Tag Archives: Flour

Brilliant Bread Making Videos

Yesterday I posted my sourdough method, with the way I make a sourdough loaf at home. I was lucky enough to get a comment from Sourdough The Angry Baker, who pointed me towards these great videos. Produced by King Arthur, a flour milling company in the USA, they are by Jeffrey Hamelman, a brilliant baker, and are quite indispensable if you’re interested in baking you own. I promise if you have any interest in baking your own bread you need to watch these videos.

The original videos can be found here, at the King Arthur site.

Continue reading →

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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Further Sourdough – The Best Loaf I’ve Ever Baked

Last week I posted a simple sourdough recipe, which got really positive reviews. I’ve already seen some photos of bread made by Aiden Byrne of the Church Green using this recipe, and I should get a few more from others in next week or two. I would love to post a small gallery of pics, so if you are giving sourdough a go please e-mail me the pics to put up here. Continue reading →

Simple Sourdough

Food fashion, to me, is a very real concept, and one that can highlight really great food or quite poor food, the current cupcake obsession is one that really grates. Sourdough is another of these concepts, that seems to be getting really rather popular, but what is it? Can you make sourdough bread at home? Can you buy good sourdough bread in Liverpool? 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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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.