What happens with the same ingredients, adding stretching and folding
I decided to take to heart a comment on the freshloaf forum to try stretch and folds with rye breads of up to 50 percent rye. Bread #71 came out so well on the first try and I was so curious about adding this dough manipulation that I could not wait to do the bread a second time and compare the results while the taste was still almost in my mouth.
I have to confess to a couple of emergency changes, but the ingredients in toto are exactly the same as the first try of bread #71, even up to the thirsty bag of flour I used the first time and the all-purpose einkorn flour. Well, not exactly, because I had no old bread to soak and add. Almost exactly. What was the emergency - or rather last-minute change? I ran out of rye flour and had to get more, despite my month-before-Passover pledge to use up the flour already in the house. This significantly changed the nature of the sponge, though the same amounts of each type of flour were used, just at different phases.
And how did this bread - with its stretch and folds - compare to the first try of bread #71? The bread crumb (meaning interior) was somewhat airier with bigger holes. The taste was very close. The crust was better, most likely because I had a better feel for how long it needed in the oven and because I removed the top of the la cloche for the last five minutes to let the bread get some time without being covered. This allowed for a crustier crust and a darker color.
Not a scientist
If
I were a scientist, I would have carefully produced this bread, changing just
one aspect of the process, which would be to add the stretch and folds. But then I received some marvelous comments on the freshloaf about doing
a long autolyse, and how could I wait for another bread to do that?
Impossible. So, way before the sponge was done, I mixed together the
bread flour and water (too much water, but can perfect that another
time) and let it sit, covered, in a bowl, beside the sponge, for a long autolyse.
Just
making the same bread twice in a row, I checked the dough and the baking bread less often - not opening the oven door as many times - and let it go uncovered by
the top of the la cloche for the last five minutes, giving it a nicer
crust.
Taste, color, and sound?
Answers
in order of how one experiences a bread: Sight - beautiful, with
gorgeous deep brown crust. Sound - nice crackling sounds. So satisfying. This requires
silence in order to hear the very low crackling. Taste - Delicious, very
good. Perhaps another experiment would be to
use whole grain einkhorn.
So, yes, not exactly the same recipe, but almost. In an imperfect world of impatience and excited baking, this is pretty much as close to the scientific method as I am willing to get.
*** for the second time, almost, but not quite, the same instructions for bread #71
Sponge
51g starter
94g water
14g rye flour
99g bread flour
Mixed and covered. Let sit overnight and well into the next day for a total of 17.25 hours because the kitchen is still pretty cold at night.
Autolyse
221g water
133g bread flour
Mixed, covered, and let sit for 4.33 hours, while the sponge became sufficiently bubbly to be considered done and ready to move on to the dough phase. When the sponge was ready, I added the autolyse to the sponge, and then mixed in the dough ingredients.
Dough
92g rye flour
114g einkorn flour (all purpose; still working to finish that bag of flour)
8g caraway seeds
10g salt
Mixed everything together, the sponge, the autolyse and the remaining ingredients. The dough proved tough to mix, so wet hands at the ready, I squeezed and manipulated the dough until it became as it should be, a homogeneous blob.
Stretch and folds
Over the next hour and a half, I did three stretch and folds. The first at 15 minutes, the second 35 minutes later and the last 30 minutes after that. Covered and let sit, in this case for 4.66 hours.
Finally, we have sunshine and temperatures in the 50s. Snow is melting, hats are unnecessary, and I could go crazy with carrying my dough elsewhere so that I could tend to it on the go. Not something I do often, but I'm not going to let a dough fail just because I have something unavoidable to do. As it turned out, however, no one showed up for my meeting, and there I was in a room at my synagogue with my bowl of dough, my art supplies, some text and a creepy lonely sensation of being without anyone else in a place that is usually full of people. Like being at Grand Central without a soul; very twilight zone.
I actually did one stretch and fold in the car, paper towel and a bottle of water at the ready, and the last one in a bathroom. In my defense, I have not yet gotten sufficiently crazy that I have taken a bowl of dough on the subway and to my office. I have contemplated it. In the eyes of the law, however, conduct is what counts, not mere thoughts (unless we are talking intent, but then, of course, that is thoughts accompanied by actions).
I took home the dough, examining it every 15 to 30 minutes, to determine when it was ready to be prepared for baking, which my mind always equates with preparations for take-off, though that is completely different.
Baking preparation
When the dough was ready to move on to the next phase of baking preparation, I did a stretch and fold on a well-floured wooden board, covered the dough, and let sit for 15 minutes. That's a good time to clean up a kitchen. I also prepare the basket where the shaped dough will sit for the hour to an hour and a half before going into the oven.
I put a kitchen towel in a small wicker basket and generously sprinkle flour on that regular kitchen towel, so that the dough will not stick to the towel. In this case, I also put caraway seeds on the flour so that the top of the dough would get some pressed into it. When the 15 minute rest period has passed, I shape the dough into a boule, and - important - put the dough, upside down, onto the well-floured towel.
I have to confess that I have never used a banneton. Curious; just have not yet spent the money.
Rye needs some more caraway seeds just before baking
At one hour, generally, and in this case, the dough is ready to be baked. I cut a nice "X" of cross-slashes on the top of the dough. Because this was a rye bread, and I love caraway seeds on a rye, I sprinkle a generous amount of water on the top of the dough, and sprinkle even more caraway seeds on top.
Oven
One hour before I will put the dough in, I preheat the oven to 500 degrees with the top of the la cloche placed on the baking stone. Immediately upon putting the dough in the oven, I reduce the temperature to 460 degrees. At 15 minutes, I reduce to 440 degrees for the remainder of baking.
This bread took 50 minutes in the oven. At 40 minutes, I removed the parchment paper and at 45 I removed the top of the la cloche.
Musical crackling sounds out of the oven. Wonderful crust. Scrumptious taste.
Disaster struck. No beer in the house for the planned second beer bread. Not that there is always beer in the kitchen or in the basement, but usually there is some bottle of craft brew around. I will wait until the spouse buys some; in the pantheon of household tasks, as the beer drinker, he is tasked with beer purchasing.
So a different type of bread would be made; there was rye flour and rye starter, and the package of einkorn flour that I was curious to open and try.
What do you mean it's not whole grain?
I recently spotted, for the first time, in the local Whole Foods, a store that is a mix of a locally-sourced food emporium and a corporate food behemoth, a package of einkorn flour. Before I set out to work with this flour, I was blissfully unaware that there is more than one type of einkorn flour. Without looking closely, I purchased the "all purpose" variety, a euphemism for a white flour, cleansed, if you will, of most fiber and nutrients. I just assumed it would be whole grain, like everything else in that small part of the baking aisle. Somehow, it seems wrong to sell an ancient grain in a form fit for Wonder Bread.
Ingredients and instructions
Sponge
94g water
39g rye starter
113g rye flour
Mix and cover. This is not a sponge that will get bubbly. Indeed, I find rye starters a bit frustrating because their expansion is so reserved. No need to worry; if you skimp on this phase, more time will be necessary for the dough to rise. Just a matter of when the fermentation will occur.
Dough
221g water
114g einkorn flour
232g bread flour
9g salt
8g caraway seeds (plus more later for sprinkling before putting dough in oven)
Mix, cover, and let rest. This dough rested longer than expected because, I am supposing, I could have let the sponge develop for more time. The dough seemed to be at its peak at 5.25 hours. Nice and big and puffy.
Warning - weird bag of flour makes numbers questionable
My ingredient numbers might be off on this bread, not because my measurements were inaccurate, but because I was working with a King Arthur bread flour package that was especially thirsty. In a bread I make each week, flour from this particular package required a good 50 percent more water than usual, though I always use KA bread flour for this bread.
Also, einkorn flour is said to require less water than wheat. In this recipe, previously using whole wheat instead of einkorn, I generally use 207 grams of water, though for this specific dough, with the weird bread flour package, I used more. I am guessing that with a typical bag of bread flour, from 20 to 50 grams less of water would probably be needed.
Pause - benefit of making same bread over and over
Here I was, making a bread with einkorn flour for the first time, adapting a recipe - bread #27 - I have used about 10 times. I had to feel my way with the water amount because this is not a dough I know intimately. But the reason I could make my weekly challah perfectly even with an extremely thirsty batch of flour is that I know exactly how this dough should be at every step. After 15 years of almost weekly practice, one gains confidence. It was easy to see that the dough needed a whole lot more water.
So, when trying out a recipe that turns out terribly, do not immediately blame yourself or the instructions. It just might be that one of your ingredients is not acting within the average in some way, thus, throwing off the entire bread. Such a challenge gets easier to spot and rectify with experience.
Pause here for Purim baking
After 5.25 hours, instead of pushing on to prepare for baking, I put the dough in the fridge. I was in the midst of hamentaschen baking for the Jewish holiday of Purim, with a deadline for sending a package to the daughter in college. Needed to roll out the hamentaschen dough, with my grandmother's rolling pin and her yellow baking bowl, and to fill each cookie (pastry?) with fillings modern and old-fashioned. Poppy seed filling, traditional, one daughter's favorite; apricot for my other daughter; and, of course, a universal preference for chocolate.
Morning brain - another pause
Next morning, instead of trotting off to work, we have another two-hour delay due to ice. Winter this year is reluctant to leave this. As I write, we are expecting not one, but two more storms this week. We are not in Minnesota, here; we should be noticing signs of spring already.
Because bread is on the brain, I wake up an hour earlier than usual, despite the two-hour delay, and get the bread baked before my usual start of work. 5:45 and I am in the kitchen, brain on autopilot, preparing the dough for baking.
I sit in the kitchen, reading Michael Pollan's Cooked, the part about a perfectionist chef describing a restaurant that operates with precision timing and operations, down to how to load the dishwasher. I realize I am completely deficient on this score. I mostly perform tasks with a "good enough" attitude, or, at other times, I experiment, flirting with failure to move outside my comfort zone. That's what 108 breads is all about. I go for the quirky, but reading at 6 a.m., I feel as though, perhaps, I have never, except for motherhood (where perfection is impossible), reached the point of loving something so much that I take joy in the the consistent performance of a task down to the last detail.
Maybe it was a little early to be so hard on myself.
Baking preparation
I take the dough out of the fridge, sprinkle flour on a large cutting board, then on top and on the sides of the dough. I do a stretch and fold, cover, and let the dough rest for 15 minutes.
Shape the dough. Then I put a well-floured kitchen towel in a small wicker basket. I also sprinkle some caraway seeds on top of the flour. Place the dough, bottom up, in the towel inside the basket, and cover. Let rest for an hour.
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees with a baking stone and the top of a la cloche, if you have one. (Otherwise, place a pan on the oven shelf below where the dough will be. Right before after putting the dough in the oven, place a cup of water or ice in the pan. This will provide steam for the dough to rise. The la cloche does the same thing without risk of steaming in your face or ruining the oven. It creates a mini-Roman oven in your oven.)
Thank goodness for parchment paper
I put a piece of parchment paper, that miracle invention, on the baking peel, and, in order:
(1) Turned the dough, right side up, onto the parchment paper.
(2) Generously sprinkled water on top of the dough.
(3) Threw some caraway seeds on top as well.
(4) Did a quick cross-slash cut into the top after that.
(5) Put the dough in the oven.
Reduce oven heat immediately to 460 degrees. At 15 minutes, reduce again, this time to 440 degrees. I removed the parchment paper at 40 minutes. Total oven time was 51 minutes, but I should have left it in for another three minutes. Just a tiny, tiny tad underdone.
Isn't that beautiful?
Gorgeous oven spring and a great taste, but I'm a pushover for anything with rye and caraway seeds, despite the all purpose einkorn and the need for a few more minutes of baking. This is why I cannot be a perfectionist. I like this really good bread quite a lot; it doesn't have to be perfect.
P.S. I received a note saying to try stretch and folds even with rye doughs up to 50 percent, so I will try that next time with this bread and report back here.
