Well, I finally arrived back in my kitchen and I am ready to go (unfortuantely I have a bunch of work I have to get done before I can even think about baking). But of course I was very excited to see the condition of my starter - and I want to refresh it so that hopefully I can work with it tomorrow.
It smells fresh, but it looks like potato soup with about 1/4 or so of clear liquid on top - I think it is called the 'hooch'?
According to Peter Reinhart, I am going to keep a cup of the starter and get rid of the rest. He doesn't say anything about the liquid - what should I do shoud I pour it off first - or mix it in before I take out the discarded starter? Or don't do either and just take out the required amount of discarded starter?
Help - i am raring to go but I don't want to make a mistake!
The last few times I've visited my parents' house, they've served some incredible breads from a local bakery. One time we had a roasted garlic-parmesan loaf that was to die for. This time we had an organic white sourdough with the most beautiful gringe and crust on it. The next morning for breakfast we had an organic cranberry-walnut sourdough that knocked my socks off. After finishing off an entire loaf of cranberry-walnut bread in one sitting, I thought to myself "I gotta go check this place out."
Pane D'Amore is in a teeny little storefront in uptown Port Townsend. Going by mid-day on the day before Easter was probably not the smartest idea of mine because the place was packed, so I didn't get a chance to talk to the bakery owners Frank D'Amore and Linda Yakush. But I was lucky enough to catch one of the bakers there, Ilon Silverman, as he was wrapping up for the day. He gave me a tour of the place and told me about his baking background.
Ilon told me he's been baking for close to 20 years. He got into bread baking, he said, when he first heard about baking sourdough loaves without yeast while in high school. "My initial tries came out like bricks", he told me, but he stuck with it and was eventually able to get the hang of it.
Slideshow
Inside the village bakery
Ilon was able to get his foot in the door as a professional baker at The Berkshire Mountain Bakery in Massachusetts, getting to apprentice under the master baker Richard Bourdon. Later he landed a gig at the renowned Metropolitan Bakery in Philadelphia.
When I asked what brought him to Washington he told me a funny story. "I was out here checking out the Olympic Peninsula," he said, "when one morning I smelled bread. And not just any old bakery, but, you know, real bread." He went into Pane D'Amore and chatted with the guys for a bit, then asked if could come in and help bake the next day. So for the next two days (on his vacation, I remind you), he got up at 3 in the morning and put in a full (unpaid) shift at Pane D'Amore.
After returning to Colorado, Ilon heard that Pane D'Amore owner and head baker Frank D'Amore had been seriously injured in an accident and that the bakery needed help covering for him. Ilon called up the bakery, saying "Hey, you might have forgotten me, but I'm the guy who came in and baked with you on my vacation." He ended up coming back out to Washington to help cover for Frank while he was out of commission.
Frank D'Amore, who has been baking in Port Townsend for over 25 years, is back baking again and the bakery, which is about four years old, is going strong. The under 900 square foot joint (including the retail space) does about a thousand pounds of bread a day, with anywhere from ten to twenty different types of bread each day. All of the bread is made with organic ingredients, not just the flour but the nuts, seeds, and fruits as well. In the summertime, when the farmers' market is going on out front, the line will be out the door and they'll sell over 400 loaves of bread from the storefont alone. Pane D'Amore's breads are served at a number of local restaurants and has recently been picked up by the Safeway in town, which is the largest bread seller in the area by far.
The breads they make there are killer: aside from the ones I mentioned, they make a Fig-Anise Bread, Ciabatta, Swedish Limpa, a Flax, Oat, and Sunflower Multi-grain Bread, a 7 Grain, Panini, rolls, Ficelle and many others. About half of the breads they bake are sourdoughs, the other half yeasted. They also bake pastries, rolls, sticky buns, cinnamon rolls, cookies, focaccia, and pretty much anything else you can bake in a hot oven every day.
Pane D'Amore is located at 617 Tyler St., Port Townsend, Washington and is open 7 days a week.
I'm relatively new to baking and I wonder what the conventional wisdom is on acceerating fermentation or proofing by using a warmed space (usually an oven that has been briefly warmed or an oven with a pot of steaming water beneath the fermentation vessel). Now, there is no doubt that this speeds up the rise, but I wonder what am I really losing by speeding this process up? So far, my bread recipies have used instant yeast and a fermentation time of 2-3 hours (no poolish or overnight refridgerator rising, I don't have the patience) - by adding some hot water to my oven, I can cut that down to about an hour. Most of the articles I've found so far state that a longer rise will result in more flavorful bread - but could accelerated rising cause other problems as well? Such as the texture, crumb, or ovenspring? Whether I speed up the fermentation/proofing or not, my biggest problem is getting enough ovenspring so that the loaf comes out light and fluffy. I don't get bricks, but the results are sometimes more dense than I think sandwich bread shoud be.
I'm still learning how all this works so I appreciate your comments. Here's a basic recipe that I've been using for a sandwich loaf, courtesy of Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything". Usually after combining the ingredients, kneading, there's a 2-3 hour rise, then a punch down, 15 minute rest, then another 1-2 hour rise, then baking at 350 for 45 minutes.
hi everyone. i'm new to this site and new to baking and have what is probably a very stupid question. although i'm pretty good in art, my math is very crummy. (and that's not a good kind of crumb!)
so i'm making a preferment today and trying to use my scale. as i understand it, a preferment is 1:1 water to flour and 1/4tsp yeast. the question arises when i try to figure baker's percentages. in baker's percents a preferment would be 100% flour and 100% water by weight and 1/4 tsp yeast.
obviously flour and water are not the same weight. and if you figure the weight of the flour as the 100% measure and the water as a percentage of that...then you have the baker's percentages. well here's what happened today when measuring:
1 cup of flour (houston, humid, sea level) weighed .29 lbs or 4.64 oz. (sorry don't know how to change my scale to grams).
1 cup water by measure weighed .52lbs or 9.88oz.
so if i'm making a 100% to 100% preferment that is 1:1 by weight. then it's about 1/2 as much water to the flour by measure. right? it means that i weigh out .29lb or 4.64 oz of water and add to the poolish, right?
my technique for measuring the flour is to spoon in flour to my measure scoop. then leveled with a knife, and measure.
if this is the case then adding 1 cup of flour and 1cup of water by measure is waaaaayyyyyyyyyy wrong! because it means that the water is too much volume for the amount of flour, right?
I have been traveling for the past 2 1/2 weeks for work and I can't wait to get back to my kitchen! Whenever I could spare a moment I have jumped on and you all have made me jealous with your baking!
I want to post a a couple of photos of my very first sourdough that I baked just before I left but I am having trouble getting the images up.
Can someone direct me to any info on the site that explains how to do it?
I *might* have made the best cinnamon rolls Ive ever had
And I *might* have eaten almost half the pan full of them already (baked about 12 hours ago now)..these were the best things I've had in soooo long and I was TOTALLY craving Cinnabon rolls, so found a recipe online and WOW! Amazing.
Then a little sourdough bread roll action
This is the starter I've been working on the past 2 weeks now, and it's starting to come into it's own.
I made Naan Flatbread and I made it with sourdough! It was very exciting! Although not really true or accurate, because I don't think there's sourdough in Naans. The sourness usually comes from the yoghurt - which I realised at the last minute I forgot to buy so I used sourdough starter instead. I've been scouring through the internet the past week for Naan recipes because it was my Dad's Birthday over the weekend and he loves flat breads, so I thought I'd make him Naan. And I stumbled upon the blog entry of Il Forno and there I learnt how Naan was made with the help of Julia Child. I know, it's not really authentic or Indian made but still I think it's a good start.
The final taste was beautifully sourdoughy. Haha - not quite Naan in flavour but it was very yummy. It was crispy, very nicely chewy on the inside and I loved the texture inside that was created by the sourdough. Most rewarding even if I actually failed to make Naan. Next time I will remember the yoghurt.
Sourdough Flatbread Makes 11
1½ Cup Lukewarm Water 1 Cup Liquid Sourdough Starter 2 Tbspn of Olive Oil 1 Tbspn of Salt 1 Tsp Active Dry Yeast 900g Bread Flour
Chopped Garlic Sesame Seeds Poppy Seeds
Mix all ingredients (half the flour) in a bowl of a sturdy mixer until well combined. Autolyse for 20 minutes. Knead the dough and add in remaining flour a little at a time for about 10 minutes until a smooth elastic dough is formed.
Transfer dough in an oiled bowl and cover, leave for half hour at room temperature and refrigerate overnight (I left it in the fridge for 2 days).
On the day of baking, remove dough from fridge and let it de-chill for an hour. Divide dough into 150g portions. On a well dusted surface, roll the portions out until about 0.5 - 1 cm thick. Sprinkle water over flattened dough and sprinkle desired toppings. Cover and leave to proof for 2 hours.
Preheat oven at 250C and place baking stone on the centre rack one hour before baking.
Gently transfer dough to a well dusted peel or the back of a baking sheet. Gently pull and stretch dough out, and make several pricks with a fork in the dough. This is because, the dough will puff out like a pita and so the pricks allow air to escape.
Bake for 6 minutes. Remove from oven and place on cooling rack to cool for a few minutes. Serve warm.
I am relatively new to artisan bread baking and have been using a Kitchen Aid Pro 600. Following the mixing times in the BBA, I have yet to attain the satin/silky texture on the dough (except for cin. bun dough that came out perfectly, but that had butter). Peter Reinhart states it is exceptionally difficult to over kneed, and I've used slow speeds up to the speed he recommends for basic french bread (medium I think). I am not sure if I am tearing the dough - the surface looks rough. BBA says to kneed until the temp reaches X, and I've attained that temp, but not a smooth mass. Times have gone over ten minutes, but stopping earlier fails the window pane test. I've let it rest a few mins which helped, but still tough. Has happened a few times.
1. Am I overmixing?
2. Window pane: should the dough easily become sheet-thin when stretched, or do I need to work it to translucent thickness?
He does not say to autolyze, but by reading the posts here, seems almost a necessity. Not sure if this will fix the problem comletely. It would seem his recipes are pretty amateur-proof, at least at the mixing stage.
I'm not sure if I'm on the right track or not. I started a sourdough starter that sourdolady gave directions for two days ago. Today is the second day for feeding. Therewas a little runniness to the mix, but that's all. No bubbles or incredible smell. I proceede to mix in the next two T. of room temp. ornge juice and KA organic whole wheat flour. The mix immidiately tightened up into a ball. Is this normal or did I go wrong somewhere?
Try as I may I wasn't able to locate a local source of hard, spring, golden wheat at a reasonable price. The freight cost made ordering direct prohibitive. So, I had my nearby health-food-store-pill-pusher try to find any hard, spring wheat for me. I'll give them credit. They will try to find whatever I ask of them. Imagine my surprise when I picked up the wheat today and found that they had obtained a GOLDEN, hard, spring wheat for me - Prairie Gold as grown and sold by Wheat Montana. Here's their web site: http://wheatmontana.com/ I don't know how it compares to Walton's Golden 86, but Wheat Montana's Prairie Gold sounds just as good if not better.
I'll be milling some tonight and letting it age for at least 3 days before I bake some bread with it. I took some Prairie Gold and put it beside the hard, white, winter wheat that I've been using. The Prairie Gold has a slightly "brighter" look to it. I can hardly wait to use it. I'll keep you all posted. Has anyone else out there used any Prairie Gold wheat?
