Bread - What are you baking today…..
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Did my first bake with the baking steel last night. My normal baking routine had been disturbed by preparing for the sale of my house so I fermented a poolish in the day time and used the evening to get to grips with the steel. First, the results:
This is what they looked like in the oven straight after launching from the peel:
Using the steel cut the baking time by 10mins. I didn’t leave the loaves to go dark, but the colouring is much more even. If I left them to go dark brown, then the baking time would have been 5 mins shorter.
The oven spring was decent, quite uniform and controlled. The final shape of the loaf was quite pleasing, more symmetrical and rounded. One really fun thing was being able to watch the loaves rise in the oven. It will be interesting to see how the pure levain loaves I have planned for the weekend fare.
Launching was easy and fun too, but the process made a lot of mess, leaving loads of flour everywhere. Definitely one of the things I’ll be focusing on improving.
The bread was good. Decent crust, moist and tasty but the crumb was unspectacular. It was airy, and fluffy in texture but the bubbles were quite evenly spaced. How much of this was due to the fermenting and flour mix (I used bran and wheatgerm), and how much was the baking steel I do not know, but again, more bakes, with different doughs should clarify this. I’ll do a Biga this weekend too, so I can knock off a couple of pizzas.
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Good looking bread there fellas. I tried a hodge podge 50% white, 20% wholemeal, and 30% white rye 75% water today. Not such an open crumb. Might be due to the rye? The dough was stickier than usual. Tasted great with cheese, dill gerkhin, and cumin saukraut
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I think I can smell it in North Carolina.
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At the beginning of the pandemic, when I started seriously trying to make decent bread. I bought 500gms of dried yeast.
I gave a lot of it way (for a period last Spring/Summer, yeast was impossible to buy in UK). 11 months down the road, I thought that it may be getting a tad stale, so I chucked what remained away and bought a new lot…
I am making my first loaf (Poolish) with it today. The difference in the smell and the composition of the dough is like chalk and cheese. I actually cant really believe it.
