The Baking Section
Available pre-ferment recipes:
Available bread recipes:
my setup
I have a nice rising and proofing setup that uses classy, brand name expensive.. oh no wait, I don't. I use cheap and effective household items. For instance, admire my rising bowls:
opened |
assembled |
And of course they look really good with dough in them (condensation courtesy of the yeastgenerating lots of alcohol and heat =):
side view |
top view |
Exclusive and expensive? No, not really. This setup consists of four $3 salad bowls, and two $2 window-thermometers superglued into two of them to act as temperature guage to monitor development of the dough as it rises. Low tech? You bet. Effective? I would say so...
For baking, the loaves go into the oven preheated to 260C, where they will bake on a baking stone. This sounds rather fancy and expensive, but every BBQ-supply store is likely to sell "pizza stones", which is the exact same thing. They cost about $30, so it's cheap but really effective (stone radiates heat, unlike metal tins which mostly just transmit it instead. Using a stone will lead to a far nicer crust).
no need for high-tech: a normal oven with a pizza stone (and oven thermometer) |
I tend to transfer the dough baking paper and all onto the stone, then after I'm done misting them, when a contact crust has started to form, gently shuffle the loaves so they're loose and then do the magic tablecloth trick, but then with baking paper.
tips
A tip for work surface: a very smooth surface will mean all your flour dusting gets swept to the sides while you're working. If you use a subtly rough surface you can spread flour into the surface rather than onto it, and the dough will not act as a wiping cloth for flour instead. Don't do this on very rough surfaces obviously (like dimpled granite). For primary work I use a rough-surface plastic cutting board, which is ideal.
A tip for hand cleaning: get a nylon abbrasive pad for cleaning your hands rather than a normalsponge pad. it will clean off the dough easier, and is itself cleanable by simply folding it double and rubbing it against itself. all the flour washes right out, and the glutten gets rubbed up into easily removable "strings". Also, due to the nylon nature it's not so scratchy that you'll tear open your hands, just scratchy enough to get all those annoying bits of "why do you keep sticking to my fingers" dough.