My Bread Year: 1-2-3 Sourdough Bread

This year I have decided to blog every bread I make, even if I have to double up on the breads per post, post breads multiple times or even just post only pictures as proof. Why you ask? Why not, I say. Though I really don't have time for the endeavor, I want to prove to myself that the failures (and there are always failures) are as instructive as the successes.

We begin with the first success: This bread is called 1-2-3 Sourdough Bread after this post from The Fresh Loaf, one of my favorite bread resources. Way back, a hundred years ago, in April, I was trying to get the hang of my Electrolux Assistent N26 (aka DLX) stand mixer and stumbled across the formula for the bread. Of course, this actually predates my purchasing the Bread Baker's Apprentice, and predates my knowledge of Baker's Percentages. I did have a scale from beer brewing, so off I went.

People always mention a learning curve when using the Electrolux Mixer. In my case, I never had a Kitchen-Aid, so my learning curve was on how to use a mixer in the first place. Back then, my first doughs baked into very flat bricks that never rose. Even the yeasted ones. I was actually thinking maybe I had made a mistake in buying the machine.


But from what I had read, people initially hated the machine. I was determined that the machine would work for me.

I quickly realized that I the advice I had read- let the machine run by itself for 12 minutes- was valid, but for larger batches of whole wheat bread. Plus no one had mentioned the speed of the mixer, and I also realized that the machine had likely overmixed the bread, thereby ruining the structure of the gluten.

My breakthrough came when I did two simple things: 1) I watched the dough being mixed from start until it was ready. Don't ask me how long this takes, but from my previous experience I know what dough looks like when it is ready, so watching the process helped me a ton. Reaching in and feeling the dough also helped determine when it was ready. All those years of hand kneading have really paid off! 2) I resisted the urge to add more flour. Also known as Add 90 percent of the flour and reserve the remaining 10 percent in order to curb this urge. The thing is that the dough looks like it will never come together. Eventually, like me now, you will just dump the measured flour and walk away.


The funny thing is, every time I pull a loaf of bread from the oven, I don't jump up for joy. I don't really get excited about things when they happen. But when I reach into the bread box at work and pull out a half loaf of my own bread, I smell it and can't believe I made the bread. It's like a twin version of me made the bread and gave it to me. I cut a slice, toast it, and just think about how good the bread tastes.


1-2-3 Sourdough Bread from this post on The Fresh Loaf
Recipe:
230g Sourdough Starter @100%- I keep mine fed with Type 1050 flour
460g Water
690g Type 1050 flour
14g Sel de Guérande

Formula:
33% Sourdough Starter
66% Water
100% Type 1050 Flour
2% Sea salt

Baked in tiny oven with baking stone and oven steam. Results in a 71% Hydration loaf.

BBA Challenge #26: Poolish Baguettes

First of all, I'm apologizing for the gap inbetween posts. I began this post in early December, and tried to finish it the week before we left for vacation, but the week became too busy. I did manage to write it on the airplane on the way over thanks to the Apple MagSafe Airplane Adapter and seatguru.com's advice. However, I was sick for about 12 of those 14 vacation days and am still now recovering. I'll have a full report on what I ate, including, I hope, a post on churros, unless I burn my fingers off attempting to make them.

So here we go, Bread #26 of the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge.

When I lived in Brooklyn I tended to avoid French Bread. The bread was always had a bone dry but crispy crust with the whitest interior I'd ever seen. I tended to avoid it because I, after all, made far superior bread. No, no baguettes for me.

The very first time I attempted making French Bread, as in, bread shaped like a baguette was in university. Unknown to me at the time, but actually fairly evident, was the high hydration. I remember stirring the dough. Not kneading, mind you, but actually stirring until my arm hurt. The dough eventually came together, but I thought it was going to pull my arm off with it.

Everyone loved the bread, and even said it tasted like French Bread, though I can imagine that everyone was using store-bought French Bread as a comparison. At the time, I hadn't been to very few good bakeries. And even then, what had interested me more were the baked goods- muffins and cookies in particular. So, of course I was paying no attention to the bread, so even I didn't have a marker on which to base my failure or success with the recipe. Because of this experience, I decided to stick to my basic bread recipe.

So after the near failure of the French Bread and the success of re-doing it, as well as the consistent awesomeness of the Pain a l'Ancienne, you would think that I would have an easy time making Poolish Baguettes. Well, yeah, sort of.


I always place the liquid into the DLX first, then proceed with the mixing. Here is the water, flour, and poolish in the bowl of the mixer. The formula utilizes a large portion of poolish as well as a bit of whole wheat flour. As a comparison, Daniel Leader, in his very excellent Local Breads, gives his secret ingredient as corn flour. Not corn meal, mind you, but corn flour, which is finely ground and apparently turns the bread golden.


The dough came together fairly quickly, but still needed a bit to go. I actually want to make a video of the kneading action of the DLX just to show how the bread comes together. Then again, never having seen a video or real life demo of a complete knead in any machine, maybe my methods are completely wrong.


Eventually, the bread comes together into a ball and there you have it. Windowpane (not shown) and all.


The dough rose beautifully.


And then I decided to try my hand at stretch and folds. It is often described in the bread community as stretching the bread one side over itself like a letter, though whenever I think of a letter fold, I think of folding paper to make an envelope, not the fold up and fold down that is characteristic of this fold.


Here's the dough turned 90 degrees and folded again.

Also, in Germany it is customary to use window envelopes in DIN Lang size (equivalent to business size envelopes) and fold the piece of paper in thirds like a "Z" so that the address, on the letter, is showing through the window. It's rare, even for small businesses, not to use this type of fold.


I put it back in the bowl and let it rise again.


I think I might have erred in this in that I did the stretch and folds not in steps, but only once in the middle of the rise. Recently, I made a double batch of the Pain de Campagne using stretch and fold throughout the rise. The dough rose beautifully and the gluten structure was stronger than I've ever experienced it.


So here. Maybe here is when everything began to go horribly wrong. You see what I did? I began as any normal baker would. With a batard. Except they were too thick in the middle and too tapered at the ends. If I were making batards- and I really should have stopped here- they would have come out marvelously.


But no! I went fearlessly forward and decided to do as the recipe said, despite the size of my oven and the conditions I was working with.


I actually wanted them pointy, but it didn't really work, as they were a bit too pointy and thus too long. In the end, some of the points were hanging off the baking sheets, and I had to smoosh them back so that they would still be on the sheet.


As the shaped loaves were rising, I also made a different bread. I know I've mentioned this over and over again, but on my trip to Paris I became obsessed with the Poilâne miche. So I decided to make this recipe over and over so that when the real one came, I'd be ready.


This also dovetailed with my experiments using sourdough. Even I was astounded by the crumb. In the past, with a store-bought starter I had very flat very thick bread. This was the second loaf of many to come that I made with Beatrice.


Now, you might look at the results and say, "Mon dieu! those baguettes look amazing." But- and here's where my perfectionist streak comes out- I didn't like them. Not because they didn't have the wonderful flavor or aroma of the Pain a l'Ancienne baguettes. Not because of that. And not because the flavor was very reminiscent of the Pain de Campagne. I mean, it was a similar recipe, no?


No. What I didn't like was the crust. Somehow I used too much flour when dusting the couche and not enough water in the hearth baking. Or maybe the linen wicked too much moisture from the crust. The crust was too dry and too crunchy.


Or maybe it was because I had to bake them on a blue steel baking sheet instead of directly on the stone itself. My oven is a city oven, and is relatively small, so I can fit a 30x40cm baking stone in there but with poor air circulation. Also, the rack in the oven is only 30 cm deep, so I'd have some stone hanging off the rack and fears that chunks of the stone would collapse under the weight of the bread.


Still, if you look at the crumb there are very decent holes.

Though this bread might be authentic somewhere, it was not what I wanted- a shiny crust with no flour on it. Looking back, I should have misted the breads. Or increased the hydration. Yeah. No.

I'll try these again, but perhaps when I began baking out of Leader's Local Breads. Then I'll get everything right.

I really can't argue with the flavor, though. Since this formula included some whole wheat, the bread had a much richer wheat flavor. Still, the bread was not as good as the Pain de Campagne, which is slowly becoming my go-to bread when making breads out of yeast.

BBA Challenge #25: Pizza! Napoletana

When I was in College, or, as I am now accustomed to say, in University, I worked at one of the University-run snack bars. I worked Friday Nights because I really had no social life, and working allowed me to talk to random strangers while their food was cooking. While I enjoyed working the grill and making omelettes for very cute women, my true love was making pizzas. The only drawback was that I actually didn't get to talk to anyone except for whoever was making pizzas along with me. So I had to switch every other week in order to get the best of both positions.

The thing here, though was that we had copious amounts of cornmeal to dust the peels, so they slid beautifully into the oven. Taking them out, however, was a different matter. There was always this fear that the pizza would wobble on the peel, and fall to the floor, cheese side down, of course. I did drop a few, but, in truth, perhaps only two out of the hundred or so that I made in my time there.

Growing up, however, we never made pizza at home. Our home oven was actually unused for most of the time I was growing up, and, since Mexican cuisine doesn't really have much that requires an oven, it became the de facto storage for our pots and pans. As for delivery, we had the Pizza Cart, always a phone call away, and Domino's, which I hated because it never tasted good and the pizzas were always way too small in comparison with those from the Pizza Cart.

In New York, there was always the debate as to who had the best pizza, and which Ray's was the first with the name. For best pie, however, my vote went to Grimaldi's, partly because it was delicious, and partly because it was a bit of a ritual, whenever it happened. We would begin by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan to work up a hunger. Then, we would wait in line outside the restaurant (there was invariably a line) and then scarf down an olive-and-roasted-red-peppers-topped pie. We would head over to the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory for a scoop before watching the lights on the Fulton Ferry Landing. Though I've done this countless times, I never got tired of it.

In Berlin, however, Pizza is a different matter. There's mini-pizzas, often available for a single Euro, but they're usually about four or five inches in diameter, or they are a rectangular piece of about the same size. Slices don't exist here except at a few places that claim NY-style pizza, but even their pizza leaves one craving good pizza.

Having said that, there are a few places that make excellent Pizza. Clärchen's Ballhaus, which is actually a ballroom, as well as Toros, near where I work are two good examples. Toros actually has a wood-fired brick oven, which you can see when you walk in. Don't even mention that place in Prenzlauer Berg because I hated the experience of being in the place, though the pizza was pretty good.

My favorite place in Berlin, though, is the Pizza Klub, which, coincidentally, is just a Katzensprung away from us. There had been a string of pizzerias in the same location before they opened up, so when the last one closed my expectations were at Zero. When they removed the paper on the windows after remodeling, however, the entire neighborhood was shocked. There were nice lamps. Wooden tables. Rock star posters on the wall. It looked so... inviting. We first went there on a Sunday after a weekend trip. I really don't remember which pizza I had, but since then, we've had dozens of pies from there. It's even become our favorite place to watch Football, which we do every two years for the European Cup or the World Cup.

I have been making pizza as long as I have been making bread, and while the pizza was always acceptable, it was nowhere near the pizzas I would eat when out.


This is a picture of my Electrolux Assistent model AKM4110W, known to most as the DLX. I actually got it after getting my bonus from work last winter, and after researching it on Jeff Varasano's excellent Pizza Recipe site. My whole intent was to make pizza. I never dreamed I would be participating in the BBA Challenge or getting back to making bread.


For Peter Reinharts recipe, there really isn't much in the way of prep. You sort of chill high-gluten flour as well as water, and just mix it up. I added a little bit of olive oil for texture, but aside from that, there's really nothing to it.


Here's a picture of the dough just before shaping and baking. I have to confess to not reading the directions all the way through. Instead of forming six balls and refrigerating them. I just put the entire dough in a bowl and stuck it in the fridge. I also sort of forgot about it. You see, I had wanted to make pizza during the week, and, as fate always has it, I only got to the dough six days after preparing it. On a Friday. On this day I took the photo above and then froze three of the balls of dough.


The other three were flattened out for a dough rest.


The first pizza was a resounding success! The only thing I didn't like was that I was using a 17% low-fat mozzarella, just to see how the cheese would melt. I've never had much luck with low-fat cheeses, and this one was a bit stubborn as it cooled. I had to wrestle my teeth around it.


It made for a beautiful pie even if the crust was a bit pale.


Pie two also had fresh mozzarella, but this time I used Mozzarella di Bufala, which I traded for an arm but not a leg at Galeries Lafayette.


This was one weirdest things when I first got here. Mozzarella is sold by the Kugel, floating in brine, in its own plastic pouch. In Brooklyn, I used to head to the Italian Market on Graham Avenue and pay a pretty penny for fresh Mozzarella which they would weigh out for me before taking a leg but not an arm. Here, each pouch of 125g Mozzarella can be had for just over fifty Euro cents. The downside to so much fresh, is that the aged variety is impossible to find. Even when you try to buy "Pizza Cheese" here, it is mostly all Gouda, with no Mozzarella at all.


The second pie did not fare well. Hesitation will do the opposite of wonders when you are baking. In this case, I am not sure what happened other than the pie spilled itself onto the oven stone, causing a fair amount of smoke the next day when I was baking my loaf of bread for the week. I flipped the stone over and forgot about the blackened parts.


Pie three gave up a crumb shot. I just had to take it because I can't let a BBA item go by without showing the holes.

Pie four was eaten before I could even get a picture of it. I know, I know. Bad me.


Pie five had parmesan, cheddar and fresh mozzarella. It looked just as toxic as the picture above, but only because I found an cheddar from England that was bright orange, just the way I like it.

This crust was was one of the most flavorful crusts I have ever had, by my hand or otherwise. It really took me back to the Pizza Cart as well as certain pies in New York. Ever since I began seriously appreciating pizza I've been focused on the crust. However, I would never dare eat a pie without tomato sauce. White Pizza? For me, it's not pizza.

Once, my sister and her husband attempted to order Extra Cheese on a thin crust pie at Grimaldi's. Sacrilage! I shouted. I told them to trust me, and just order a maximum of two toppings. The pizza had the right amount of cheese on it. It was just a thin layer, but it was the perfect foil to the crust. After the pizza, we headed over for some ice cream and took in the lights of the city before descending back into the subway and heading home.

Other Pizzaolos in the BBA Challenge:

Kelly from Something Shiny

Janice from Round the Table

Paul from Yumarama

Cindy from Salt and Serenity

Sally from Bewitching Kitchen