GabrielLeung1's blog

For about two years previous I had been making bread for groups of college students as a part of the college student outreach at my church. Every Sunday morning I would bring pounds of retarded yeast fermented dough to the church kitchen, prep it on site, and bake it off for our college lunch. I was pretty proud of the formula I used for it, mostly this was because it was mine. I chose the hydration, the fermentation technique, and the shaping and baking of it. And it always came out beautifully every time. Later on, i even started fermenting it with my sourdough starter. 

November 10, 2009 was an auspicious day. It was the second baguette day, and a day I thought would be as interesting and full of questions as I could be hoping for as early in the program as we were. I had my concerns of course, as the product we were finishing and baking was the direct baguette.

With the completion of the laminated dough final, the next section begins. And it was a section that I had been anticipating for a very long time. It was the artisan bread section! Finally I would receive formal instruction on something I've been self-teaching myself (with many wonderful resources like TFL of course) for years. 

We made baguette dough, poolish, and a 40% whole wheat dough in the course of 5 hours. The baguette dough would undergo retarded yeast fermentation in the refrigerator for 2 days, but the whole wheat dough we ended up baking off.

I suppose I was too worried about the section final that I had today. Despite many problems that happened when it came to forming my croissants and danishes, everything came together in the end!

It was an extremely interesting experience, fourteen bakers all trying to use a single proof box and two ovens in mostly the same space of time. Perhaps this is similar to what working in industry is like? 

I end a period of inactivity with a picture of croissants!

I sold my first sandwich loaf recently! I think it turned out quite nice. I also made some sweet white batards, and experimented a bit on sourdough. 

The sandwich loaf came out quite nicely, it was made using KA Bread Flour and SAF RED instant yeast at 70% hydration with autolyse and french folds. The batards were identical to these, but were made at 65% hydration with 25% AP flour and 75% bread flour. 

I really just wanted to put the dough into a bread pan and see what happened. This is pretty much the same thing as my CaP 2. The difference here was that I introduced two folds during the fermentation and I baked the loaf at 400 F, brushed with egg wash. This is in comparison to baking at 500 F with steam.

http://chausiubao.deviantart.com/art/CaP-2-127364147

Further improvements on my white bread included three changes.

1.) Salt-less autolyse period

2.) Decreased amount of preferment

3.) Decreased hydration

Because an autolyse is meant to increase extensibility, salt would be a bad addition, this would counter the decrease in extensibility of a drier dough. However, I should be able to score these loaves because they are drier.

http://chausiubao.deviantart.com/art/CaP-1-127362078

A good white bread was made yesterday. This was my attempt to bring together all the techniques I've been learning about from books and this site.

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Formula:

 100%  Bread Flour

 70%    Water

 1.33% Salt

 0.8%   Instant Yeast

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Method:

I just recently succeeded in completing a mother starter and so I've started to use it to make some sourdough. The first set of loaves came out rather dull looking but tasted quite good.

The second use of the loaves were exceedingly different.

http://chausiubao.deviantart.com/art/Pain-au-Levain-122190327

The starter was 14 days old, I expect it will get even better as it matures