Bread - What are you baking today…..
-
I don’t reduce water. Unlike @Giles I took autolyse instructions too seriously. I’ve found a locally available source of spelt and wheat that has quite a high protein content and the spelt especially seems to suck the water in.
Both the recipes I’ve been tweaking these last few weeks have 70% hydration (plus the water in the levain so more like 73%), but the 700g of water isn’t enough to wet all the flour so I’ve added more, around 800g. The result (discussed a few posts back), has been a high hydration dough, that is fun to work with, a lovely moist crumb, but flatter loaves, as the dough spreads on the baking sheet meaningfully.
I’m prepping for a new bake and I’m working out what to do about it.
-
Having watched that, my steam, scoring and the starter are all good. Shaping is possibly something I can improve, but I’m thinking it is the length of the bulk ferment that may be the major issue.
There is definitely oven spring happening but the loaves spread so much between the banneton and the baking sheet that the starting point is more diminished than it should be.
Nice video! Thank you.
-
I've taken to looking at this thread instead of watching porn. It seems to fulfil a similar desire
-
@Giles it's the Regular Chef recipe that I used for my 1st bake. I like his style, very easy going and simple to follow. I didn't get much oven spring, but I think I know where I went wrong thanks to Rueben's help.
-
famous vienna restaurant Steirereck https://www.steirereck.at/en/restaurant/
has a bread sommelier… if you ever come back to vienna, you got an INVITATION (not only for the bread ;)) -
Arrrrggghhhh.
As noted yesterday I am trying to perfect my spelt loaf, and struggling to get the kind of oven spring I have had earlier with spelt, and regularly with wheat loaves.
Initially I thought it was too much hydration causing the issue. I lowered this bake to 75%.
After yesterday’s discussion I suspected the issue was the length of the bulk ferment. This dough had a three hour bulk ferment (down from four and a half), and a 10 hour fridge retardation (down from 14 hours).
There is plenty of life in the dough. The over night fridge proofing saw a 40-50% increase in volume. Straight from the fridge:
They came out of the banneton’s just fine, but deflated meaningfully after scoring:
There is oven spring. The volume of the dough increases during the first 20min. Here they after 20min. They have been covered and the oven has steam. The problem is that the volume increase is much more lateral rather than vertical.
Finished:
The crumb is not the greatest I’ve had, but isn’t bad at all:
So these loaves turned out more or less exactly the same as my last batch, which had a longer bulk ferment and fridge proof, and higher hydration. What the actual yeasty-fuck is next?!
-
You guys are killing it on the Bread Frontier.
I would pay good money to have a sandwich with that bread.
)
