No-Knead Bread Experiment #2, Part 2

Same recipe as the last time, no modification. This experiment is seeing what happens with different rising methods. The previous test had the dough rise in an oven for 90 minutes, then 30 outside the oven. This time I did the rising 100% outside the oven, for 2 hours. I'd like to think it turned out pretty well!

GRADES:
Crust: B
Crumb: C
Taste: B
Overall: B-
The only thing keeping this crust from being an A is that it was a bit too tough. I suspect that's due to the cooking method, and if I used a heated stone or something along those lines instead of a dutch oven I'd see better results. The crumb was light and fluffy, but mostly closed. However on one third it opened up; had the entire crumb been roughly that open or consistently closed I would have given it a B, but sadly the inconsistency means I'm going to have to keep it at a C. The taste was fairly bland, in part due to the low amount of salt I use in the recipe. As such it's not supposed to have a strong taste. Even so it should be a pleasant bland taste, as opposed to a boring bland taste. Overall I was fairly satisfied with the bread. I'm going to post something other then a loaf of bread tomorrow, then try out a new cooking method with the Dutch Oven on Sunday using this same recipe. Next week will be pretty much all Sourdough I think, as my starter's starting to look stabilized.

Second No-Knead Bread Experiment #1

Sorry for the forgetting the last two updates. I've been busy with some rather time consuming reading and I'm afraid to say just forgot to write up posts.So I decided to start a second experment with no-knead bread. My first experiment was on the effect of hydration in the dough. This time I'll be changing how I let the bread rise after shaping.

The recipe will remain the same in each trial.
400g Bread Flour
260g water
1 tsp salt
1/8th tsp active dry yeast
I put the yeast and 200g of water into a bowl and stirred them up, then let them sit for 5-10 minutes while I gathered the rest of the ingredients. I then put the flour in with the water and yeast, then mixed until most of the flour and water was combined. I put the rest of the water and the salt in, then thoroughly mixed the dough until it was all combined into a fairly sticky ball. I put it into my rising box for 16 hours, during which time the dough rose to about two and a half times it's regular size. I turned it out onto a floured surface and folded it several times, then shaped the dough into a round.

It is at this point that I'll be varying the process. For this loaf I put the dough into a 150 degree oven to rise for 90 minutes, then room temperature for a half an hour while the oven and dutch oven pre-heated. As I expected this caused the dough to rise to pretty much as large as it could get while in the oven, meaning the loaf was fairly flat and had poor oven spring. I suspect if I'd raised it at a lower temperature the result would have been fairly different.

Have some pictures!

Grades:
Crust: C
Crumb: C
Taste: B
Overall: C+
Part 2 will go up on Friday, with it finishing on Sunday.

No Knead Bread Experiment, Part 2

A week ago I posted the first part of my experiment with dough hydration in no knead bread. This is part 2 of that experiment. There's not a ton to say about it. I used 3 cups of water, an 8th of a tablespoon of yeast, a teaspoon of salt and 2 cups of water. Needless to say this was a very wet dough, and barely formed into a ball. Needless to say the dough barely formed a ball when thoroughly mixed! It didn't rise very well as even after a 18 hour rising period the gluten wasn't thoroughly developed. As the pictures show, it stayed moist and rather flat the whole way through. Even the crumb wasn't firm enough to support decent pockets.
Images:


GRADES:
Crust: C
Crumb: D
Taste: C
Overall: C-

EXPERIMENT OUTCOME: Overly dry, for sure. Sure it didn't rise as much as it does when you get the ratio right, nor was the crumb as open and loose, but it was far better then too wet of dough! So new bakers, try to err on the side of caution and keep your dough a tad dry until you really get a feel for it!

What do you want to see me experiment with next? Starting next week I'll be trying to cut back on the text content and post more pictures from throughout the process.

Monday Sourdough #2

As I've said previously, I'm generally posting bread I made a few days before. Such is the case with today's post. I've got a sourdough starter that's almost 2 weeks old now, and I've been using it every other day or so. The taste's changing over time, as it should for a starter this new. I might be making a longer post discussing it in a few weeks, when the taste's started to stabilize. It's yet to truly get sour, it's more of a nutty taste at the moment.

This weekend is when I'll make a properly kneaded loaf of sourdough bread. For now I'm doing no-knead so it minimally interferes with school. And it's working very well. I started with a cup of starter, a cup of flour and about a half cup of water. I mixed it together and let it sit for ~4 hours.

After it developed for a few hours, I added in the remaining 2 cups of flour, cup of water and teaspoon of salt. I mixed the dough thoroughly and put it into a greased container to rise overnight. A lesson I see to keep forgetting is to put the the container into the fridge overnight, not leave it sitting out! Both times I have, the result looked something like this:

See that fine dark smudge, about an inch off the bottom? That's where it was when the dough started rising. I woke up, saw that and of course was more then a little concerned the dough would collapse before I could have a chance later in the day to cook it.  Thankfully that worry was unfounded, and the bread turned out quite good.

The oven spring was decent, maybe giving a 170% increase in height in the dutch oven. I know the spring would be better if the top was scored. But frankly I like the way it looks when it splits. Gives it a authentic feeling. Of course once I get all other parts of the bread down and I acquire a proper sharp knife that can score well, I'll be scoring the bread. But for now I enjoy the way it looks. Bonus crumb shot! Not open enough for me, but it was quite soft.

GRADES:
Crust: B
Crumb: A
Taste: B
Overall: B+
Wednesday will probably be a loaf of honey whole wheat no-knead bread! See you then!

Learning Bagels: First of Many

While I've made bagels before, I've never been perfectly satisfied with them. So today I decided to try two new things with them: First a new shaping method, and second not boiling half of the bagels. Just cooking them straight, and seeing if they kept their shape. In the past when I've made bagels they collapsed slightly during boiling and cooking. I wanted to be sure that it was my handling or shaping that needed work, and not my dough creating/kneading. Long story short for those of you that don't feel like reading the whole thing: It's all in the transfers of the dough.

I mixed a tablespoon of yeast with 1 3/4 cups of water and 2 tablespoons of sugar. I stirred this together then let it sit while I got the rest of the ingredients out and prepped the counter for kneading. I then mixed in 4 1/2 cups of flour and a tablespoon of salt, then kneaded for 10 minutes. I was worried the dough was too dense and wouldn't rise enough, so instead of a quick 30 minute rise I gave them 90 minutes. The dough was still very dense but had doubled in size so I separated it into 12ths and shaped the balls of dough into bagels. I tried a new method of shaping the, rolling the dough into a log and using water to join the ends together. It seemed fine when I put them down to rise, although the dough was resisting stretching. I gave the now shaped dough 20 minutes, then put half on a cornmeal dusted cookie sheet and the other half into a pot of boiling water, with a tablespoon of sugar dissolved in it.

When I put the half-dozen bagels into the pot of boiling water, my first mistake was apparent. By using water for the join, I created an easy point of weakness. To my lack of surprise they separated at the join. My first instinct was to reach in and try to re-close them, which I suspect would have been a poor choice given that they were floating in boiling water! After 3 minutes on the initial side I flipped them, and gave them another 4 minutes to finish the boil. I took them out of the pot and put them onto a second cookie sheet, likewise prepared with cornmeal, and put both sheets into the 375 degree oven. I checked them at 10 minutes and saw the non-boiled bagels had expanded considerably, while the boiled ones were still pale and even slightly damp still. I switched the racks they were placed on and gave them another 10 minutes. After that I pulled out the non-boiled bagels, as they were fully cooked while the top side of the boiled bagels looked identical do how they did when they were put in.

They look like decent, bagelish rolls. Not what I was hoping for, but certainly not bad! They tasted good, and except for having closed interiors they were close to what I was hoping to see. The same can not be said for the boiled samples.

What you don't see is the burned black bottoms. Part of the problem is I suspect the cookie sheet they were cooked on. It's a simple metal sheet, not an air buffered one or stone. The bottoms were burned nearly black, while the tops are barely thoroughly cooked. They taste great, and ignoring the bottom the texture was good.
Ultimately I made 3 mistakes: first my dough was overly dense, leading to slow rising, also causing a poorly developed internal structure. Fix: use slightly more water, less flour, and knead more throughly. This should give a better internal structure, while allowing for a more airy finished product. Second, shaping. The density of the dough contributed to this, as the logs were hard to elongate enough to make a proper bagel. I should have shaped them into balls then let them rest for 10-15 minutes to let the gluten relax. This also would have given them a bit more time to rise, making a better final bagel. Finally the cookie sheet and oven placement. The boiled bagels started close to the heat source on a non-air cushioned sheet. This meant the bottom cooked FAR faster then the rest of the bagel, resulting in the state the bagels ended up in. I would also cut out a teaspoon of salt. While the taste is fine there is a fairly salty flavor. I think next time I make these I'll use a cup of sourdough stater in the place of 3/4ths of the yeast, to give it a fuller more rounded flavor without relying on the salt.

GRADING:
Crust: D
Crumb: C
Taste: B
Overall: C
 I'll be making bagels again next weekend, although I might use another one of my irregular bread projects as the blog post instead next Saturday. If you have any suggestions, or a getter bagel recipe let me know in the comments, and see you Monday!

No Knead Bread Experiment #1

While I may (plan to) only update this blog a few times a week, that's not indicative of how much I cook. I try to make something every day, even if it's as simple as french toast with leftover bread, or pancakes. My update schedule will be in the pattern mentioned previously to try and give myself time to build a buffer of bread to write about, and partially to give myself time to do things other then write about bread and bake. This is a long-winded way of saying that I made the bread in this piece on the 14th and not the 15th, when I posted this.

I've decided to experiment with no-knead bread some more. This time, I decided to use significantly less water then is called for. The next part of this will be with much more water. I was of course reasonably certain what the outcome of both variations would be. Nevertheless, I decided it was worth attempting.

I used 3 cups of flour, 1 cup of water, an 8th of a teaspoon of yeast and a teaspoon of salt. This made a very stiff dough. I put it into a container to rise for 14 hours, in which time it nearly tripled in volume. Normally that would be a good sign, but I was slightly worried. I put my bread into a clear container for rising, and saw only a few small bubbles in the dough through the side of the container. Normally in a bread with a well formed crumb I'll see many large and medium sized bubbles along the sides of the container. Unfortunately I neglected to take pictures, an oversight I will not repeat. After it was done rising I folded the dough four times, noting it was significantly tougher then normal. This was not in and of itself reason for concern as it was a much denser dough by design. I put it on a greased piece of plastic wrap, itself another experiment, and let it rise for a final two hours before cooking it. I scored the top immediately before I put it in the oven to try and maximize the oven spring.

 Not the prettiest loaf of bread I've ever made, but certainly not the worst looking one. I cut it open and well, it was about what I expected. Medium sized openings on the top of the loaf, and a closed inner crumb. Sorry for the poor quality of the crumb picture, it's roughly a third of the way towards the middle of the loaf.

GRADING:
Crust: C
Crumb: C
Taste: B
Overall: C+

Sourdough Monday #1

One thing I've wanted to make for some time was a proper loaf of Sourdough Bread. There are many things you can do to make a pseudo-sourdough, which has a hint of a good sour taste, but to make the real thing you have to actually make a starter. The actual process of making and establishing the starter will come in a later post once it's finally reached something resembling a completed state. That being said one part of the process of making a starter is feeding it. You take roughly a cup of the starter and mix in a half cup of water an a half cup of flour, adjusted to keep the hydration ratio around where you want it. (This is for one style of starter: there are others.) This means that very quickly your starter will get too big to manage easily, and you have to get rid of about half of it.

So rather then throw out a few cups of perfectly good flour-water-yeast mixture, I decided to use it as a rough pre-ferment for a loaf of bread. I added 1 cup of flour and half a cup of water to the 2 cups of starter  mixture, mixed it up and let it sit for roughly 16 hours.

When I got back to it the bowl was full of the pre-ferment, and was ready to be turned into regular dough. I mixed in another 3 cups of flour and a cup of water and stirred thoroughly. Another cup of flour was mixed in to stiffen up the dough a bit, but it stayed a very wet dough. I put it into a greased container to rise, then put it in a warm place for two hours.  I expected it to merely double in size, but it surprised me and instead tripled. I poured the dough onto a throughly floured counter and folded it three times, then shaped it into a round and put it onto a floured towel to rise. After 2 more hours I put it into the oven and cooked it for 30 minutes at 500 degrees, then another 20 minutes at 425 degrees.

The result? A white bread with a bit of flavor, slightly denser and wetter then a loaf I'd make with this process would normally be. The crumb wasn't as loose or open in the middle as I'd like, although around the outer third it was quite airy.

GRADING:
Crust: B
Crumb: B
Taste: C
Overall: B-