A new standard loaf…

Some time ago, I wrote that I had settled on a standard, everyday, loaf – I was wrong. In breadmaking, as in so much else, standing still gets dull. True, I could turn out, reliably, a decent, crusty, white loaf – with occasional excursions into rye bread – but I felt my standard loaf could be better, and so it proved.

I’d intended sticking with the same 60% hydration as before, but somehow I cocked up the calculation, and in reality it was about 68% which, as it turned out, was a great improvement, both in texture and in keeping qualities. I also added 50g of wholemeal rye flour, for flavour. I made a change to my yeast starter, too, adding flour to it.

This is the recipe. There is actually

Floury crust on home-made bread…

This question was put to Nigel Slater in today’s Observer Magazine:-

How do I get a floury crust on my home-made bread?

His answer, to dust it with flour before the second proving, then leave it to its own devices, before baking, is wrong. No mention of slashing the bread, to allow it to expand in the oven, for a start. And I think dusting the bread with flour so early will cause the dough’s surface to dry out somewhat, impeding rising, because things happen more slowly in a relatively cool domestic kitchen than they do in a hot artisan bakery, where you might get away with that technique. You’d still have to

Honey, I burnt the bread…

I’m having a problem with bread. Of late, I’ve baked a couple of loaves late in the evening (normal temp/time – 200C/35 minutes). The first one I left to its own devices until the timer went off – the crust was so deeply browned – almost black in parts – a few more minutes would have trashed it completely.

Last night, I repeated the process, set the timer and retired to read part 2 of The Lord of the Rings – for about the 28^th time (these things matter to LOTR freaks!). Alarmingly soon, the smell of scorching bread began to permeate my flat – not too difficult as it’s about the size of a 3-car garage.

Into the kitchen, hauled out the well-tanned loaf, scrabbled for the cooling rack, and checked the timer – a mere

Culturing yeast from beer sediment….

I wrote, some time back, that I was going to salvage the yeast sediment from bottle-conditioned beer, and grow it on, to make barm-leavened bread – about as back to basics as you can get, apart from by-guess-and-by-god sourdough.

Then I wrote that the yeast sediment was so meagre it was barely there. Then, a couple of days ago, I thought, what the hell, and did it anyway.

By the way, the technique for pouring the beer off the sediment is exactly the same as decanting wine – pour slowly, with a steady hand and a light under the neck of the bottle – as soon as you see a few cloudy threads, stop.

It sat there, balefully, for days, doing

Bakers’ Percentage, one more time…

Some time ago, I tried out the Bakers’ Percentage method of breadmaking (where the flour = 100% and the rest of the ingredients are percentages of that). What I was concerned with was water, as I’ve had a problem with making dough which is too wet. I’m actually pretty much past the wet dough problem now, but I thought I’d try this once more.

Last time I tried it, it didn’t work, which I thought might have been

A bit of culture…

Back in the mists of time, bread was often leavened with “barm” – a technique enshrined, these days, in the name of the barm cake. Barm was the yeast, floating on the top of fermenting beer, skimmed off and grown on, with the addition of flour, more or less indefinitely, as with sourdough cultures today.

Not having access to fermenting beer, I’ve done the next best thing and bought a bottle of beer which is bottle-conditioned. That is – for those of you unfamiliar with the term – given its fizz via a second, in-bottle, fermentation, and not

Bread Bits, Part 5 – Emulating a brick oven, and other stuff…

This is one of the few times I wish I had a family to bake for – then I could make more bread, and get more immediate feedback. Still, that’s life…

Anyway, last week I bought a 13” pizza stone on which to bake bread, and a peel – they have a variety of peels, the link is to the one I bought – for the purpose of moving the risen loaf onto the hot stone (and removing the baked loaf – see Part 4 for more info), and the results have been excellent.

Today, I’ve been leafing through a book that’s just been delivered, Baking Bread – Old and New Traditions, by Beth Hensperger, whose Bread Bible I already had. It has some excellent photos, but – as I rather expected – there is some duplication of recipes. There is also an unacceptable number of typos (oats, are called Avena satira, instead of

Bread Bits, Part 4 – The gadget hunt…

And so the saga of my bread continues…

These past few days, I’ve been going cross-eyed, trying to find someone who sold bakers’ bench knives. These are simple things – a rectangular blade with a wood or plastic handle – so how hard could it be?

Lakeland sold them, up to about a fortnight ago. So I was left to Google’s tender mercies – not helped by the illiterate bastards at Google not recognising the plural possessive form – bakers’ – and only recognising the singular possessive – baker’s. I found one firm, www.thebertinetkitchen.com who listed one, but the design was crap and would make it almost unusable for mixing a wet dough (basically, the part where your fingers would normally brace it when mixing, was

Bread Bits – Part 3 – expanding horizons…

Last week, having pretty much got the hang of basic white bread, and able to turn out loaves with reasonable consistency, I thought I’d expand my horizons a little, and make a Pain au Levain. That is, bread made not simply by adding yeast, but by making a pre-fermentation, in this case a day before (for the rye loaf I’m in the middle of making at the moment – I’m typing this while waiting for the first proving to do its thing – I

Pages: 1 2

Bread Bits – Part 2…

As I said in one of my early posts, my bread has been made mainly by guess and by god, as I have had no instruction in bread-making – one day I just thought, I’ll make some bread by hand. Nevertheless, it’s something I seem to have a knack for; my bread has been pretty good, and well-received by those to whom I’ve given loaves. (I had used a bread machine in the past, but that doesn’t count as hand-made.)

However, much reading and research has shown me the