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JonJ's blog

November 20, 2024 - 3:09am
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JonJ

Thinking about open crumb

Every now and then I go after open lacy crumb in my breads. Now, I'll be first to admit that I love my bagels, flat-breads, whole-wheat and all rye breads too! So, a lot of the time I'm not interested in open crumb at all. But, the first time I made a sourdough bread that had a dark, almost-burnt crust, and a light interior that was like a "web of crumb" held up by the crust, it was a bit of an "aha" moment. So, that's what other bakers were going on about, it isn't only an Instagram thing!

Lately, I've had a couple of things on my mind when baking the sort of loaves for which open crumb becomes a consideration - both things revolve around getting loaves that are more well proofed.

The first has been about building the levain so that it is vigorous and more capable of expanding the loaf to a large size before becoming too acidic. And, pairing that with keeping the hydration low and using a vigorous machine mix. So, a dough that will be capable of inflating well, paired with a strong levain.

The other thing is something I guess we all think of - it is what Paul recently called "loaves (that) felt light for their size" and what I think of as loaves that have a light hand-eye feel! My batard bannetons normally take about 800-850g of dough, but I've found that I can reduce that to about 750g of dough and just extend final proof longer until the banneton is filled to the same volume as before. For this bake it was 768g dough per loaf.



For the levain build here, I had a lovely bubbly very liquid 166% hydration rye levain leftover from making Danish rye a couple of days before. With a '3' stage build we'd normally want a stiffer levain, so at about 10pm at night this was made into a ~80% hydration levain by using only 9g of the bubbly rye levain with 125g of bread flour and 100g of water. The next morning it was almost ready to use (kept in proofer at 26C), but wanted to give it another 'quick' feed before using and to bring the hydration to about 100%. This feed was an additional 30g flour and 50g water, the relatively small amount of flour meant that it wouldn't be necessary to wait for too long before baking, and the levain was nicely tripled before using. I still aspire to the more classical 'french 3 build levain' at a much lower hydration (say 50%, salted), but then I guess we'd be looking at say 1:6 for the overnight feed, whereas, by keeping it a little more liquid as was done here I could go a lot higher (this is about 1:13?). Don't know which way is better, a higher feed ratio or a stiffer levain or if they are even mutually exclusive, and I wonder what your thoughts are!

When it comes to the 'vigorous' mechanical mixing I've been back on the food processor bandwagon for a while now and my mixer has been taking a break. I'll be the first to admit that the food processor felt 'chaotic' for me at first. I had disasters and ruined my old food processor too! Nowadays, except for having to work with the 'scary' metal blade things go pretty smoothly. I do about a two minute mix starting on slow and adjusting the dough every now and then. Dough is mixed for one loaf at a time to stay within the capacity of my food processor as well as to mix better. Gluten development is marvelous and because it is so fast, the mixing and washing of the food processor bowl and blade can be done within 15 minutes, even for two loaves.

For this bake the fermentation was fairly long - 7 hours 40 minutes - and still could have been longer - with the proofer set at 26°C. That time is from initial mixing of the dough until it went into the fridge overnight. The dough started a little cool as 15°C water was used for the initial mix by hand, then it had a 40 minute 'fermentolyse' rest in the fridge before going into the food processor and came out of the food processor at 24°C.



Crumb was good, open but not as open as my previous bread. And, next bake I'll tweak and push it even further... maybe up the hydration a percent and reduce the amount of dough for each loaf a touch too. After all, it is a long journey to crumb nirvana. But not all at once -  the next loaf is going to be a whole-wheat loaf - so this will continue to be a slow interrupted journey in many stages.

-Jon

October 27, 2024 - 6:36am
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JonJ

A new standard sourdough recipe

I've had more than my fair share of experimental failures lately! This is the curse of being an experimental baker. My failures of late have included, amongst others and going through my baking notes, a 90% biga with raisin yeast water that took too long to rise, a sourdough made with a cool and stiff preferment, and a sourdough made at warm temperatures with a very very low inoculation. Some bakes have had whacky hydrations too...

So, I needed to bag a win, and going through my baking notes again I realized that I don't actually have a base-line bread recipe to return to anymore. For this bread I decided to play it safe, keep the hydration down, give it a normal duration ferment with an amount of levain in the conventional range. And, at the same time keep an interesting flour base starting with the idea of about 76% bread flour, 16% wholewheat and 8% rye which I picked up from Trevor J Wilson. Since my bread flour here is a weakish 11.5% protein I did supplement with some vital wheat gluten and introduced malt as well because I like what it brings to both flavour and dough handling. And it has been a while too since I've done a true autolyse, lately I've been adding the levain upfront into the water for the final dough, but I'm still somewhat on the fence whether that is better than a true autolyse. For this bake I brought the autolyse back.

These breads were then made with a two hour autolyse with no salt. Then the autolysed dough, the salt, and 'only' 15% levain were mixed all together using the dough hook only for 2 minutes, just to mix the ingredients which is easier than by hand. I then gave it only 30 slap and folds, which I prefer to machine sometimes, so here I've got a combination of both machine and hand mix.



Then a small amount of water was bassinged in, a couple of coil folds during the earlier part of bulk and a longish bulk until pre-shaping of 5 hours, followed by another 2 hour 15 minute rest of bannetons in proofer before going into the fridge overnight and baking the next day.



Although I didn't do anything wild with making these breads I was fairly experimental with the seed toppings. The one loaf had golden linseeds, whereas the other has white sesame, chia and basil (subja) which brought in a savoury flavour.



It was nice to enjoy bread with a soft open crumb again! And, when next I deviate into the experimental wilderness, I'll remember this bake as a point to return to for making breads that I love.

-Jon

September 24, 2024 - 12:47pm
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JonJ

Abel's 90% biga with instant yeast and 15 hours at cool temp

With all of the discussion around biga on thefreshloaf lately, I thought I'd owe it to myself to faithfully make Abel's 90% biga bread which has become one of those famous recipes here. This time I tried to make it exactly as per the recipe. In the last month I've tried Rene's idea of a 50% biga with sourdough, and I've also tried a similar idea of a long 24 hour fermented biga made with sourdough at 90% biga.

For me, the promise of the biga method is the extra smell and flavour from the biga, and maybe also that dough handling is better because you seem to be granted an extra special window of time where fermentation has advanced quite a bit, but gluten development has been minimal or at least fundamentally different enough that you can still develop a strong gluten. That is, provided you are working from 'strands' of 'just mixed enough' biga!

One of the things that has kept me away from Abel's method was the requirement for keeping the biga at 14-16°C, especially since I don't have a wine cellar or own a wine fridge. However, I seem to have figured out a good enough method here - I used my proofer switched off, which is essentially a polystyrene box, to which I added an additional bowl with 2 ice bricks and ice to keep things cool.



The biga was initially mixed using the famous method of two chopsticks just until there were strands or threads of dough, perhaps I was a little too much on the minimalist side because I did leave more unmixed flour at the bottom of the bowl than I would have liked. The initial dough temperature after mixing was 22°C (room temperature water), which went down slowly overnight and at the end of the 15 hours before use it had reached 13.7°C.

This bake was done with instant yeast and the flours used were 90% Caputo Manitoba Oro and 10% Lowerland wholewheat. 1kg of the two flours were mixed together, and then 900g of that was used for the biga and 100g was reserved for the final dough. Mixing of the final dough was done similarly to how Alan and Lance recommended on the original post by Abel - I used the paddle and added small large coin sized chunks of biga gradually to a slurry made of two-thirds of the final water and flour. It was mixed for about 20 minutes whilst slowly adding the chunks of biga and small amounts of the hold-back water at a time, then the salt was added and gave it a further 8 minutes or so. I stopped with the mixer when the dough kept on climbing over the top of the paddle, even though there were still a few small bits of the biga in the final dough that weren't incorporated fully. Temperature after mixing was 23°C.

Although I was concerned about the small bits of biga that made it through into the dough, it wasn't a problem for the final bread which had no lumps.

The bread had one coil fold during the 1 hour spent in a warm proofer (28°C), then was split and pre-shaped and rested on the counter at room temp for 30 minutes, after final shaping and transfer to bannetons it was again kept at 28°C for 1hr 15m before directly baking. The dough handled very nicely, it felt a little loose but was easy to shape and score.

As others have said, oven spring was amazing. And I love it when a loaf crackles after coming out of the oven, as these did.



The final flavour was lovely, subtle, much sweeter than sourdough and the salt came through well when eating. Lovely crispy crust. The crumb was more open than I have had with my previous biga bakes made with sourdough.

What a lovely bread, all in all. I am curious to one day try with lievito madre to see if I can copy what Lance did in that regard, but I'm even more curious if it is possible to get a nice flavour using a raisin yeast water. And the IDY one is just such a winner already that all that seems unnecessary.
September 11, 2024 - 7:35am
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JonJ

Keto rolls and bagels

It is amazing what can be done with faux substitute ingredients nowadays. I've previously had some bread and rolls made by a local 'low carb' company specializing in keto products called "We Love Low Carb" and the baked goods product range is truly outstanding -  bread (sourdough and CY), buns, bagels, pies, pitas, wraps, pizza bases, and why not have hot cross buns as well!

I'm always into exploring what makes products tick, and this bake was mostly about learning more about how these modern miracles of food technology work.

With that in mind, I baked some rolls and bagels using a bag of their all purpose flour mix. The bag of their flour mix lists the following ingredients: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, oats, almond/macadamia nuts and vital gluten. In other words, what we have here seems to be the use of low carbohydrate seeds and nuts (except for the oats, which I wouldn't count as low carbohydrate, right?) and the magic ingredient that allows for a bread texture and makes this suitable for so many different kinds of breads would be vital gluten. It is interesting, and notable that flax seeds aren't listed as an ingredient, and in reviews of the product people seem to regard this as a positive thing! Perhaps people are tired of the taste if they're on a diet where this is a major constituent.

The bag contains a brief recipe: "500g of we love low carb flour, 300g water, 15g yeast, 14g salt, 30g sweetener. Mix all together for 12-15 mins. Let rise then bake for 40 mins at 160C". A couple of things are noticeable - a lot of yeast and salt. And more emphasis on the mixing than on how long you should leave it to rise! Rather cheekily the recipe leaves the sweetener up to you, which could be a source of carbs or artificial sweeteners, I guess (I used agave syrup for this).

In the initial mix with a Danish whisk, it felt and looked like a gluten free bread, and that had me fooled at first.


In fact, I left it for 10 minutes before using my Kenwood as I was treating this similar to a gluten free bread. But, the mixing is essential, and this is the opposite of a gluten free bread, there is a lot of gluten here. The strangest thing is that after mixing for 10 minutes on the dough hook it developed a really tight elastic ball of dough. So tight that it was very difficult to remove from the dough hook, I've never struggled as much to remove a ball of dough from my dough hook as with this bake.

I made both rolls and bagels. The bagels were boiled, because to me a bagel has to be boiled. The dough could handle the boiling treatment acceptably well, although you do have to be gentle with your handling when you're seeding the boiled bagels as they're softer than with normal bagels and do deform easily.

And there was a lot of lovely oven spring. Nice browning on top. Beautiful texture and crumb. Flavour-wise it tastes like the ingredients, not as nice as real bread, but the texture can fool your mouth.





An interesting experience overall and one I'd recommend if you were on a carb restricted diet.
June 28, 2024 - 9:11am
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JonJ

25% maize meal bread

There is a post from the long distant past (2017) on this site, by Wendy (Lazy Loafer) describing one of her bread tasting open house experiments where different sourdough loaves were made each with a different flour making up 25% of the flour. It was a lovely, interesting read, and a lovely interesting experiment too, especially since the flours used were quite varied and there were some non-wheat variants including amaranth, and one made with whole corn flour, which ended up being the clear winner in terms of tasting.

Quite inspiring and hence this loaf!


In the past I have made loaves with maize meal, but always made a porridge/scald first with the maize meal. Which I suppose is the 'correct' way, but also wasn't hassle free in that the porridge tended to lump and was difficult to incorporate in the final dough.

This bread was much simpler to make, simply by incorporating the maize meal as a dry ingredient with the other flours. The dough was gritty when mixing, and it didn't slump even though the hydration was a little higher than Wendy's. The grittiness didn't really come through to the crumb of the final loaf, although you could feel a slight grit in the crust.


In terms of the experience of eating the bread it was similar to eating a maize meal porridge (or as we call it here, mielie pap or uphuthu). Very filling (satiating), fairly bland to the taste, made lovely toast, and overall 'substantial' is a word I'd use to describe.

The maize meal used is a South African maize meal, which in these parts is always made with white maize and I'd say is 'medium' ground - not as coarse as the polenta that I have access to which is made with yellow maize, and certainly not as fine as corn starch! So, I guess you'd have a completely different experience if you used a yellow maize meal.
April 10, 2024 - 4:22am
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JonJ

Foodgeek's Danish rye (rugbrød)

This bread ticks a whole bunch of health check-boxes for me and my ravenous teenager who is into healthy eating - whole grain, not wheat, and lots of fibre from seeds.

Foodgeek (Sune Trudslev) has a great description of this recipe with a matching video. He even has some fun suggestions of toppings you can use to make open sandwiches (smørrebrød) including, of course, smoked eel.

The high amount of seeds in this bread (90%) are what make it so special, bringing in some flavour, and a lot of chew and fibre. I prefer to use pumpkin seeds and rye kernels as per the original recipe, but practically it is not always possible to have enough seeds on hand and for this bake I'd run out so used a mix of seeds from the cupboard; this bread is still delicious with whatever is available.



There are variations of Danish rye, for example, this Stanley Ginsberg Danish rye recipe seems to only have about 20% in seeds, and possibly a more sour taste to it.

I take care when making this bread to keep the rye sponge fairly 'sweet' and I like to give it a final build 3-5 hours before using it in the final dough for this reason. The levain was made over 3 builds to achieve the 166% hydration sponge. Build 1 was 5g sweet stiff wheat starter:50g dark rye flour:50g water. Build 2 was the above:160g dark rye:160g water. Build 3 was the above:125g dark rye:344g water and 540g of this was used in the final dough when it was 3 hours old. Of course, there are lots of ways to make the levain and two alternatives are offered with the original recipe.

Sune's instructions for knowing when to bake is when the bread has risen 30-50% in the pan and there are 6-7 pinhead sized holes on top. I'd tend to agree with that, although for this bake the rye flour was super active and had reached the top of the pans after only 3 hours with many pinholes; consequently they were baked a little earlier than was usual and had some minor cracking on the top but otherwise I think the fermentation was spot on.

And, for this bake, inspired by Lance I tried painting on flour paste and starch washes to get some "glanz" on these breads, which sort of worked, they looked prettier than normal but I doubt you'd notice it unless you were looking carefully.

Besides the open sandwiches, this bread is great toasted and with a lot of butter. The Dane's have a special word for the tooth marks you leave behind when the butter is super thick, it is tandsmør ("tooth butter").


These breads are sweet and dense with a highly satisfying mouth feel, and I highly recommend this recipe if you love 100% rye or not.

 

April 3, 2024 - 8:51am
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JonJ

Hybrid sourdough bagels

When I'm in the mood nothing beats a fresh chewy bagel and for me this can be one of the most satisfying breakfast or lunch breads. I know some people aren't so into bagels, but I just think that (maybe) they've never had a great boiled bagel that came out of the oven a few minutes ago.

So, I bake a lot of bagels and thought it might be good to write a bit about my preferred recipe here. First a disclaimer - it isn't really mine - it is mostly Jeffrey Hamelman's "Bagels with Pâte Fermentée" recipe!

Where I make it differently is that I think using a regular hydration (100%) unsalted sourdough starter plus a little wholemeal flour brings with it a lovely flavour and freshness, and that this makes for a great replacement for the pâte fermentée from the original recipe.

Dough then becomes:
   
    690g bread flour
    76g  wholemeal flour
    200g levain (100% hydration, made with bread flour, usually from overnight ferment)
    397g water at around 30°C
    18g  salt
    1 3/4 teaspoons instant yeast
    1 1/4 teaspoons diastatic malt powder

Also, instead of sprinkling the baking sheet with semolina or cornmeal as Jeffrey does, what works well for me is a quick spritz of water and a sprinkling of brown rice flour which makes it easier to pick up the bagels for the boil. I've also figured out that I like bagels with a slightly shorter bake - so about 15 minutes at 230°C for the nice chew and softness.

This hybrid version, and Jeffrey's original pâte fermentée, are such lovely go-to recipes for bagels.

March 22, 2024 - 3:24am
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JonJ

Malt taste testers: chocolate malt, caramel Munich and biscuit malt

A few years ago, Dan Ayo posted here about his experience with using chocolate malted barley from the brew shop in a bread. It made a big difference to the colour of the bread and the flavour of it too.

Thinking the same, I made small taste testers using three different kinds of barley malt that I picked up from a craft brew supply store.


The malts that were tried were called: BEST chocolate malt, BEST caramel Munich I, BEST biscuit malt. I assume, from the names that the original source is Bestmalz.de. You can see the theme that all of the names of the malt promised a different flavour experience, although that would be with beer!

Taste testers in this case were seven different doughs each made with a base formula of 100g white bread flour, 65g water, 20g levain and 2g salt. I tried two different concentrations of each malt - 2% and 0.5%, and made a seventh dough with no malt in it for taste comparison. Credit is due to Paul for the idea of the 100g sample loaf.


In this pic you can see the testers after baking. In columns, from left to right, they are: chocolate, caramel, biscuit. The top row is at 0.5%; the bottom row at 2%. And the lone one on the far right had no malt added to it.

Called the whole family to taste and we had a pleasant time sniffing and tasting each sample. As you can see the chocolate malt one was quite visually distinct, even at 0.5% but especially at 2%. It had a taste like 'coffee' and not chocolate. The other two didn't bring in enough flavour to notice, but they did improve the dough and bread texture, especially the biscuit malt. If you sniffed them very carefully you could pick up some interesting malt notes even with the pale malts.

In conclusion I'd say that the chocolate malt was worth the try and can see why Dan found it interesting too. There are many other interesting malts used by brewers that I'd like to play with as well, obviously there are rye and wheat malts, but also curious to know if anyone has opinions on whether things like an acidulated malt or a malt with high dextrins that might have an effect on the Maillard reaction would be a worth a try. And then there is the approach of including the grains themselves in the bread which might be a better way to go.

March 11, 2024 - 6:21am
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JonJ

Falafel bread

If you think about it, the spicing used in falafels (cumin & coriander, garlic, cardamom...) is like a recipe for a bread spice. The thing is though, how would you put a falafel into a bread. Home made falafel mixture, with freshly minced chickpeas, fava beans or lentils? Even better still why not use a box mix which has already been dehydrated and they've done part of the work for you already!



There's a really pretty falafel mix that I've been buying lately that has the potential to be really pretty in bread - the 'crazy' blend with beetroot and poppy seed. A bit like putting falafel in bread - crazy. This is my second try with it, and I do know that if you don't mix it in super well you could potentially get pretty patterns from the included beetroot. But, the first time I tried this mix I also had home-made humus in the bread and although tasty (and pretty) it didn't come out as open as I would have liked this.





This time around, I used the falafel mix in the main dough (in the saltolyse, or should I say falafelyse), and this had the benefit of creating a stronger dough with a less gritty texture to the final bread. Alas however, the beetroot effect was largely lost and all I got was a general pink and yellow ethereal glow to the loaves rather than the pretty patterns from my first go at it. Some VWG was added to the dough to compensate for the falafel mix, and who doesn't like their bread bouncy?




Was it worth it? It certainly made a very interesting bread. Obviously, great with humus. Obviously! These 'bread spices' brought in some wonderful flavours, and especially with a cheese and tomato sandwich I had some great taste moments. Might reduce the salt a touch on the next bread as it was a little salty.


Method was as follows:

    50m saltolyse, complete with salt and falafel mix

    Added levain using the dough hook for 2 minutes only.  Completed this with 35 slap and folds

    30 minutes later added bassinage of 50g of water that had been held back, bringing total water to 600g. Also added 4g of leftover falafel mix here.

    20 minutes later bench fold to close the dough up

    At 4 hours 45 min after adding levain pre-shaped into rounds

    20 minutes later final shape

    20 minutes later into fridge

    (next day, 16 hours later) baked the first bread - 230C with steam for 20 min, then 200C without steam. Second bread had an hour in the proofer extra time whilst the first one baked


November 9, 2023 - 10:37pm
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JonJ

Hummus and Miso Sourdough

When it comes to omelette fillings the combination of miso paste and hummus is complementary and comforting, although I suspect I'm the only one who tries something like that with their eggs. And, it is true that miso, and hummus, when spread on hot buttered toast are simply delicious. So, my thinking was that together they could make for a great combination in a bread, even if it is difficult to imagine!

The recipe is a combination of Benny's miso bread (which used 10% miso) and Txfarmer's hummus sourdough. Txfarmer used quite a lot of hummus - 265g per 340g of bread flour, and she also, quite importantly used home made hummus. Although I do make my own, for convenience sake I bought tub of hummus which unfortunately only gave me 187g of hummus (so I used less than txfarmer), and halfway through I was worried that using a commercial hummus wasn't so smart as the sorbic acid in it might negatively affect the sourdough culture, but it seems to have been okay. For miso, I used this lovely "marumu inaka" red/brown miso.

The final dough had 340g bread flour, 187g hummus, 34g miso paste, 152g water (plus an extra 30g water added later as bassinage), 100g levain, 7g salt and 10g vital wheat gluten (as "insurance"). I didn't reduce the salt, as Benny also didn't, but he also didn't add hummus, and my final bread was fairly salty. I'd say to reduce or even leave out the salt if you're going to try this bread. The final dough was mixed for 5 minutes on the dough hook followed by 30 slap and folds. My notes say it 'bounced' when I tried to slap and fold, so was not really as stretchable as a regular dough. As stated above, I did add an extra 30g of water 30 minutes after that too, and once again it didn't handle as it normally does, my notes also say that the dough was slow to get a good gluten stretch, and it is these unusual dough characteristics that should have kept me alert to the moisture in the dough.

I messed up the baking! Because the dough felt fairly robust and not slumpy in the banneton I assumed it would bake the same as a normal loaf and this wasn't the case. I baked it side by side with a regular sourdough and that was a mistake - my habit is to turn the loaves when I remove the steam trays after 20 minutes and this bread was still very wet and loose and should not have been turned, and this turn seemed to knock it into a strange and wonky shape. Perhaps I should also have given a few small scores rather than the single 'ear' type score as well to contain some slumping. It did get an extra 15 minutes in the oven with the door cracked open afterwards, but certainly this bread should have been baked more carefully, as one does with a wet slumpy dough, and requires at least a full hour of low and slow baking with foil tenting.


This bread was super delicious. As the main ingredients were generously used, with ample hummus and miso, the flavours really came through and shone. It made for a lovely savoury breakfast bread, and since we had a friend visiting who was appreciative, it was cut a little too early, and a little too hot. And was superb with melting butter on it. And, finally, gone within an hour.

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