in peace, and there are so many people like him who are unable to overcome their demons, instead drowning themselves in narcotics or alcohol. So sad how many people he saw and interacted with in those final days, all of whom said how sick he looked, and no one reached out or pulled him in to take care of him.
8. Even with that perspective, life feels askew without my digital scale.
Bread - Number 22: Grateful for a number
Must admit to losing some momentum for the bread project and this is where gratitude comes in for the number 108. If not for the number, I would probably already have taken a few easy, good recipes to add to my previously tiny repertoire of breads (okay, there were only two bread machine recipes before 108 breads began), and having learned a bit, would be fine with the knowledge gained, not upset that bread making had not been mastered.
I am generally okay with not mastering any given subject. I like what I like in art, wine, food, horticulture, movies, books, whatever, without any knowledge of the details of official excellence. In fact, I eschew the idea that other people define what makes something good, when that something is a matter of taste. But I also tend to start and stop projects, to not commit, to not get into anything too deep.
The value of the number 108 is the commitment to something definite. With 108, there is no doubt that 22 is not enough. To stop before 108 would be to break the commitment to myself to experiment and learn for a long time about one particular task, a very old task, in a big, modern world. (Perhaps I need to buy that slow movement book.)
Plus, now I am totally addicted to bread ovens, to books, to people describing their recipes and crumbs. Hydration rates are still a challenge.
Might not make another totally new bread for a month. Will try some previous breads with the starter first and then perhaps with autolyse. Will take time to get the spreadsheet up to date. Will take the 108 a little more slowly, not rushing to bake bread after bread, but to pause to watch helpful videos and do more reading - without the pressure of constantly keeping an eye on the next bread. No rush. 108 breads is for my own enjoyment and some good eating. There is no deadline.
Half whole wheat and flexible
Bread #22 is 50 percent whole wheat and lends itself to a working schedule. However, fitting this bread into an typical office/home schedule, would require some early-morning mixing. There are dough phases that require 12 to 14 hours on the counter or where dough can be stored for the day in the refrigerator. It is the levain build bread, from Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman.
Ingredients
Levain stage
2.4 oz. water
small ladle full of starter
2.4 oz. whole wheat flour
Dough
1 1/16 cup (8.65 oz.) water
5.6 oz. whole wheat flour
8 oz. bread flour
1 1/2 tbsp (.3 oz.) salt
add levain
Evening start
Spent most of the evening pondering what bread to begin and being too lazy to go to the basement for any spelt, rye or oat flours. Truthful, but not proud. Yes, the one-minute walk down the flight of stairs determined the selection.
Mixed the starter with water and then, Danish whisk in hand (love that thing), mixed in the whole wheat flour. Covered with plastic and left overnight. What began as a small pile of shaggy dough was a wet, only slightly bubbly, sponge the next morning. Nicely risen, though not many holes. Perhaps my starter has also lost some of its momentum.
[Levain at 10 hours.]
Instructions were to allow levain to rise on the counter for 12 to 14 hours. The house was quite warm - maybe 80 degrees (love April in DC) - and at 11 1/2 hours, it was almost time to leave.
So mixed in dough ingredients with levain. The recipe stated that the dough should be, and I quote, "moderately developed," a phrase so vague and unsuggestive of texture or appearance, that I made an entirely clueless determination. To be fair, the author gives instructions for number of minutes and speed for a commercial mixer. Here is where I left.
Please do not judge if you are thinking something like - wow, she really does not know what she is doing - or - a few minutes of mixing is worth a good ten minutes of hand mixing. Patience is a virtue I keep working on. This is why I fantasize about the Scottish bread making class. That and travelling in Scotland.
Confusion
Totally my fault that I then got confused when the recipe referred to bulk fermentation and folding as though those were tasks that would be accomplished in two completely separate periods of time. Returned 2 1/4 hours later, glanced at the part of the Bread book that discusses bulk fermentation, only to discover that every 50 minutes to an hour there should have been a stretch and fold of some kind. Oops.
Here are a couple of photos at 2 1/4 hours of bulk fermentation without folding.
And ...
I did one stretch and fold at 2 1/4 hours, then placed in floured bowl for the final rise. At this point, I was betting that this dough was not worthy of too much more of an emotional or temporal investment. Though instructions called for a final rise of two to two and a half hours, it was over 80 degrees in the kitchen and the dough was massive at one hour.
Upon restrospection and with the benefit of viewing the photographs side by side, perhaps massive was a misimpression.
Baking
Preheated oven to 460 degrees, placed top of la cloche in the oven on the baking stone, and waited a little under an hour before placing the dough (scored with a star on top) on parchment paper on the baking peel and into the oven. The dough was wet, sticky and not keeping a great shape. At 30 minutes, I removed the parchment paper and then checked the bread at 40, 45, 47 and 50 minutes. Each time, I listened for that wonderful crackling sound and expected more. Afraid I left the bread in too long.
The taste was a bit dry and the bread needed more of a rise, no doubt the consequence of missing the stretch and folds during the first rise of the dough all mixed together.
Warning #1: Storing some flour in the basement freezer requires that one extra step of walking down the steps to get the flour. This leads to hesitation to use said flour in starters and breads. Keeping the flour upstairs will necessitate one quarter to one third of freezer space to be allotted to flour. Spouse will have to be notified and reasoned with. Spouse will consider this additional evidence of bread obsession.
[Photos here are of the bread ovens at Pepe's Pizza in New Haven. A pizza worthy of New York. Really Italian. I wanted to bake bread there. Immersed in the incredible slices.]
Warning #2: Reading thefreshloaf feeds a bread obsession. More recipes and tips exist than can possibly be attempted. Add in breadtopia and the danger exists that all time will be spent reading about bread, watching dough-related videos and poring over recipes. If you lose your job and people refuse to meet your gaze, you have gone too far.
Warning #3: Care should be taken to make some breads for friends, family and work colleagues. Each bite will buy a small increment of time during which they will tolerate your descriptions of crusts, crumbs, doughs and sourdough starters. Also bread successes shared will endear you to them, though they might start describing you as the crazy bread person.
Warning #4: Checking the starters in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning or directly upon returning home from work does mean you have crossed a line. The dog, and perhaps other types of pets, will not judge you. Teenagers and many others will.
Warning #5: Despite repeated admonitions to oneself, despite sleepiness and misjudgments, and despite the knowledge that a better bread will not happen, you will get up in the middle of the night, go to sleep very late and wake up well before dawn to mix up and tend to doughs and starters.
Reality: Yes, the line has been crossed. Next up is continuing to fill out my in-progress spreadsheet with bread data. Busy working on another bread - #22 - and feeding the starters. In the process, enjoying my digital scale and Danish whisk. Change jars to rotate Rye into clean jar. No longer an actual rye starter, but the name stays. Would have to go down to the basement to retrieve the rye flour. Not happening. Too late. Spent too much time reading recipes.
P.S. Decided after Bread #22 to take a break, make some breads from the early successes a few more times, and concentrate on building knowledge and skills for a little while.
P.P.S. Also, now that it is spring (and DC is a beautiful area of blossoming frenzy this time of year), have resolved to finish painting a table - also sitting in the basement - and to paint something on that large canvas earmarked for the dining room. Yes, sitting in the basement.
P.P.P.S. Will still write as bread books to be read, bread videos to be watched and bread techniques and history to be learned. 108 is too far away to know whether it is not enough.
Bread - Number 18: Like a teenager, a starter cannot be woken by an alarm and be instantly happy and productive
Sleepy starter + changing gears mid way = hockey puck
Hockey puck = inedible
How Not to Make a Bread
Start with a sleepy, just defrosted starter; decide to throw it away; waken it too many hours later with a somewhat more awake starter; knead for the first time, having no idea how or really for how long; watch the bread not rise well at any stage. Buy something else for breakfast.
My apologies to the River Cottage Bread Handbook for an absolute failure of the sourdough recipe.
Ingredients
sponge -
167g white whole wheat flour
5/6 cup water
about half a ladle full of starter
dough -
200g whole wheat flour
1 2/3 tsp salt
1/8 cup water added to recipe
Made 1/3 of recipe for one loaf.
Instructions - though not the right word
Mixed the lackadaisacal sponge ingredients. Let rise overnight. Did not rise. Sponge sitting on counter not risen and waiting to be thrown in the compost. Added the half of the starter during feeding time before throwing the whole thing in the compost.
Sponge with added starter began to bubble. Muted hopefulness. Mixed in starter and let sponge rise for a few hours. No real rise.
Mixed in dough ingredients. Dough was very dry and added an extra approximately 1/8 cup of water. Have no idea what a kneadable dough should look and feel like. Let sit for 10 minutes and began to knead, if what I did could be considered kneading.
River Cottage instructions called for 10 minutes of kneading. Kneaded for 13 minutes, somewhat loosely following the River Cottage kneading instructions, and for longer than recipe called for because assumed my hands not nearly as strong as big guy who wrote the River Cottage Bread Handbook.
River Cottage author said dough should be "smooth and springy" when kneading is completed. Have no clue what that means for a whole wheat dough, which responds differently than white flour dough, and never produces the nice window-pane effect when kneaded.
Won't even recount rest of instructions, except for highlights.
Sensing disaster after kneading, left home and bought bread for dinner at a friend's house.
Dough seemed dry, so before placing in oven, sprinkled top with water. For good luck, cut a cross into the top. Used baking stone and top of la cloche. When removed top of la cloche after 30 minutes, bread looked pretty. Sprung enough for the top to be classic in appearance, though tiny because of minimal spring in oven.
Could not cut the bread. A nice, bread-shaped, large hockey puck. Anxiety setting in.
Bread - Number 19: Sponge imploded
Trying to make up for bread number 18, made almost the same recipe, but with a tiny bit of added commercial yeast. Let promising-looking sponge rise overnight. Too long. Had imploded by the next morning.
Glad the teens are finished because breads number 11 to 19 have not shown themselves to be a stellar group.
Time to reach out for assistance.
Bread - Number 15: The bread that will not be named, discussed or otherwise mentioned ever again.
Total disaster and even had a do over. Not going to recount every step. Tried to do an autolyse. The first try, I left it for 90 minutes, far beyond the 60-minute maximum. The autolyse, consisting of one third bread flour and two thirds whole wheat flour, mixed with all of the water, resembled more than anything else silly putty. It would not allow any mixing or integration of the other ingredients.
Threw out what could not even be called a dough. It had failed to rise or appear anywhere near an edible substance.
Second try
On the second try, left the autolyse - same ingredients - for a half hour, but even that seemed too long. (And bread number 14 did fine with a 60-minute waiting period; so who knows.) Only let the dough rise for four hours. Looked fully risen. Maybe should have stopped at three hours because it looked pretty good then.
In bread making, there is definitely no rule that more of a good thing - or waiting period - is better. Indeed, slight increases can mean disaster.
Despite decent baking time, yada, yada, nothing could save this bread.
It did not rise. The interior appeared pasty, with a couple of cave-like wholes. In terms of effort to cut, let's just say we could have used all those wrestlers who will not be going to the Olympics. Super human strength required to slice a truly terrible bread put this into the garbage after a few bites. At least it did not prove dangerous to eat.
Need a sign or a good bread
Trying not to sink into a deep depression despite not making a great bread since bread number ten and feeling like a class or perhaps a mentor is needed.
Observation #1 - Every time a new bread is attempted, assume it will fail. When it turns out well, feel so surprised.
Observation #2 - Still fear that each attempt will meet with failure, but care somewhat less that it will. Anxiety is being replaced with wonder that such loveliness is being created in my kitchen.
Observation #3 - Really love that one is not even supposed to clean the baking stone or the la cloche, merely wiping down or getting stuck bits off with a knife. Who said that primitive people were not advanced?
Observation #4 - Now that bread number five has been made about seven times, enjoying the utter joy of the sight of the beautiful bread and the sweet sound of the crackling as it comes out of the oven. The crackling can only be appreciated because of the lack noise. It is the sound of an empty nest.
Bread Number Five dough rising in a pretty bowl. Notice the places where it seems like the dough is being inflated and stretched.
Observation #5 - Buying books on bread baking can be dangerous, causing one to lose sleep by staying up late into the night reading about recipes, techniques and crazy people who eschew commercial yeast and grind their own flours.
Observation #6 - May well be turning into crazy person mentioned above.
Observation #7 - In addition to the names of 10 bread books jotted down, the many websites, videos and discussion forums available render it possible to become and stay obsessed.
Observation #8 - Wish list blossoms as does realization that incredible breads are being produced without the items appearing on the list.
