Stupid Baking

[Anastasia Beaverhausen]

Liv, have you tried the banana bread beer? It's my favorite beer.

[wei yau]

Pi(e) Day is coming up at the office.

This year, I'm gonna go all dim sum up on their asses.

Hong Kong Egg Tart

Though I am strongly tempted to cheat and use pre-made crust, on account of generally being afraid of baking.

[BrotherMan]

Probably because I'm not 100% awake yet, but I read that as Honkey Tonk Egg Tart and wondered what happened to my best bort friend.

[Ymir's blood]

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by wei yau

Pi(e) Day is coming...

Came and went without me getting any pie. We ate at China King buffet last evening. I had hoped they would have some sort of thing resembling pie, cheesecake even, but alas, no pie-like anything was to be found. Their dessert island had only a bunch of factory-made cookies, a ghastly banana cake roll thing, and ice cream.

[Ymir's blood]

Ghastly

[ChristinaM]

Have any of you had any success with making 100% whole wheat bread in a bread machine that you can cut into thin slices without having it crumble? The recipe that came with the machine is useless because if I only use as much water as it says to the dough won't even come together. I don't have any problems when I make the french bread that my husband likes or a 50/50 blend of white and wheat flour but so far the healthy hippie type breads that I like have to be cut into massively fattening slabs to make a sandwich with.

[chunksmediocrites]

Can you describe what you mean when you say it won't even come together? How is the hydration- wet, dry, normal? Is the dough super strong (not extensible)or taffy (too extensible)? When the dough is gently stretched, does it pull back like elastic, or pool out all sad and weak?

[ChristinaM]

The whole wheat recipe that came with the machine calls for 1 cup + 2tbsp of water to 3 1/2 cups of flour. If that's all the water that I use there is still a lot of dry flour left at the end of the first knead cycle and the result is an inedible dry brick. I've added more water tbsp by tbsp until the dry flour gets picked up and then the dough feels about the same as the squishy white bread stuff does. I'm so used to feeling the dough by hand as I knead it so I'm not exactly sure just how elastic it should feel in the machine but it sure doesn't have much of any when it's done. It doesn't collapse into crater bread so I don't think that I'm using too much water.

[Dingfod]

From what I remember about having a bread machine, a cup of water sounds about right. Do you put any vegetable oil in it? Are you using self-rising flour or do you add yeast?

[ChristinaM]

For french or white bread I'm using bread flour and bread machine yeast. For the whole wheat I'm using mostly stone-ground grainy looking stuff. Maybe part of the problem is that their idea of whole wheat flour is the more processed kind that's only a bit more than 50% whole wheat. There's a very obvious difference in the texture of the white flour and the wheat flour. I can make rye bread that's easily cut into thin slices too with about 1/2 rye and 1/2 white flour but the same crumbling thing happens if I try to make whole wheat rye. I'm just starting to try to venture away from the recipe book that came with it because it's pretty heavy on the white bread recipes so I'm still learning to experiment. The only recipes that call for oil in them it are the sweet and quick bread ones and the banana bread came out really well. Lots of our fruit is almost ready to be picked so I want to try the jam setting then and see what kind of mess I can make using pectin instead of all of that sugar. Plums have a lot of their own and they're almost ripe.

[chunksmediocrites]

Whole Wheat flour weighs about 0.25 lbs per cup so that's 0.87 lbs
Water is about 0.5 lbs per cup so let's say the recipe that came with the machine calls for 0.6 lbs.
Baker's percentages calculate hydration as a percent of the total flour (flour being the 100%), so that recipe would be about 69% hydration, which doesn't seem bad on paper.

Does the recipe call for a particular brand of Whole Wheat flour? What kind of Whole Wheat flour are you using? How long have you had the flour? Does the recipe call for wheat gluten?

[ChristinaM]

I love the way that you guys think .

The recipes just say to use whole wheat flour without being specific as to which kinds. Maybe something to try next time is to use some regular grocery store whole wheat that isn't stone ground and has smaller grains. If that comes out right then I'll know that it's the type of flour that I use that's making the difference and then I can start to use that and take notes about the results that I get using slightly more or less water. I'm not sure if adjusting the amount of sugar or yeast would help. Up until now it's been something that I do by feel with my hands and not something that a machine does for me so I never gave much thought to the chemistry of it.

[chunksmediocrites]

Okay- so while I was leisurely posting I missed the post you wrote that you were using coarse stone ground whole wheat. The hull of the whole wheat in coarse flour act like little knives- they cut up all the gluten strands. And that explains why it has a totally higher absorption rate than what the recipe calls for.

There are a couple things you could do with this flour, and forgive me for not being familiar with bread machines. You can add in all your water and flour only, and then just mix it long enough so that there is no dry flour. Then (if this is possible on the machine) stop the process and just let the rough dough sit for about 30 minutes- this is an autolyse. By allowing the flour to fully hydrate and absorb all the water this will reduce the time you need to mix the dough, which will also reduce the amount of time the little knives are shredding your gluten strands.

Another thing you could do is mix a preferment. There are lots of different types of preferments, here I was thinking a poolish would work and be easy to do.
Normally when we make a poolish at the bakery, we take equal weight water and white flour with a portion of the total yeast for the recipe (maybe 20% to 40%), and mix that together until it is relatively free of chunks of flour (though a few or small chunks are no big deal). At 100% hydration, this is a wet, sticky paste/ batter with no development. Then you put it in a covered container (one that the poolish will only fill about half-way, and a container you can eventually fit in your fridge). Let the poolish sit at room temp for about 5-6 hours, or until it increases in size to roughly 150%. There will be bubbles in the poolish; if there are not something bad happened. Then refrigerate the covered container until you are ready to use it, preferably within 24 hours. When you go to use it, there should be a noticeable difference in texture: instead of a thick slurry, it should be a but more gelatinous and form some strands and body; well at least with white flour, I haven't made a whole wheat poolish. If it collapses some, that's okay- it has lots of gas pockets and will tend to collapse as you mess with it.

Depending on the type of bread, you could easily take up to half your total water weight to make this preferment. Also if the poolish is cold when you use it in the final mix, you will want to raise your remaining water temp to compensate so your dough doesn't come out cold.

With the rough stone ground whole wheat that absorbs more, you might want to skew the weight on the poolish mix to more water than flour- just make sure you know how much water, flour, and yeast you used in the preferment, and subtract that from your ingredients for the final mix.

The poolish will do a couple things: it will hydrate a portion of your flour ahead of time, making the mixing process easier. It will jump-start fermentation so that when you finish your final mix, the dough already has active reproducing yeast and enzyme activity converting starches to sugars for the yeast to eat. It will probably reduce your mix time, which is good, because the longer you mix the more the little bran knives cut up the gluten strands, which will damage your structure and volume.

The last thing to think about is to add some vital wheat gluten if you want more body out of it; whole wheat has less gluten available and generally lower volume as a result. Here I have very little experience, we don't use any in the bakery, just what is already in the flours.

If I'm man-splaining like a douche then please tell me and I'll apologize, you obviously have experience with making bread and I don't want to presume.

[livius drusus]

Chunks is ever so dreamy when he's bakesplaining.

[ChristinaM]

Nope, that was just bakersplaining and it was great. The only reason that I'm using a machine is that I hurt my wrists and I can't knead by hand anymore and I was getting sick of no-knead artisan bread. I'm no expert at baking but I always had a few recipes that I varied with seeds and stuff and they always worked so I didn't give much thought to the chemistry of it. I didn't even measure the water exactly because I knew when it felt right. My food processor can knead but it beats the bread to death. It's time to learn to do it with my brain instead of my hands.

Seeing as I have you here, how the heck do you get baguettes to hold their shape so that they come out long and thin instead of wider and flatter than you thought that they would? I've yet to make anything that was supposed to be a roll that wasn't a weird shape by the end. I've only tried to make them with no-knead bread.

[chunksmediocrites]

I forgot to mention that after the autolyse you of course add all the rest of the ingredients and finish the mix, probably shaving a few minutes off the mix time and checking for development.

If when you form a baguette the dough pools out during proofing (the period between forming the loaf and baking), there can be a couple things going on.
The dough can be too wet- a very wet dough won't have enough elasticity to hold shape.
The dough can be underdeveloped (undermixed)- the gluten strands aren't organized enough to hold shape during proofing.
The flour can have poor protein content, or have a lot of lower quality protein- impacting the gluten development.
The loaf can be overproofed- as the yeast activity continues and the loaf increases in volume, at a certain point the structure of the loaf will begin to degrade. If you bake an overproofed loaf it tends to get less oven spring, less color (the yeast has eaten more of the available sugars and the crust does not caramelize as well), and the gluten structure has started to sag and collapse, giving you a poor profile.
The flour can have poor fermentation tolerances and be finicky.
How you score your baguette (if you score it) can cause the loaf to flatten out.

If your dough has decent strength and development, and your bread flour is decent, then one thing you can do is make sure you form your baguette tightly; another is to use a well-floured cloth (couche) and some objects around it to help support/ maintain shape during proofing, and then double-check your scoring technique.

It is kind of hard to describe good forming and scoring technique, so I would suggest searching You Tube, there are a lot of decent videos there.

I am going to cheat and post a video from the bakery I work at but it is a promotional video and definitely not instructional for forming, scoring, or baking. I'm not featured in this video, though I know everybody in it and manage most of them.

Bakery Magic: Baguettes - YouTube

For home couching you could heavily flour a cloth that most closely resembles canvas, then block the loaves on either side with something like saran wrap or aluminum foil boxes to help support them. If making more than one baguette at a time please make sure to form a loop of couche in between to avoid them glomming together.

[ChristinaM]

OMG those look great.

One problem is that I just use the same recipe for baguettes as I do for generic oval or round artisan bread and that's pretty gloppy dough even when it sits overnight. It doesn't look anything like the dough in the video. I think that the few times that I tried baguettes I just waited the minimum amount of time for the first rise so it was even more wet than usual. I'm not making them as long and thin as they are either. I was also using regular white flour and not bread flour although I don't really know what the difference is. My husband eats so much bread that there isn't time for flour to get more than a week or 2 old around here. As far as scoring goes I just cut some random lines for appearances sake but now that I think about it I have no idea what the purpose of it is other than cosmetic. My next idea was going to be to just go find some long skinny pan but I know that isn't really necessary.

And don't worry - even if you were trying to advertise your business I'm not driving from Santa Cruz to Portland no matter how good the bread is .

[chunksmediocrites]

So there is a big difference between all-purpose flour and bread flour- bread flour has a higher protein content, which directly relates to the strength and volume of the dough.

Also with baguette dough you might want a separate recipe. This link has a nice simple recipe and step-by step. She also has the perforated baguette pans which can be great for home baking.

If you cut scores to deep or vertical the bread tends to open up like a book and flatten out.

Here's a decent tutorial

Proper scoring of a baguette - YouTube

[ChristinaM]

Now I really want one of those pans. Thanks for the help. I can't wait to try it again and see if I do better the next time.

[ChristinaM]

Well, it also might have helped if I had remembered that I live over 2000' in a very, very dry summer climate and it recommends adding 2-4 extra tablespoons of water per cup of flour. Duh.

[Janet]

I bought something called Fiori di Sicilia from a King Arthur Flour catalog my sister randomly received. It's a flavoring, some mix of citrus and vanilla. I've never heard of it, but I was curious enough to try it. Does anyone have any suggestions of how I should use it?

[Qingdai]

Maybe something like Panetonne?

Panettone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[lisarea]

Oh, bleargh.

My foolproof NYT no knead bread is not rising. I don't think it's the yeast this time. I think it wasn't wet enough or something, like somehow I messed that up because I started making bread in the middle of the damn night when I was half asleep. It did look drier than usual.

Anyways, can this marriage be saved? Can I, like, proof some yeast and add it or whatever and then, like knead the no knead bread and make bread like a refugee, or should I just cancel all our plans and go live in the park or something?

Don't tell me to start over! I know how to do that already! I don't want to!

[Dingfod]

I think you've answered your own question in there somewhere.