Breaking Bread: Making Bread

Jimeats, One of these days I may start branching out from these artisan type breads. I figure I've saved about $15 in bread purchases alone this month. My next effort might be to try hamburger type buns like UncleVic. At home I like to make the mini-pork tenderloin sandwiches now that require a small White Castle size bun that you cannot buy in a store. The closes thing would be a Sara Lee dinner roll. I haven't tried sourdough yet or starters.

I've been expermenting, I'm trying to make a New England style hot dog bun useing a light rye bread recipe. Getting close but it's not where I would like it yet. I thought I may enjoy a hot dog more often with a better roll/bun. This calls for an active rye starter, just wish I could buy rye flour in bulk at Costco. Chow Jim

I went looking for bread books and discovered Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois is the number one best selling bread book on Amazon.com. My curiosity was piqued and dang the authors live in the Twin Cities and put on bread baking classes around town. My next opportunity will not be until July because of my travel schedule but I may look into it, and get the book of course. Here is their website.

http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/

I mixed my dough and it is rising as I type. I may bake tonight or tomorrow morning. In the meantime I went to Barnes & Noble today with the intent of checking out the book I referenced in the previous message. It looked good and I may buy it yet but I walked out of the bookstore with Baking with the St. Paul Bread Club by Kim Ode instead. It is a collection of 70 recipes by members of the club in the Twin Cities, about 15 people in all.

http://www.amazon.com/Baking-St-Paul-Bread-Club/dp/0873515676/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207337397&sr=8-1

The book was in the Minnesota Regional book section and not in the cooking section so it may not be sold everywhere. However, it is on Amazon.com.

Tonight was another baking night.

3 cups bread flour,
2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten flour,
1 Summit Pale Ale,
1 tsp IDY,
1 tsp salt,
1 tsp minced garlic,
3 tbs brown sugar,
3 tbs extra virgin olive oil.
Let rise to double, punch down and form shape.
Wash with egg and water mix, lightly sprinkle basil, garlic powder and parmesan cheese.
Bake 55 minutes at 375 degrees on pre-heated pizza stone.

Once again Davy, nice looking loaf there.
I'm still trying to find a recipe for a honeycomb bread and came across a recipe that I will try later in the week.
It calls for an active wheat sourdough, so it will take a few days for me to activate it.
This is for 4 loafs
3.5 C of homemade buttermilk
4C of whole wheat sourdough
1.5T sea salt
1/3C REAL maple syrup grade B or C is fine {maybe better}
3T butter
10-17 C of whole wheat

I'll make these and give away a couple, then I'll reduce if I like it.

I like your recipe above but I may need more Pale Ale than that.
Must have some for the baker. It's all part of quality control.
Chow Jim

Jim, a 12 oz. bottle of ale is slightly too much liquid for a single loaf so you do have to take a swig before you pour.

I don't have a stand mixer or enough bowls to make 4 loaves at one time. I assume you could divide that recipe up for one or two loaves. The 10-17 cups of whole wheat flour is an awfully wide range. My guess combined with the 4 cups of whole wheat sour dough that you would only need 10 cups of whole wheat flour to make 4 loaves. I also find you can get a good tasting whole wheat flavored bread using a ratio of 1:3 of whole wheat to unbleached bread flour.

The maple syrup idea seems interesting. We use the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum maple syrup. Next year we are going to tap our own trees and give it a go. The sap looks like water and you have to boil it down to get syrup at a ratio of about 16 to 1 for Sugar Maples and more for some other maples.

I had a sandwich for lunch today and used some store bought whole wheat. It dawned on me how bad commercial bread can taste after eating home made for the past two months most of the time. So I had to quick make more home made. This week's bread is similar to others I've made and is getting to me my standard utilitarian everyday bread.

This time I doubled the powdered garlic that I like to put in my breads and added a teaspoon of powdered onion. I also switched from ale to a more subtle Pilsener for the liquid. To be specific it was a Summit Pilsener. It is hard to keep from eating this whole loaf in one sitting.

2 cups bread flour,
1 cup whole wheat flour,
2 tbs vital wheat gluten flour,
1 tsp sea salt,
1 tsp IDY,
3 tbs brown sugar,
3 tbs extra virgin olive oil,
2 tsp powdered garlic,
1 tsp powdered onion,
1 cup warm Summit Pilsener beer,
1/4 cup 2% milk.

Mix all the ingredients together and knead for 10 minutes. Let it rise for a minimum of 90 minutes, punch down and let it rise again. Form the bread and bake on pre-heated stone at 375 degrees for 50 minutes.

We visited our cousins today. Cousin Karen was making a Dutch oven no knead bread from a recipe and article in Mother Earth News magazine. It turned out great and of course I took a picture.



Here is the article.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/The-Science-Behind-Dutch-Oven-Bread.aspx

This might be something I'd like to try on the road in the RV over a camp fire.

Wow,look at the crust on that!!! Give me somwe butter...or Smart Balance and let's at it!

I've never tryed that method, but I have thought of it.
How was the overall taste and texture?
Did the loaf take on any flavors from the Dutch oven?
Looks damn decient though. Chow Jim

It was great. It came out exactly as the article described. There was no taste from the cast iron dutch oven.

I took on an experiment to compare traditional kneaded bread with the no-knead bread technique that was first made popular by Jim Lahey and written up by Mark Bittman in the NY Times in November 2006. This is their video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13Ah9ES2yTU

My recipe for both was.

2 cups unbleached bread flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1-1/4 teaspoon sea salt
3 table spoons pure University of Minnesota Arboretum maple syrup
wheat bran as needed for flour handling
Instant dry yeast
water

The variables were the yeast, water, and baking techniques and temperatures.

For the no-knead bread I added 1-5/8 cups water.
For the kneaded bread I added 1-1/4 cups water.

For the no-knead bread I added 1/4 teaspoon of yeast.
For the kneaded bread I added 1 teaspoon of yeast.

For the kneaded bread I mixed the ingredients together and brought the mix to a ball that I then proceeded to knead for about 10 minutes. When you knead by hand you can actually feel the gluten developing.



For the no-knead bread I mixed the ingredients together just long enough for the mix to come together. The no-knead is an almost unhandleable soupy mix. Here is the comparison of the no-knead in the red bowl and the kneaded dough ball in the white bowl.



I covered the no-knead bowl with clear wrap and set it aside overnight for 19 hours total. I let the kneaded ball rise to double for about 2 hours and punched it down once. Then I turned on the oven at a temperature of 375 degrees to pre-heat the stone. After about another hour the kneaded dough had risen again and I formed it into a boule ball and slipped it onto the stone with a peel.



This is the resulting bread after 50 minutes.





The next morning I dumped the no-knead mix on the counter and folded it twice just like the video.





I put it on a towel with wheat bran to prevent it from sticking and then covered it and let it rise again for another hour.



After an hour I put a enameled Dutch oven in the oven to pre-heat at 475 degrees. After about 20 minutes I dumped the no-knead mix into the Dutch oven like so and covered it with the Dutch oven lid.



After 30 minutes I took the lid off and let it bake for another 20 minutes. This is after 30 minutes.



This is the finished no-knead bread out of the oven.





The no-knead bread had the better crust and slightly better taste but a direct taste comparison was impossible with the breads coming out of the oven on separate days. I suspect the kneaded bread could have been better if I had refrigerator fermented it overnight the way I do my pizza dough and not rushed it. I expected the crumb to be different but both were tight. However, as I sliced deeper into the no-knead bread the crumb did get a lot looser. The variable from the standard no-knead recipes was the use of the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum pure maple syrup. It was just something I wanted to try. I don't know if the syrup affected the experiment.

What I don't understand is the claim that no-knead is simpler. It takes longer in over all time, it gets rather messy with dirtying a towel, the counter for both has to be cleaned up, the Dutch oven has to be cooled and cleaned, and there seems to be a lot more steps just to save 10 minutes of kneading it seems and kneading is one of the more enjoyable aspects of baking bread. I will probably continue to perfect my regular bread baking techniques. It was fun.

wow...I'd say the experiment was a success!

Yesterday was another bread baking day. This time I mixed 2 cups bread flour with 1/2 cup whole wheat, 1/4 cup of Oat bran flour and 1/4 cup of vital wheat gluten flour.

Davydd...another delectible delight...I can see the butter melting on my piece now!!

DavyDD is getting pretty good at this. I have always been intimidated at baking good bread but he has inspired me to learn and do better.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

Paul, It is fun to experiment. I seldom ever make the same bread or pizza twice. Tomorrow I am going to run up to Cabelas and buy a cast iron Dutch oven and give bread making a try over a campfire when we head out next month.

Durn it, we need smell o vision

Don, You will just have to use your imagination.

I just bought the Dutch oven so I can't wait to experiment. I might bake in the fire pit in my back yard.

I also bought a Danish dough whisk from Breadtopia.com. I think it will give my bread an aesthetic edge.

http://www.breadtopia.com/store/danish-dough-whisk.html

Davy, What a coincidence I've been looking for a Danish dough wisk for months now. I knew I could order one on line but for the one item I was trying to avoid the shipping costs. I was holding out thinking I'd lump it in with my next King Arthur order. I checked all the large kitchen outlet stores to no avail, sale clerks didn't even know what it was.
I have 2 stand mixers that I rarely use, I just like to mix by hand and get the feel of the dough.
You may want to look at bannertons for your loaves of bread. I found some reasonable at the San Fransisco bakeing institute. Chow Jim

I found the whisks fairly resonable at Fantes. I bought both sizes shipping was cheap enough and arrived in 3 days. I'll be giving them a workout this morning, I have the pre-ferment going for 2 loaves as I type.
Chow Jim

In my ongoing quest a search for honeycomb bread I came across this recipe
which I tryed yesterday. Getting close but still haven't nailed it yet.
This recipe is intended for a bread machine, I'm the machine.

Loggers Bread

1 c Whole Wheat Flour
1/2 c Oat Flour
1 1/2c Bread Flour
3 Tbl. Applesauce
1 ts. Margarine
3 tbl powdered Buttermilk
2 ts Brown Sugar
1 ts Honey
1 ts molasses
3/4 ts Salt
1 c Water
1 Tlb Yeast

Original recipe calls for all ingreidiants added to bread machine
useing the dough cycle for rolls.

I don't own or care to own a machine so mine was done by hand.
I didn't have oat flour on hand, actually neve have seen it so I made my own by grinding whole oats in a spice mill. Worked just fine.
Overall a very good breakfast type bread a little dense would make great french toast or bread pudding if it starts to go stale.
My next try this weekend I'll try to tweak it useing my starter instead of yeast also some homemade buttermilk rather than the powder. I might add rasins also. Chow Jim

I haven't baked any bread recently having been on another pursuit of the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich most of last month. However, last night I started an earthen oven course that will span over the next two weeks at the Gale Woods Park Farm in Minnetrista, MN west of Lake Minnetonka. It is a community education course with hands on construction of an earthen oven. About 20 students signed up. The instructor prepared ahead of time the foundation base, fire brick arched door and sand form on top of a wagon. We mixed sand and clay for the first 4 inch layer and applied it. Next week we will finish it and the following week we will bake pizza and bread in the oven as part of the course. Last night after we completed our work we all piled onto a hay wagon for a ride through the park. The park is a donated farm to the Three Rivers Park System in the Minneapolis metro area. It is a working farm with chickens, sheep, cows and pigs focused on school group tours.

The three night course is over. I missed the second night because I was suffering through a kidney stone attack. But I did get a photo of the results of the second night's class where they put on a second 4 inch layer of insulating clay, sand and straw and then a finish coat along with decoration. As you can see the artists in the group made it into a pig's head.



The last night was basically a celebration and baking of pizzas and bread. Here is our instructor making a toast for the completion of the oven. The oven was fired up about 2 PM and then the coals were raked out at about 5:40 PM. You can see the pizzas that had come out of the oven. Everyone got to make their own.



After the oven had cooled down from making pizzas the bread baking took over. Here you can see the bread baking. That is an artisan bread on the left and two loaves in a pan on the right.



Here are two finished loaves of bread.



It was a fun course. An earthen oven is simple to make. I don't know if I would do this or just go ahead and make a more permanent dome brick oven. My schedule is too busy this summer but perhaps next summer.

Davydd, It may be of interest to you that King Authur has reduced the price of flour to the wholesalers. This sould trickle down to your grocery store soon. You can find out the information on their web site.
Good news because flour prices went thru the roof.
My bread baking usually falls off during the summer months, but it has been an uncommonly cool rainey summer so I pop out about 3 loaves a week.
Homemade English muffins today, a good way to use dicarded starter.
Chow Jim

Wow...never had a homemade english muffin...gotta be better than Thomas's we have to get!!

My bread and pizza making dropped off completely this summer. First I carried a kidney stone for 2-1/2 weeks of pain until I had a cystoscopy to remove it, and then after I got over exuberant in laying porcelain floor tile and did too much at one time trying to catch up and stay on schedule. My left arm and hand froze up and became literally an non-functioning stump for a couple of weeks and my little finger and ring finger went numb. Probably a similar case to carpel tunnel syndrome from too much constant movement of laying mortar and grouting. You can't knead dough in that condition.

Have any of you bought any bulk flour at places like Whole Foods? We have Whole Foods and a regional chain called Sprouts out here in AZ that sells bulk flour. You just scoop out how much you need and pay by the pound.

For white unbleached all purpose flour I use a 25lb. bag of King Arthur from costco.
For my specialty flours rye, wheat, 00 pastry and so on I have a couple of sources. I have found a store that carrys Bob's Red Mill in smaller portions
that come in very handy. I can use it without the worry of it going rancid or taking up valuable freezer space.
We use to have a store nearby, Wild Oats, but that was sucked up by Whole Paycheck. Too bad because I enjoyed their selection of bulk items.
They said it was going to reopen as Whole Foods but that never happened, still empty. Chow Jim