Wild Yeast

Notes from my kitchen, in which I bake bread and raise a few other matters

The Trouble with Experiments

If you’ve been baking for a while, or even if you’re a new baker, chances are you’ve done some experimenting with ingredients or techniques to see what works best for you. Maybe an experiment goes something like this:

You have a choice of two flours, and you wonder which will produce a better bread. So you take your favorite recipe and bake it twice, once with flour A, and once with flour B. Except for changing the flour (the experimental variable) you keep everything else the same: the other ingredients, the fermentation time, the baking time and temperature. You like Loaf A better, so you conclude that Flour A is better.

Here is an experiment I did a while ago, but I’m not going to say what the experimental variable was, just yet.

I like the loaf on the left better because the grigne (cut) opened up much more nicely than the one on the right.

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Grissini Revisited

As far as I’m concerned, there is no more perfect party food than grissini. A bouquet of these thin bread sticks looks beautiful and never fails to draw a crowd. They’re crunchy and savory and can be picked up and eaten with one hand.

But let’s face it, if you have to roll several dozen of these things individually you may be arriving a little late to your own party. It’s not that I don’t love hands-on time with my dough, but sometimes just a little more efficiency is in order.

In her book The Italian Baker, Carol Field describes how Italian bakers do it, by simply stretching the elastic dough with the hands. For me, this was not only faster but produced wonderfully rustic, knobby-ended grissini. (Do you know me? I am nothing if not a fan of rusticity!)

I love my grissini thin thin thin. If you prefer something a little plumper, roll the dough into a 6 x 4-inch (rather than 12 x 4) rectangle, and cut it into only 8 pieces rather than 16.

This sourdough recipe is very flavorful (and makes nice pizza as well), but yeasted grissini are great too!

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Do-It-Yourself Conversions

Have you noticed that most of my recipes list ingredients in grams? I often receive email from people asking if I would convert the grams into ounces, or into volume measurements. I’m sorry I cannot do this on request, but here are some tips that may help you, if you want to do the converting yourself.

I strongly recommend weighing ingredients, especially flour. The reasons for this are explained in my post about scales and weighing. Many scales can switch between avoirdupois (ounces/pounds; the US system) and metric (grams/kilograms; the sane system) units.

If you do not have a scale, or your scale does not have metric units, you will have to do some math. (Remember when you rolled your eyes in 5th-grade math class and complained that you couldn’t imagine when you would ever need this stuff in real life? Now would be a good time.)

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Book Winners!

The book gods smiled upon me last week and it turns out I have not one but two copies of Bread Baking: An Artisan’s Perspective to hand off to the lucky ladies upon whom the random number gods have smiled:

Caitlin of Engineer Baker and Rebecca of Richmond Hill, Ontario. Congratulations!

The rest of you can order your book here. Read it and learn! The author Dan DiMuzio has kindly offered to answer any questions you may have on reading it, so feel free to shoot me an email and I will send it on to him.

Pain de Beaucaire

Pain de Beaucaire is one of those breads that is like true magic to me. It really seems impossible that a stiff dough could yield a bread whose crumb is as light and open as this centuries-old bread from Beaucaire, in the south of France.

The secret lies in the bread’s unique shaping method. The dough is formed into two layers, with a layer of wet flour slurry sandwiched between them. When the sandwich is stood on its side to bake, the loaf opens along the “filling” to create its beautiful characteristic fissure, similar to a fendu loaf, and the steam created by the slurry helps lighten the crumb.

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Bread Baking: An Artisan’s Perspective Giveaway

What burning bread questions are on your mind ? How do you know how long a dough should ferment? What is the ideal baking temperature? What is an Auvergnat and how do you shape it? In his book Bread Baking: An Artisan’s Perspective, Daniel DiMuzio lets us in on all of it.

This is a textbook, aimed at baking students. It is not a cookbook, although there are a few formulas. But if you’re a bread geek like me (come on, you can admit it), you will find plenty here to interest and inform. It is technical stuff, presented very clearly so even those of us who are not pros can make sense of it.

Chapter by chapter, DiMuzio, a baker and baking instructor, takes us through each step of the bread baking process: ingredient selection, mixing, fermentation (what is that yeast really up to in there?), shaping, proofing, and baking. He explains not only what to do, but why to do it. There is also a chapter about rich and laminated doughs, and one on how to create your own dough formula.

Courtesy of Dan and of publisher Wiley, I have a copy of this great book to give away. All you have to do is leave a comment here by 11:59 PM PST on Monday, April 13 for a chance in the random drawing. International entries are welcome in this one. Remember, you cannot win if you do not play!

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