Tag Archives: Dough

Musings on Sourdough

If you read this blog, you’d know that I’m a bread fanatic, both baking and consumption, it’s something I love doing and I’m always working on how to get the best results. The last few month have seen me dabble with sourdough in an attempt to nail down a certain process and dough. The dough in question is from Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, great bread but also a slightly tricky method, its taken me seven attempts to get results I’m happy with.

Today’s loaf has been the best yet, I feel my method is getting more accurate and I’m hoping to be more consistent in the future. The key to this is two important steps for me, firstly I use my starter to make a young leaven and secondly I rise the bread in the fridge over night.

Today's Loaf

A young leaven is made using the starter I described previously, which should have a strong acidic almost unpleasant smell, and at times if you use too much can be overpowering. A young leaven uses 2 tablespoons of this along with 200g of flour (whichever flour you want to use for you bread) and 200g water, mix them together the night before you need the leaven and leave at room temperature. This produces an active bubbly leaven with a light fruity smell, rather than something that will overpower you loaf. I then use 150g of this leaven per 500g flour in the dough recipe.

Close up of the crust

The long rise in the fridge has two effects, firstly producing a better flavour, but more importantly making the dough more manageable. Due to using a very wet dough, 75% hydration, getting the loaf from the proving basket to baking tray and slashing was proving (excuse the pun)  difficult. I had several times when the dough stuck to the basket or collapsed and spread too far, with the cooled dough, the final loaf easily came out of the basket without any collapsing or misshaping. The slashing of the dough was also easy with no drag of the blade on sticky dough.

The crumb

This isn’t a full recipe, if you want one please see an earlier post of mine, or preferably  buy the book Tartine Bread, its excellent. If you are having trouble with your sourdough, as I was, or if you want to try it yourself these tips should really help you.

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Lorraine Pascale Bakes Terrible Bread

Last week I was unlucky enough to witness Lorrain Pascal bake bread, during Home Cooking Made Easy, she made bread with a recipe that had me reeling with disgust. I often bake my own bread, for reasons of flavour and texture, quickly made supermarket bread lacks both of these and generally I find it an unpleasant food. The whole reason for baking my own, is to take time and produce something far superior to the rushed and flavourless pap that adorns supermarket shelves. So what did Loraine do that so troubled me? She made a bread with only 30-45 minutes rising time, I can guarantee this bread had almost no flavour and poor texture.

Good bread takes time, this is a fact, to make good bread you can’t rush, there are no corners to be cut that will improve your final loaf. I’m currently working with a recipe that takes at least 12 hours for the final loaf, or more if you want it to. It’s this time and slow fermentation of the dough that produces flavour. Now, I’m not suggesting you should all make a dough over the course of 24 hours, I know that practicalities determine something shorter. However, if you are going to bake your own, take a little bit of time to produce something different than the mass produces rubbish that is so readily available. I really wonder if Lorraine knows what she is doing.

So here is my recipe of Pain D’epi, its simple with an hour for the first rise and 30 minutes for the final prove, the minimum required. However, to stretch this out, say a first rise of 2 hours, would only help the final bread. If you did have the time, make the dough the night before you need it with only 2 grams of yeast, the leave to rise in a cool room or fridge over night. With more time the results will only get better.

  • 500g Strong white bread flour
  • 7g Active yeast
  • 10g Salt
  • 340g Water
  • Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.
  • Add water to the dry ingredient and mix to form a dough.
  • Knead the dough for 10 minutes until smooth.
  • Place dough back in bowl, cover with a tea towel and leave to rise for at least 1 hour.
  • After one hour take dough and divide into two equal pieces.
  • take one piece and form into flat rectangle.
  • roll rectangle into long sausage shape.
  • Do the same with other piece of dough.
  • Allow dough to rest for 30 mins, meanwhile put the oven onto gas mark 9 or 250°C
  • After 30 minutes the dough should have significantly increased in size.
  • Cut loaf to form correct shape, as shown in this video.

  • Bake in the oven for 20-30 mins until the tips of the cuts are very dark.
  • Remove from oven and allow to cool for at least 30 minutes before serving.

Cut dough, ready to bake.

Finished loaf

Ricotta Gnocchi

“Whether they are made of potatoes, semolina flour or spinach

and ricotta… the essential characteristic of well made gnocchi is

that they be fluffy and light.” Marcella Hazan

Finished Gnocchi

I had some fairly good gnocchi recently, it was pre prepared, but it was good enough and made a nice dish. This got me thinking, potato gnocchi, when homemade, is superb, but also quite fiddly, the dough gets sticky and difficult to handle if you don’t make it correctly or leave it lying around too long. Thus, I’ve made a few time before, gnocchi using ricotta cheese rather than potato. Continue reading →

Our Daily Bread

Just a few pictures of my later loaf, I’m quite pleased with this one.

This was a plain white dough, 5oog flour to 350g of water, shaped into a tight cob and sliced with a Lame (a razor blade on the end on a handle). I tried to make almost like a swirl on the top of the loaf, and baked till it is quite dark.

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Rich loaf

Here is an enriched loaf I’ve baked today, it’s made using the recipe from Richard Bertinet in his book Dough, I write about it here. This bread is soft and slightly sweet, and needs to be quite dark once baked. My plan is for croque monsieur, made with some good Comte cheese. This is really a great recipe and would encourage you to give it a go, its really versatile being either sweet of savoury, I think it would make a great bread and butter pudding or just great toasted with plenty of butter.

500g strong White flour
250ml whole milk
60g butter
10g salt
10 g yeast
40g caster sugar
2 eggs

  • Put the butter and milk in a small pan and warm, untill butter has melted, do not let it boil or get too hot. Just enough hear to melt the butter should be about 40 degrees
  • Put all dry ingredients into bowl and mix together.
  • Add eggs and warm butter and milk and mix into a dough
  • Kneed for 10 minutes until smooth, then rest for 1 hour.
  • Shape and prove for 40 mins
  • Brush with beaten egg then make parallel line of scissor snips on each side of loaf.
  • Bake in preheated oven gas 7 for 15-20 minutes.

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Perfect Home Made Baguettes

I despise baguettes, I want to wipe them from the face of the earth, just like smallpox, with only small samples remaining in obscure science labs primed for further crusty destruction, should they ever make a return. Yet, I adore them, the crusty and crisp shards that break off with the first bite, the crunch as your teeth sink into the beautiful crust then penetrate into the soft crumb below. They are bread heaven, indeed when I lived in France the simple joy of strolling along the river to the local boulangery in the early morning sun, was usually the highlight of my day. So why do I hate them so? It’s because I can’t make them at home. Try as I might, and I’ve tried a lot, you can’t get the crust right in a home oven. I’ve come close but not close enough. Eating poor quality baguettes while the rain patters the window in Liverpool, doesn’t compare to the warm sun of southern France.

I consider myself an accomplished home baker, yet I can’t get the crust on baguettes right, however I will attempt to explain my best method. To be honest, you can stop reading after this sentence and not be at any loss; it can’t be done at home so don’t try. Proper bakers ovens get very hot and use steam to generate the crusts, a domestic oven isn’t up to the task. Find yourself a good baker and buy your baguettes from them. If that isn’t good enough for you, then try my method below, and you might end up with some acceptable, if not perfect, baguettes. First off you need to know how to shape baguettes and how to slash them properly, so watch these two tutorials.

Shaping Baguettes

Slashing Baguettes

Secondly you will need a baking tray and a roasting tin that will sit upside down on top of it and a baking stone. Also a hand held steam cleaner, I got mine for about £15 on amazon,

Here is my stone, roasting tin and steam cleaner

Next you need to make quite a soft and wet dough, I use this recipe.

  • 500g Strong white bread flour
  • 10g Salt
  • 10g Fresh yeast (or 7g of dried yeast)
  • 360ml of warm water.

Method

  • Mix the flour and salt in a bowl, then rub in the yeast (no need to faf about mixing it in water first of all, its a waste of time).
  • Add the water and mix to form a cohesive dough.

Dough once mixed

  • Kneed for 10 mins until smooth.

Dough once kneeded

  • Place in a bowl, and cover with tea towel and leave for 1 hour.
  • After 1 hour, fold the dough as demonstrated in the first video clip above, then rest for another half hour. At this point put your oven onto its highest setting with the baking stone on the top shelf.
  • After 30mins, shape the dough as in the video tutorial above, rest for 20 mins then shape into baguettes and prove for another 20 minutes.

Initial Pre-Shape

Shaped baguettes

  • After 20 minutes, place baguette onto baking tray and slash as tutorial describes.
  • Place upturned roasting tin over baguette, being careful not to touch the dough with the tin.
  • At this point raise one corner of the tin, just enough for the nozzle of the steam cleaner, spray a jet of steam under tin for about 8 seconds, then remove nozzle quickly and push down tin.

Spraying steam under tin

  • Now place hot baking stone on top of tin, which will help keep steam inside the tin and heat it up.

Try and tin with stone ontop

  • Place in oven and bake for 13 mins with the tin in place, then take off baking stone and remove the tin and bake until baguette is suitably cooked. About another 10 minutes depending on your oven.
  • Take out and allow to cool.

And that is all there is to it, and you should end up with reasonable baguettes, here is one of mine.

Final Baguette

Its a bit wonky, but the crust is as good as I can get it.

This is a lot of work and quite a bit of faffing about, but if you have time its worth a try, that is of course if you haven’t got a great local baker. I’m not sure there are any great bakers in Liverpool, and supermarket baguettes have a pappy flavourless texture, so give this a go.

Sid

PS – I still hate them.

Adventures in Bread

I love Bread.

Plain and simple, its fun to make and once you get into it a little its very interesting. I won’t claim to be the worlds best baker, but I’m not bad and bake fresh bread about 4 to 5 times a week. Here is toady’s bread some Fougasse from Richard Bertinet’s book Doug, a fantastic book for learning to make bread. I would also recommend Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley if you want something more in-depth and technical.

Taken from "Doug" by Richard Bertinet

Bread is great and I would urge you all to try baking your own, for those completely new try this recipe, by Paul Hollywood, a great first time bread.

As for Liverpool, since the closing of Chalkins (about 8 years ago now), there hasn’t been a bakery that I really like, Sandra Dee’s baker on picton road is nice, but I’d rather just bake my own. Does anyone else know of a good baker in Liverpool? Are the days of really great fresh bread gone for good?

Sid.