Sunday 8th of March 2009, 01:01:16 pm
I figured I'd make some pizza for dinner. It looked good going in the oven, and tasted excellent going in my mouth =P
Friday 6th of March 2009, 03:28:32 pm
I made a bit of raisin bread, and made the awesome mistake of deciding to do so around 6pm. So an hour later after the raisin'd soaked in warm water I whipped up some dough, tinned it, and then let it rise... right up to 10:40pm when I could start baking... which took until 11:15, and then the bread had to cool. Which for a full loaf of raisin bread takes about an hour.
So now it's twelve thirty give or take a minute, my raisin bread looks delicious, and I can finally go to bed...
...having been tortured with the smell of raisin bread for over an hour now. And no midnight snacking for Pomax while he's trying to ditch some excess body fat T_T
How to screw up baking baguette
Friday 20th of February 2009, 10:45:49 am
Things don't always work out the way you planned it, if you forget to stick to the plan. This seems to pretty much always happen to me when I'm photodocumenting what I'm actually doing, so without trying to make excuses for today's result: a report of failing (sort of) at baking baguette - something I do nearly every day >_>
When I get up, the routine is essentially "get up, walk upstairs to turn on shower heater, walk back downstairs, and get today's overnight-developed dough from the fridge". I have two batches of dough in my fridge, namely a large wad of paté fermenté, and a 'daily batch' for rolling two roughly 12" baguettes.
The first step in the daily routine is fairly straight foward: turn the daily batch into baguettish shapes, and set them aside for proofing.
step 1: rolling out the dough to form a strip
step 2: cut in half, and roll up each half
step 3: flatten
step 4: pinch
pinching basically involves taking the edges of the flattened dough, and bringing them together over the center, then literally pinching the dough together so it doesn't unfold again.
step 5: place inside a proofing tin (mine's nothing more than a regular oven tin, which I cover with tin toil, rather than a lid) and
step 6: proof
The dough will sit in a little chamber under my oven for about an hour and a half to rise (I was impatient today though, so I only left it in there for about an hour... fail point no. 1).
oven: my oven is fairly spartan, but meets two important requirements. 1) it can go up to 250°C. This is essential for good oven spring. 2) I have a stone tile (in this case 1cm marble) so that the bread can be heart-baked, meaning the dough will be instantly heated when it's placed in the oven, again essential for good oven spring.
proofer: nothing fance, it's basically just a hollow under the oven compartiment. The top is warm, the bottom is cold, so I have my proofing tin sitting on top of an inverted baking tray so it's close to the top and catches some radiation.
With this done, it's time to make the dough for tomorrow's baking.
step 1: the french bread trinity of flour, salt and yeast. My recipe involves mostly "it looks right" amounts of each, so until I measure it I won't guess at what I'm actually using.
step 2: mix with water and knead to form a doesn't-need-to-be-perfect boule (boule to the left, large wad of paté fermenté on the right)
step 3: adding the paté fermenté, at a ratio of 1:2 paté to fresh dough.
step 4: knead into a homogenous dough, and set to rise at room temperature until roughly double its size
step 5: punch down, ball up, and after taking a picture putting it in the fridge to sit for about 22 hours
At this point the dough I stuck in the proofer is (or, should be) risen enough to start baking.
step 1: untin
step 2: ...
step 3: put in the oven
step 3b: realise you forgot to score the bread.
This is crucial. If the bread is to spring properly, it needs some way to expand - the oven is so hot that the outside of the dough will rapidly become inflexible. If you forget to score ('cut slits in') the bread it will simply tear through the crust wherever it's weakest. This is a horrendous cock up, so I quickly jumped in (not 15 seconds after putting in the dough and closing the door) and got a small serrated knife to quickly score the bread. Now, just to indicate how crucial this is: I was already too late - a bubble had formed on the right loaf. I don't recommend you to score bread after you've put it in the oven. Score it before... anyway, with the cuts in place (and the left cut pretty poorly), we were back on the road to baking some baguettes. Scoring can lead to worries - if you cut too deep, all the gas escapes and your bread doesn't spring, it just kind of deflates. If you don't cut deep enough, the bread will still tear out. In this case, I got a little of both, the left deflating a bit, the right tearing out a little.
This is why you score before you put bread in the oven >_>;;
step 4: misting. Every 4 minutes or so I spray a generous amount of water mist under the stone plate, onto the oven floor. This turns into super-heated steam and is essential to forming a French bread style crust. No steam = no crust. And a good crust is half the bread.
step 5: after about 10 minutes I switch the loaves around. You can see the tearout on the now right loaf, and a warping effect the cutting-after-placing-in-oven had on the now left loaf. Good stuff...
After about 20-22 minutes of baking, the result is bread with two problems, neither of which were terminal, but both of which would yield exquisite bread if avoided: the short proofing time means the dough didn't quite form enough gas in it to puff up and give a nice mix of small and large holes in it. It becomes kind of the texture of white bread in a French bread crust. And no, that is not what French bread is supposed to be. Secondly, the shape's funny. Now, I don't know about you, but to me a baguette has to be straight. It just tastes better that way =D
And so another morning of baking. Is it worth getting up at 6am for?
Yes. Yes, it is.
Friday 19th of September 2008, 07:57:52 am
I like to bake bread. I particularly pride myself on my French bread, which without patting myself on my shoulder is better than most Parisian boulangeries. I should know, because our last Paris trip was, in part, one to find a boulangerie that made baguette that surpassed mine. You would imagine that as a home baker this would not be too hard, but none of the "well ranked" boulangeries got even close. Poilâne had decently tasty baguette, but still not as good. This was very weird. Also, disappointing. Lastly, it means I will simply keep making French bread.