Sourdough Bread

Sourdough is a nice test of patience. I am not a patient person and it was a miracle that I was able to make it through the whole process without ripping my hair out, but overall it still came out pretty well. For those of you who don't know what sourdough is or why its called that, heres the gist. Most bread that you make uses commercial yeast; little bacteria they've conveniently packaged for you- just dissolve and watch the magic begin! But back before we had major corporations to provide us with our bacteria, we had to get it naturally. Yes, this means that sourdough is literally a result of the bacteria that you grow right at home! This is where being an untidy person really pays off.

The first law of sourdough is that you must start with a starter. This is the way we catch the wild yeast and get them going. Now, I got some fantastic advise from The Fresh Loaf (always a great place to visit). A woman there made a starter using what she calls "raisin water". Now before I continue I should explain that the natural yeasts in the air are attracted to fruit and fructose (the sugar in fruits). Many starters will call for use of a slice of some fruit to help attract the yeast. This woman had a much better idea. If you ever look very closely at raisins you will see that the creases have kind of whitish stuff in them. That is wild yeast. How do we harvest it? Dissolve it in water. Take warm water (105ish) and pour it over a handful of raisins. Let it sit 20 minutes and you've got raisin water, more accurately yeast water. This is a great way to jumpstart your starter.

From here Im going to site her instructions because they were amazingly much better than the ones I got from my Profession Baking textbook.

1 cup rye flour
3/4 cup raisin water

From here you want to stir and let sit. When it gets about twice the size (should take about a day but its hard to tell because it depends very much on heat and the amount of yeast) you want to refresh the starter. Your new starter should consist of:

1 cup bread flour
1/2 cup water
1 cup previous day's starter

These are pretty good standards, but if you see that it is getting too thick, you can add more water, or visa versa. You want to refresh it every time it rises to twice the size and keep this going for about 2 weeks. If you don't want to throw out the rest of the previous day's starter you can just make it in bulk and create a LOT of sourdough.

Heres another warning. It will smell. Not so strongly that people will be put off, but thats actually how you can tell your sour dough is coming out. It should be sour. Don't worry, not all of that smell will be imparted in your bread. Adding flour to anything dilutes flavor. Proteins in flour bind to flavor particles and make them useless. If you make a very wet starter as I did, you will have to add a lot of flour and so you will greatly dilute the sour flavor. If you want a more sour sourdough, you will want to have a stiff starter, meaning more flour and less water in your starter. That way you wont have a lot of additional flour to add after you have let it ferment.

Anyway, the thing about sourdough is that it is literally an art. There is no strict way to do it because for everybody it will differ. The yeast in one area is not the same as the yeast from another, nor will people get the same amounts when they make the dough. This is what makes sourdough so interesting, but it also makes it complicated for a beginner. After the 2 weeks or so have passed and youre beginning to feel like youve got a nice starter, take half the starter, add enough flour to make a dough that isnt sticky, and kneed it 10 minutes. Take the rest of the starter and put it aside for more dough later. The nice thing about sourdough is that you can just keep refreshing it and it will keep making dough for you. Here are pictures of the dough i finally made and the starter that I retained. My mistake when i first made sourdough was that I didn't kneed long enough. A good test to see if you have kneaded long enough is to try to stretch the surface of the dough. It shouldn't break on you, and if it does it won't hold in gases when it is baking either. You will end up with poorly leavened bread.

Here is another tip. After you have let the dough rise to double its bulk, after you have shaped it and let it proof, you want to think about baking temperature. This is the same thinking you would use for any type of bread. If you are going to make a baguette or a roll you that is not very thick, you want high temperature so that it can brown on top as fast as it bakes in the middle. My recommendation is to start with 500 and then bring it down to 450 when you see that the oven spring is finished (inside temp 140). If, however, like myself you are making a loaf or something much thicker like that, only use a temperature of 500 if you have a lid for your pan, otherwise keep it about 420 or so for the entire time, and bring it down if the top is getting nicely brown but the middle isnt near 200 yet.

The last thing I must say because I am a strong advocate is that you MUST use steam throughout the entire oven spring period. This is just common sense. If you do not use steam a hard skin will form on the outside of the bread. That skin will turn to a crust, but there will still be gas creating pressure on the inside of the bread. It will cause the crust to crack so that it can find somewhere to go. This results in terrible looking dense bread. You never want to let skin form on your baked good and if it does, you want to score it very well just before putting it in the oven so that there is plenty of room for steam and CO2 to escape.

~Jules

Croissant Makeup

So I realized that I really didn't have much posted in the last post in the way of how to roll a croissant and make it look presentable. Here are some pictures on just how to do this. First, the large sheet of laminated dough that you roll out you want to cut into triangles as I have here. Before you cut you generally want to wait about 20 minutes to let the dough relax. You have just stretched out the dough and if you cut immediately its just going to recoil instead of staying in its position. You should end up with tons of triangles that can then be rolled up. You want to take one triangle and cut a small slit in the base. This makes the base a bit wider and allows for the little wings that come out the side, otherwise you would have to cut very oddly shaped triangles out of your dough. When you begin to roll, make sure that if any of the sides are sticky or unsightly, they are facing up. Then you want to pull the "wings" out so that there is a wider base to the croissant. From here you can begin to roll up from the base. You want to roll with one hand and hold the tail with the other hand. Once you have rolled about half way you want to start stretching the tail to make it longer and thinner and continue rolling. This is how you end up with many revolutions that make the final product look fantastic. Keep rolling until the final end of the tail is attached to the body of the croissant. Place the entire thing on the tail so that it doesn't come up during baking. Then take the wings and fold them inwards. I have yet to find a very reliable way to keep the wings real tight during baking, but I will figure it out. Once they have been rolled and are looking good you want to proof them an hour at 80 degrees so that they get nice and light. From there they can be put in the oven until the inside reaches about 215 degrees and the tops are nicely brown. If you want a shiny crust, brush the surface of each one with egg yolk, it gives a great finished touch to the croissants. If you want a matte crust egg whites or milk is best to brush with. For a very flaky and plain crust use water or simply bake them the way they are. I also recommend putting in some chocolate to make a dessert croissant. Semi-sweet is best in my experience, but its all personal preference.

Croissants

So Ive been making croissants for a while and I notice that they only get better and better as you make them. I don't believe that this is something you can ever perfect, but that there is always room for improvement. It also takes a good amount of experience and dedication to get this right, so I'll throw in as many tips as I can.

Danish Pastry Dough:

Water: 7 oz
Yeast (dry): 5/8 oz or 20 grams
Bread flour: 5 oz
Sugar: 2.5 oz
Salt: .75 oz
Milk: 12 oz
Water: 1.5 oz
Bread Flour: 2 lb
Butter: 1.5 lb -- Cold

(keep in mind that this will make TONS of croissants-- In my photos I doubled the recipe because I wanted to experiment a bit more, the single recipe above makes about 30. If you have use for that many, you should definitely make it, but if you do not, this is just a recipe for temptation)

So the first step is to dissolve the yeast in warm water (105 to 115 degrees) You then want to sprinkle on the first amount of bread flour without mixing. In the 5 minutes this takes to dissolve, you then want to add the sugar salt milk and water and stir until the sugar and salt are dissolved. You also want to measure out the remaining flour.

After the 5 minutes are up you can go ahead and mix up the yeast and the first amount of flour that is sprinkled on top of it. You then want to alternate between adding the liquid and the flour and mix by hand. Do not over mix! You don't not want to kneed this like you would bread dough because you don't want it to be as tough as bread. To get the nice crumbly consistency you need low gluten development which means high fat and little mixing.

From here you can knead it very briefly on the counter top. its alright if you don't end up using all of the flour. Flours and their ability to absorb moisture change all the time, thought they are somewhat standardized into categories like bread flour and pastry flour. If you don't use all of the flour, use some of it when kneading to be sure that the dough doesn't stick to the counter top. You want your dough to be sticky and you want to kneed it only enough to be sure it is homogeneous and cohesive.

When you are finished kneeding you can use some oil to grease a large bowl (at least twice the size of the dough) and put the dough in there, letting the oil lightly coat all sides of the dough. You then cover it with pastic wrap and let it rise until doubled in volume.

When it is finished rising, you then want to punch it down. Pull the dough up from all sides and push down into the center and turn the dough upside down to release the CO2 that is built up. From here you can wrap tightly in plastic and let it rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Some people insist on letting it sit overnight. If you are going to do this, please wrap tightly. The yeast is less active at fridge temperatures but it is still active and the dough might explode if there arent at least three layers of saran wrap keeping it in.

When this is going into the fridge you should be taking out your butter. You want to take the rolling pin that you are going to use for the project and beat the cold butter until it is nice at flat, as seen below. You are doing this because it will be easier to incorporate into the dough later. I recommend beating the butter with the wrapper still on, that way its less mess on the rolling pin. The wrapper will still come off easily, no worries. You want to then line up these butter slices and put them back in the fridge. When you take out the dough to roll it out, you are going to take out the butter too.

The key to good croissants that don't bleed butter out the edges is having the dough and the butter at the same consistency. This is very important because whichever is warmer is going to move faster with the rolling pin and cause unevenness. Even worse, when you are doing butter enveloped in dough like this, it is easy for the butter to squirt out if it is too warm. Trust me, you dont want this to happen. It is not only the worst mess in the world, but from there it is extremely difficult to salvage the croissants. My first few attempts at making them failed in this regard. So the key to having even consistency is to have them both at a similar temperature--cold. Any time you are working with the dough it should be cold.

So now you have taken the dough and the butter out of the fridge. You are to beat the dough with the rolling pin real quick to loosen it up and then roll it out into a 1X3 rectangle like this picture. You then want to use the still cold butter to cover about 2/3 of that rectangle leaving some space (about an inch or so) around the edges to be able to seal it when you create the envelope. The picture below doesn't have butter in it, but this is still how you fold the final product. Fold in thirds so that the layers go dough-butter-dough-butter-dough. Push out any air bubbles and seal the edges tight by pinching them. Don't try to roll it out at this point. Refrigerate again for about 30 minutes or more. This will not only bring things to an even temperature, but it will relax the gluten strands in the dough and allow it to stretch further without breaking, which is another key to making good croissants.

When you take the envelope out you want to be sure you have a well floured surface to roll on. Once the layers start to form they are going to be very thin and anything that causes them to stick will tear them, leaving a nice open wound of gushing butter to cover your counter top. Not fun. So from here you want to beat the envelope with a rolling pin until it starts to get a bit more maleable. Additionally, you want to roll it in the opposite direction you did the last time. The side that was the 3 in the 1x3 should now be the 1. This means that the edges of the envelope should be the parts that will be 1 and the sealed bottom and top will be 3. This ensures that you aren't stretching the gluten in only 1 direction (which will eventually break it). When you roll you want to have more downward pressure than outward-- push down as though you were trying to flatten it, don't push across the dough, that will drag only the top layers with it and that would be bad. This is called your first turn. A turn is when you turn the dough 90 degrees, roll it out, and then fold it up again. You are going to fold just the way you did before and refrigerate again. Then you want to repeat this 3 more times. Each time you roll and fold you are creating more and thinner layers of dough and butter. This is how the flaky layer texture of the croissant is achieved. By the end, if you cut the dough in half you should see tons of tiny layers piled up. You want these to be even. You want there to be over 100 layers.

When you achieve this, refrigerate again and then roll out this dough one last time. You then cut the dough into triangles. You want to make the base of each triangle a bit wide. As you roll the croissants from the base upwards toward the tip, you want to pull the tip away, stretching the dough and making the roll tighter. It just looks nicer that way-- no impact on flavor :) Then you want to take the wings of that base that you elongated and pull them inward. The finished roll should look like the ones you see here. Cover and let rise at 80 degrees for about an hour, or until you see them get large and puffy.

As for baking, you want either parchment paper or a silpat to bake on. There will be butter. They key is not having so much butter that the croissants are simmering in their own juices. If you've done it right, they shouldn't. Bake at 400 degrees for as long as it takes to get the tops nicely golden brown. Even if the outsides look done, the insides might not be, so to be safe, if you have an internal thermometer you should definitely check to see when the croissants reach above 200 degrees on the inside. That is the key to knowing that they are done. Any additional time in the oven will just make them look better if thats what you're going for. Mine went to about 220 internal temp, and they were just perfect.

I highly recommend taking them out and immediately throwing them on some absorptive towels. You want to get off as much grease as you possibly can. Any butter that is reabsorbed by the croissants will make it heavy and very fatty, so its good to have something like a paper towel spread layed out for when they come out.

It takes a lot of time and its a lot of work, but it is also fun and tasty, and besides that, not a very common skill outside the professional pastry world. Definitely worth the work.



~Jules

Just a few pictures from a fun project...

So I did a few things this weekend with chocolates,

these are just a few pictures of some fun truffle kisses I did.

The large chocolate bar I made was just a way to take the some of the 10 pound block that I have and make it into more manageable pieces.

I will be going through tempering later, but for now, enjoy the photos!

Straight Dough French Bread

Recently I made a very good french bread. I changed my past recipe a bit, but heres where I stood in the end:

Water: 1 pound
Yeast, active dry: 3/8 ounce or 10 grams
Bread flour: 1 pound 12 ounces
Salt: 1/2 ounce or 12 grams
Sugar: 2/3 ounce or 16 grams
Butter: 1/2 ounce

If you haven't already noticed I don't measure using tablespoons and cups. No professional bakeshops do because baking is an exact science. Using volume measures of ingredients is too unreliable to create consistent results.

When I read my initial recipe my first order of business was to get rid of the malt syrup. Malt syrup has its place and can be useful, however is more a pain than it is helpful. It can be easily replaced by sugar with very little change in the outcome. Heres the reason behind the addition of malt syrup. Wheat flour contains an enzyme called diastase. When water is added to flour the diastase breaks down the starch in the flour. Eventually the starch is broken down into simple sugars easily consumed by yeast. The more they are broken down the better food yeast has and the more carbon dioxide it can release. It is very important to control the amount of food because too little food doesnt produce enough leavening (gas in the bread which causes it to rise and gives it volume) to give a good bread. Too much food causes too much of a breakdown of the flour and the crumb (the inside of the bread when it is finished) will be sticky and taste like alcohol. The flavor is because along with CO2, yeast also produces alcohol when it eats sugar.

Diastatic malt syrup contains diastase helps control the breakdown of starch as well as a sugar that acts as a food for the yeast. When you dont have a ton of time to wait for the bread to rise, this is a great option. If you still dont have a lot of time, you can replace it with sucrose (granulated sugar). It is a combination of glucose and fructose, two simple sugars which the yeast will happily eat. Adding a bit more than the diastatic malt that was called for will make up for the fact that you arent breaking down more starch in the bread. The other type of malt, nondiastatic, is simply for food, color and flavor. This type can always be replaced by sugar, perhaps at the risk of making a bread that is not as dark in crust color, but that is certainly a reasonable concession.

This recipe is for a straight dough method. This means we arent making a sponge first (or a preferment) Another way of thinking about it is like skipping a step. Instead of spending an additional 2 hours developing flavor, we are taking the fast route and just adding all the ingredients at once.

The yeast that was used, active dry, needs to be dissolved in warm water (105-115 degrees) for 5 minutes before it can be used. Yeast are most active between 70 and 100 degrees, they are inactive at 42 degrees and killed at 140 degrees. The purpose of dissolving the yeast is to "wake it up" before giving it a big meal. If you don't have a thermometer, you can tell about 110 degrees because its about the maximum heat your hot water should be at. Some will run a bit hotter. The water in the recipe should be raised to that temperature, the yeast measured and dissolved, and in the 5 minutes you are doing that, you should mix the sugar, the salt and the flour together.

Here is a word of warning, NEVER ADD SALT DIRECTLY TO DISSOLVED YEAST. It is quite alright to add them together when they are both dry. Many recipes call for this, but both are soon to be mixed into a large amount of flour, so they wont remain together for very long. Salt inhibits yeast activity as well as giving the bread a better flavor, so it is important, unless you want to kill your yeast, that you don't throw the salt directly into the dissolved yeast. Once the 5 minutes are up and the dry ingredients are mixed, you can add the dry to the wet. If you dont use a mixer, I recommend doing this by hand with a very stiff paddle. Anything pliable like a scraper will not provide enough resistance. As for the butter, warm it up to room temperature and add it to the slightly mixed dough, just for the sake of having it easy to incorporate. At this point you want to kneed.

You will need muscles. This is a good replacement for a gym membership, and you will certainly feel it the next day. The bread should be kneaded about 10 minutes. This means 10 minutes of non-stop heavy kneading, not 1 minute kneading, 1 minute break. The kneading allows the gluten in the dough (formed when water mixes with the proteins in the bread) to form strands. I want to make this clear. IT WILL BE MESSY. You want a very sticky dough. You dont want to add so much flour that it makes it not sticky anymore. Flour has an absorption rate for water, and when flour is maximumly full of water, it is still sticky. When you are done kneading, it wont be. This is how you know you are doing well. Be sure when you are kneading also that you are kneading in all directions. If you just knead in one direction you will form and even break gluten strands in that direction. You want 3-D bread. Turn the bread as you knead.

When you are done, you should begin the ferment. You can do this at room temperature (75 degrees) and it will usually take about an hour or two. It is okay if your room runs hot or cold, really you want it to double in size. This is sort of like stretching a balloon before you blow it up. This will stretch the gluten and make it more pliable for the final rise, the proof. To ferment you want to lightly oil a bowl that is over twice the size of the current dough. You want to put in the dough, let the oil cover the dough, and put saran wrap over the bowl to retain moisture, otherwise your dough will dry.

When the dough has risen to twice its size it is time to punch it down. This is not what it sounds. You should have gotten out all violent tendencies in the kneading. The "punch down" is a light press to release the CO2 that is in the dough. You pull up all sides of the dough from the bowl, fold them over the middle and press down. Pull the dough out of the bowl and begin to scale it. This is determining how many loafs of what size you would like to make. If you plan to bake them together, make uniform sized loafs.

Now you should round the dough-- form it into spheres. The shape is less important than the formation of a "crust". You must pull the dough on the outside very taught and get a lot of tension on the gluten strands that make up the surface. This is the preliminary to making a crust. You can do this by folding the dough on the surface and sealing the excess at the bottom. If this is confusing to you don't worry, Ill be putting up videos of it soon enough.

These rounded pieces should now be rested 15 minutes to let the gluten on the outside relax a bit. It will settle into its new position and get a bit more pliable, which is good when you plan to make a shape out of the dough. I decided to make mini batards, tho they are a little fat. If you dont want your bread to be 2D and sink to the table, i recommend a bakers couche or a canvas to help shape them so that they are really round. For a batard you want to roll out the dough and stretch it out so that its long on one side. You want to then roll it back up and seal it at the bottom and the edges. This seem should always be at the bottom. You then want to put the bread somewhere warm (80 degrees) where it can proof. As for fermentation, always cover the bread while its proofing or else it will dry. A dish towel over it works well enough.

When your shaped dough has doubled in size you want to score it with a razer while the slash marks when baked look very diagonal, they run more down the length of the bread. you also dont want to cut straight down, but at an angle, about 60 degrees or so. Immediately after you have done this you want to place the bread onto a preheated baking stone in a preheated oven at 500 degrees (or as high as you can get it). If you dont have a baking stone, a sheet pan with parchment paper works just fine. When you preheat the oven you want also to put a brownie pan full of water at the bottom. This creates steam.

When the bread first goes into the oven a few things are going to happen. The yeast are not yet dead because the bread doesn't reach 140 immediately, but they are getting warm, meaning that they are getting very active. They are going to generate a lot of gas, called oven spring, which is going to make your final bread rather lofty. Additionally, the moisture in your dough is going to turn to steam (1000x the volume of water). While much of this will escape the bread, much also wont, and so the bread is going to get very large in the first 5-10 minutes of baking. The surface has to be pliable to handle this expansion, and it wont be if it is dried out from the heat of the oven. The baking pan of water is to ensure that there is enough steam in the oven to keep the water on the surface of the bread from evaporating. If there is no steam, there is a good chance the pressure from inside the loaf will split the crust. The steam also has a nice benefit of forming a very nicely colored, very crispy thin crust when finished. But the crust must form sometime and so you have to take the water out about 10 minutes in.

To tell when the bread is done many people say you can tap on the bottom and if it sounds hollow you are good, however I believe in science, and so i put in a probe that tells when the center has reached 200 degrees. When it has, you are good to take it out.

When cooling, be sure your bread has ventilation on all sides. If the bottom is on a flat surface, the condensation will make the bottom soggy, and thats just gross. If you plan to serve immediately then use it while hot, otherwise dont cut it nor store it until it is completely cool. Hot bread loses moisture and stales real fast. When storing for less than 8 hours do it just at room temperature in an open paper container. Plastic will again cause moisture to be retained and the crust to be less crusty and more soggy. If you are storing for more than 8 hours, freeze. NEVER REFRIGERATE!! Staling occurs at record speeds when at fridge temperatures. This is a recipe for disaster.

Photographs

As you can see my projects are in a wide range of categories. Many of these are pictures of things I have worked on in the past semester with my students. The first image are some almond cinnamon rolls with hot glaze and powdered sugar. The one that includes the picture of me is chocolate cappuccino mousse in a chocolate coffee cup with a cocoa nib florentine sticking out the top. Below that are the chocolates I am most known for, a layering of ganache and marshmallow enrobed in chocolate. The picture is courtesy of Tessa, a past student of mine. Finally there is a photo of a rosemary fougasse. As far as a bit of history about me goes, I am currently a senior psychology student at Carnegie Mellon University. I am interning for the summer with an amazing nutritionist in New York City and plan to do my graduate work in nutrition and public health. May aims are to continue baking, but learn to do so in a way that I am not becoming unhealthy or causing others to do the same. It is no small task, baking is a perilous thing to undertake when the intention is to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Ive also heard many people say that truly great chefs and bakers must be fat, because if they aren't then they don't sample enough of their own products. My take is, if you know enough science about food, you don't need to experiment or sample nearly as much. We will see if I'm right in the long run. My class at CMU is incredibly fun and the students have only exceeded my expectations. Much of the reason I bake so constantly is to be sure I am giving them the best advise I possibly could. I feel that while it is great to have the time to read dozens of professional pasty and chocolate books as I do, theres something to be said for getting all of that knowledge, plus some stuff you just get with experience, out of a class. Hopefully that class has turned a lot of people onto baking. It ranges in every category, from breads to pastries to chocolates to confections. I will write this blog much like I taught the course, with as much science and advise thrown in as I can possibly muster. If there is anything you guys would like me to make and document, please let me know, Ill put it in the next post. Right now I am doing as much with breads as I can possibly do. After this post I am going to post some photos of the two projects I have currently, Chocolates and breads. Its a nice dichotomy that keeps me up to my ears in calories :)

Jules

What this is all about

This blog is a bit of a mixing of two worlds-- my ambitions in the field of nutrition and my passion for baking. Part of this is a shout-out and a tool for current and past students of mine at CMU where I teach "Introduction to Professional Baking", a class which teaches the technical chemistry behind baking. I am looking for a way to incorporate delicious baked goods into a nutritious lifestyle. Its much easier to do as a consumer than it is as a baker, but I forbear. For any of you who are looking for the science behind baking, this is the place for you. I am going to post a few photos of past projects to get the ball rolling, and then get onto my current project: sourdough bread.