agres's blog

.We attend an annual Thanksgiving reunion, and I usually bring the bread -- adapted to whatever the menu is.  Often the menu is comprised of the foods people grew up with in Northern Europe just after WWII, and the breads were the country breads of the time. This year, it is a more refined menu, calling for a more refined bread. 

Each year, I put some effort into selecting the right bread, and refining my technique.

A better approach that seems less effort is a 4-hour long Autolyse  of fresh ground wheat berries at 90% hydration, then add ~10%  sourdough starter, a  4 hour bulk ferment including several stretch and folds with 2% salt added at the next to last stretch and fold,  a 12-hour retard, then form the loaves, and a final rise in baskets of about 3 or 4 hours.  Bake at 450F convection on a pizza stone. 

I learned the Ideal Gas Law ( https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/thermodynamics/temp-kinetic-theory-ideal-gas-law/a/what-is-the-ideal-gas-law ) circa 1962, and it has been on the tip of my tongue ever since.

I have 4 bins of "wheat" in the pantry. They are all fresh from the vendor, at a moisture content of ~11%. If I take samples of each, mill them, and mix each sample to the same hydration, the result will range from a "brick" (Kamut) to "soup" (spelt).

We keep real milk in the house during the winter, but during the summer, we switch to soy milk. (In the summer we like fruit smoothies, and soy milk makes a better smoothie.)

With soy milk and a little extra (peanut) oil, one can make a decent "American" whole wheat bread.  In the old days, I would have used a can of evaporated milk.  

When we are making a stollen from white flour, we make the dough, develop the gluten and then, only at the end do we mix in all the extra stuff – fruits, nuts, and whatever. If we included all that extra stuff in the initial mix, the gluten would not develop properly.

Whole wheat flour has a lot of extra stuff in it – stuff that can inhibit the proper development of gluten.

If the texture of ordinary 100% whole wheat is simply not acceptable to you or your loved ones, there is an arduous path to a fluffier loaf.

I was never, and am not now, a big fan of commercial whole wheat flour. Over the last couple of years, have become a huge fan of the whole wheat flours that I mill fresh.

I admit that there has been a long, and sometimes steep learning curve to producing whole grain breads that I really like. Much of that I attribute to the assumptions of the authors of most books on baking. In part that is because the authors think whatever professional bakers do, must be the best way to bake. However, bakers bake for their profit – not their customer’s health and well being. 

As bakers, we spend a lot of time on the "How" and very little time on the "Why". When we do bring up why, it tends to be why we do things in a particular way (e.g., which temperature to proof a particular dough) rather than why we choose to make a particular style of bread. 

I do not see thoughtful discussions of why people decide to learn to make baguettes.   Home bakers seem bake them because commercial bakers bake them, and people are in the habit of eating them, and so people like baguettes. Then, home bakers, bake what people like.

 My wife and I like porridge for breakfast.  The porridge always includes oats, nuts, and fruit but otherwise it is not really constrained, and I am always looking for ideas. Recently I picked-up  Bob’s Red Mill 10-grain Breakfast cereal, but it was not really a winner – we did not really like the texture, so I ground it into flour for my Pain de Campania series.

It made a surprisingly good addition to my Pain de Campania.  It was worth thinking deeply about.

I had an aunt that was exceptionally partial to bran muffins. When she visited us, I indulged her with fresh muffins every morning. Her recipe (which I scrupulously followed) was based on All-Bran breakfast cereal.  My wife and I prefer Scotch oatmeal, so we do not normally keep All-Bran in the house, so we have not been in the habit of making bran muffins for years.