alfanso's blog

I've posted these before, the Hamelman sesame semolina batards alfanso-style - meaning subbing out the very liquidy bread flour levain for my very liquidy rye flour levain.  Delivering 15% rye flour (all through the levain) to boost the flavor in this bread.  The composition of flours is; semola rimacinata 60%, bread flour 25%, and rye flour 15% @67% overall hydration.

I believe that I have the consistency part down pretty well.  So instead, let's talk about steam, shall we alfanso?  Okie Doakie, let's roll...  Recently there has been some interaction on the part of a few participants including myself and Doc.Dough, with a series of private messages between myself and the good doctor. Including this top notch video and blog entry courtesy of Doc.Dough - lots of steaming discussion included in the comments.  

As with others on TFL, I employ a double dose of steaming components which have me insert one loaf pan with a Sylvia's Steaming Towel into the lower rack of the oven ~15 minutes prior to the bake.  Once the dough is loaded I add 2 cups of near boiling water to a lava rock filled casserole pan.  This creates dabrownman's so named mega-steam effect.  Historically I've been leaving the steaming going for somewhere in the neighborhood of 11-13 minutes.  And I'm sufficiently happy with the outcome.

Now along comes Doc.Dough with his micrometers, calipers and what-not trying to upset my baking pushcart.  Purveying the notion with engineered knowledge that the effect of steam is negated after somewhere around the 5 minute mark.  Anything beyond that is equivalent to window dressing.  

What is an alfanso to make of all this fact based information, when all along I've been getting the job done by nothing more than "educated" guesswork, experimentation and personal experience?  Well, if I were me, I'd be curious enough to see where the oven spring has taken my dough at that 5 minute mark.  Because as with all of us, I hope to get better and more understanding of baking over the long haul.

For these past few bakes, instead of setting my timer to the trusty 11-13 minute mark I've been setting it to the 5 minute mark so that I can peer through the oven door window and take a gander at what's what.  And ya know something?  For the most part I'm becoming a believer!  The baguettes do open up (almost) all the way at that mark.  However, I find that the batards still have not maxed out yet, and they take a few minutes more.

And so I've turned a corner here and pretty much gotten on board.  I still like keeping the steam going for close to my requisite time, but I can now see the doc's point of view.  I don't see any downside to leaving the steam going, although my experimentation has been limited to maybe 3 or 4 bakes.  So I'l continue to slog on and see how this goes with some other types of dough.  Always something new to be learned in this doughy business.  Thanks, Doc.

And now a very few words on the consistency thing:

Nov., 2016:

 and this morning:

Rye with Caraway seeds with 125% hydration all rye levain.  After a few vagabond months, I'm stationed back home until the summer comes around.  Just back from my now annual Spring pilgrimage to the Central Valley in CA for a week with old friends and I headed, once more, down to Fresno for another delightful afternoon with David Snyder and his wife.

Back home for a first bake I decided to wrangle a few changes to the rye with caraway seeds @100% hydration mixed levain I made last year.  Recently I've been enjoying baking with the Jeffrey Hamelman inspired 125% all rye levain. And so I changed out the other levain for this one and made appropriate flour adjustments otherwise.  I also swapped out AP flour for Bread flour, a change that may have resulted in a lesser oven spring.  

A far cry from anything other than good.  However the notation was made and next time I'll revert back to AP again.  I may well stick with this wetter and "rye-er" levain.  The overall hydration of this dough is 73.5%.  I should note that this bread gets a cornstarch glaze before and after the bake.

But my favorite part of all of this, and the reason for the post at all, is that even with some alterations to the components, there is a consistency that is clear.  One of my personal cornerstones in this hobby is to be consistent in output from bake to bake.

Here is the bake from July, 2016:

And here is today's bake:

350g x3 baguetes

615g x 1 batard

alan

Crumb: vertical and horizontal...

Here is the formula pared down to 1000g.  This is an offshoot of an offshoot, with the baseline formula rooted in David Snyder's SJSD, from there to my prior effort, and now to this one.

(I add 15% to the levain build amounts to account for levain lost the sides of bowls, tools, etc. during the build.)

DAY 1:

1. Mix liquid levain. Ferment at room temp covered, until at least doubled in volume. (6-8 hours or more).  Less starter and more flour and water can be used to get the same total weight.

DAY 2:

1. Dissolve levain in water, add flours and mix. Cover and autolyse for 30 minutes.
2. Add salt and mix to incorporate. 300 French Folds split into 150FFs/5 min rest/150FFs.  Dough will be quite sticky throughout FFs.
3. Transfer to a clean, lightly oiled bowl and cover.
4. Add caraway seeds to dough during first Letter Fold.
5. In 80dF kitchen - Bulk ferment for 80 minutes with 4 Letter Folds every 20 minutes, then refrigerate.  Dough will smooth out and lose stickiness with LFs.
6. Total retard for at least 10 hours.  Dough can be divided same day or next day, it just doesn't matter.

DAY 3:

1. Divide, pre-shape and shape as desired.  10 minute rest between pre-shape and shape.
2. Onto couche, cover couche in plastic bag and back to retard for x hours more. Dough will require minimal to modest flour, at most, on couche.
3. An hour before baking, pre-heat oven to 500ºF, with baking deck and lava rock pan* in place.  Sylvia’s steaming towel into oven 15 minutes before the bake.  *or other steaming device.
4. Prepare cornstarch glaze: whisk 2/3 TBS w/1/8 cup water and mix into ½ cup boiling water, whisk until smooth and incorporated.  Do not discard as it will be used again after the bake completes.
5.  Apply 1st coat of glaze to dough on baking peel.
6. Bake at 480ºF ~13 minutes with steam (2 cups very hot water on lava rocks), separate & rotate 180 front to back.  After rotating bake for ~13 minutes additional (or more) for baguettes or 17 minutes additional (or more) for batards.  Vent two minutes.
7. Reapply cornstarch glaze to completed bread while still hot.  Sprinkle on more caraway seeds across the top of bread.  Optionally seal the seeds with a final slather of the glaze.

No, not the Crosby, Stills and Nash song.  Rather my "full sized" baguettes.  Geremy (kendalm) has been bugging' me ;-) on and off for a while to try my hand at a full sized baguette.  And so here is my first attempt using the same Pain au Levain w/ 125% hydration rye levain as I ran last week.

Obstacles; not enough oven depth so I had to load them in sideways, my couche isn't large enough, no retarding tray for the couche, and no oven peel long enough.  Other than that, things were mostly honky-dory!  For the couche I used a stiff kitchen towel brought back from Paris by my brother a while back (the lead photo), a cut up cardboard box for the retarding tray, and two cookie sheets taped together for the oven peel.  Oh, and three pieces of parchment remnants to cover the oven peel.  Certainly not ideal, but just creative enough to get me there.

The baguettes weighted in at 365g each, a little over the dictated 350g, and fell ~9-10cm short of the 55cm standard - mostly from being a bit gun-shy on meeting the length vs. the width of the baking deck.  A bit sticky due to the 16% rye, they could have been shaped a little better too.  One unappreciated result was the four of them being lined up across the baking deck.  This created insufficient space between them and therefore the sides of each one insulated and under colored the other.  Not an issue when they are loaded head first across the length of the stone.

I baked these less boldly than I ordinarily would have, trying to be a bit more "traditional" in baguette shading.  I think that I'll be keeping the cardboard "tray" around for a while as I'll probably want to run these again while attempting to be truer to weight and length the next time.

Baked at 460dF, 10 minutes under steam, 12 minutes more and then vented for 3 minutes.

365g baguettes x 4.

I really like the Pain au Levain breads that I've made from Mr. Hamelman's "Bread".  And just the other day I made another similar to this Pain au Levain w/WW.  But if find myself wanting a rye flavor more so than whole wheat.  

So I swapped out the 60% bread flour levain for a 125% rye levain.  Adjusting for the difference in water due to the very liquid levain, it dropped the final mix hydration down to ~57%.  Way too dry to want to deal with during an autolyse.  And therefore while scaling out the final mix, I added the levain to the mix immediately, but otherwise kept everything else the same.  And ended up with the prescribed total dough hydration of 68% for this Pain au Levain with 125% hydration rye levain.

I finally changed out my old and trusty, but severely cracked 1/4" clay tile baking deck

with this

a scrap piece of granite cut to size.  Thanks to pictures from Lazy Loafer which shows a similar stone, although I opted out of a second slab of granite above the bake area as LL has.  And this was my virgin bake.

The scoring is a tad sloppy, but I can't say I'm displeased with the final product.

330g x 3 baguettes

510g x 1 batard

 Update.  Crumb shot added.  For a 68% hydration bread the crumb is pretty open.

The lead picture is NOT Tartine, more on that later.  

Last week's run of the Tartine Baguette formula was a success, but as noted, they were a little thin on flavor profile.  This week I reran the formula with a few changes - why not?  Substituted out 30% of the AP flour, replacing it with rye flour.  And added a foursome of the new loves (loaves?) of my life - these little "batard-ettes".  What a happy family snapshot for the future heirloom photo album.  

Oh, I also mixed in caraway seeds, and painted the surface with a corn starch glaze - just for the fun of it all.  Now the flavor had a boost and stood out, ably assisted by the robust essence of the added caraway.

• 600g x 1 Batard
• 250g x 4 Batard-ette (the cutest thing you ever saw)

But wait - there's more...

My wife had a desire to try her hand at that irresistible Brazilian snack bread, Pão de queijo.  Little balls of tapioca based dough mixed with parmesan, garlic and eggs.  Really tasty treats.  "Quejar" translates to complain in Spanish, but this is Brazilian Portuguese, and trust me, nobody is complaining once these babies hit the inside of one's dentures! 

But wait - there's more...

The lead picture is NOT the Tartine bread.  Rather it is another round of the Hamelman Roasted Potato Bread.  This time I behaved and didn't fashion baguettes out of the dough.  Another batard and more of the batard-ettes.  

I decided to take Ian's (isand66) advice and after consulting with, and getting the green light from, the wife I sautéed minced potato skins and minced onions and added them on the first set of Letter Folds.  Added some fresh rosemary too.  Topped off with a post-bake slather of oil and sprinkling of coarse salt on top.  Although the oil looks good, it was a rookie mistake in that it wasn't easily absorbed by the bread and stayed, er, oily on the surface.  I'll try to remember this for the future - ixnay to oil on the surface of the finished product just for the look!

•  650g x 1 Batard
• 250g x 4 Batard-ettes

Both of these breads are low enough in hydration that they slipped off the couche with nothing other than the thinnest  of layers of raw flour added.  And even that was not necessary.

Double hydration mix with 75% hydration mixed flour levain and 100 % hydration AP poolish.

Back from a few weeks on the road and itching to get back in the kitchen for a bake.  For some reason I had an of-the-moment hankering to do this bread, probably due to all of the Tartine this and that activity on TFL drilled into my skull over time.  No book, so I relied on the internet to yield the specific formula for these.  And came away with a bit of head scratching due to minor differences or sketchy details from site to site.  But there was enough concurrence to know what to follow and what I wanted to alter. 

The dough is a curiosity in that it uses a combination of preferments - one levain and one commercially yeasted.  Additionally I followed one posted formula using double hydration, which makes for a squishy incorporation by hand when the final 10% of the water is added with the salt.

 Where I went off the rails - hence the alfanso-style twist...

• Upped the overall hydration from ~64% to 67% and increased the salt to 1.8%.
• used IDY instead of ADY for the poolish while acknowledging that IDY use is at ~3/4 that of ADY.
• Dropped the IDY in the poolish from the astonishingly huge 1.5% to the "more normal" 0.12%.  The poolish had completely matured in under 7 hours, still less than my anticipated 10 hour time frame.  At 1.5%, it would have taken over my kitchen kinda like in that episode of I Love Lucy.
• Used my standard 75% mixed flour levain instead of the 100% AP flour levain.
• Dropped the autolyse and Letter Fold intervals from 40 to 30 minutes, so that the entire bulk rise completed in 2.5 hours rather than something like 4 hours.
• Used my standard 150 French Folds, 5 minute rest and final 150 FFs before bulk rise.
• Retarded for the remainder of the day, divide and final shape late at night and an early morning bake directly out of retard this morning.

 Although somewhat dry to the touch, the dough remained quite extensible throughout, including final shaping.  It also shed a surprising amount of water onto the couche between last night and bake time.

So far the taste is good, but not necessarily anything to write home about.  Maybe my recent consumption has been the sesame semolinas and olive loaves where the flavor of the loaf is elevated beyond a standard Pain au Levain type of flavor profile.  Dunno.  But excellent crunch to the crust and a modestly open crumb.  Will make some really fine toast!

400x4 baguettes.

I've been spending my recent last few months' bakes frequently feasting on a small handful of Mr. Hamelman's formulae.   In general they seem to center around a 125% hydration bread flour based levain, or are modified from IDY to levain, as  my recent take on his potato bread was.  As often as not, I'll use rye instead of bread four.  

He emphasizes a 2 stage build, and initially that is what I was doing.  However, I've been creating a lot more of the 125% hydration levain than I know I'll need to use, and just store the remainder in the refrigerator for next time.  Sometimes next time is a week or more away.  

When it is time to prep for a mix, I refresh that remaining levain from the refrigerator.  In essence, I'm only performing a single stage build as the mix time nears and using the prior levain's build excess as my first stage of the build.  Even if that occurred a week or more prior.  But I'm getting the value of a 2 stage build.

My most recent mix had this 2nd stage of the levain build double in size in just over 4 hours.  Robust, healthy and ready to go to work, although I retarded it for a few hours until I was ready to mix - further control of my schedule.

The more I play with these minor changes and shifts, the more I feel confident that I can go off the rails and modify the process to my schedule.

The bake pictured features a new entry.  More of the Hamelman sesame semolina, alfanso-style.  I decided to make some "small" rolls - I really don't have a classification for them - maybe baby batards?  I really like the size and the way that they came out.

1x700 batard, 2x375 baguettes, 2x275 baby batards

I've been keeping a low profile recently doing the same old, same old things.  Mostly minding my own business and occasionally commenting on baguettes and not much more.  Needed a break.  But my wife recently piped up and asked if I would make a potato bread.  There's a first time for everything, I suppose.  

Jeffery Hamelman's potato bread formula in his book Bread uses commercial yeast.  Around these parts, with few exceptions, that just won't do anymore.  Hence, time for an alfanso-style remake.  And a search of the internet seemed to indicate that there was no prior lone wolf out there who made these as baguettes before me.  So I'll assume the mantle for now.

Using the Hamelman "standard" of 15% pre-fermented flour, I made a 2 step (actually more from multiple previous leftovers) 125% hydration liquid levain, using 75% bread flour and 25% rye. By the end of the final build the thang was gurgling away with big frothy bubbles, something any mad scientist would have been proud of.  FYI - no IDY was harmed in the making of this bread!  The roasted yellow potatoes were peeled, cubed and baked in a 425dF oven for 30 minutes.  Then riced.  25% of total flour.

I made the mistake of autolysing just the flour and water, which comes to about a 55% hydration - not very accommodating for incorporation of the other ingredients.  And something I won't repeat again.  Because of the extra effort to get the levain, potato and salt sufficiently ready for French Folds, I did a total of 400 FFs, with a 5 minute break in between to let the dough relax a bit, now the standard M.O. for me.  Letter Folds, totaling three at 40, 80 and 110 were easier with each set as the dough became more comfortable and relaxed as it rose.

 An all-day sleep in the refrigerator prior to a late night divide, pre-shape and shape.  The dough was incredibly compliant and soft - so easy to work with.  As this is a 63% hydration dough, I was conscious of ensuring a good seal.  Onto the couche, and tucked back into the refrigerator for an early morning bake.  450dF oven, 14 minutes of steam, 14 more for the baguettes, and a 4 more with 2 additional minutes venting for the batard.

The bread itself is soft and light with a surprisingly not-too-forward potato taste.  Thanks to the potato, the bread takes on a lovely rust and golden color.  Not a particularly open crumb - on the baguette, but I'm past those days now where that is a be-all and end-all qualifier.   A good addition for my recipe box.

700g x1 batard, 400g x2 baguettes

Crumb shot added for those few (and you know who you are!) perversely interested in what's going on in the innards of these beasts.  I don't know what a potato bread should look like inside, tight or open, but at 63% hydration plus the potato added to the flour, it would seem as though it should be somewhat dense.  A pan de cristal it is not!

No batards were harmed during the making of this blog entry.  All were proofed in a couche under retard.  Considering how much time I spend on baguette baking, I'm surprised at how many batards were part of the year.  A partial list...

Son of SJSD, Alfanso Style with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain.

Forkish Field Blend #2 with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain.

Gosselin with WW and 75% hydration mixed flour Levain.

Hamelman Pain au Levain with WW and stiff Levain.

Hamelman Pain au Levain w with mixed stiff & liquid Levains

Snyder Semolina Capriccioso

Snyder Semolina Capriccioso, Alfanso Style with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain.

Pane di Altamura, Alfanso Style with 60% hydration durum flour Levain. 

SJSD ALfanso Style Rye with caraway seeds and cornstarch glaze, 100% hydration Rye Levain.

WW Fig-Pecan with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain.

Hamelman Pain au Levain with WW, figs and pecans, 60% Bread Flour Levain.

Pane di Alfansomura Semolina/AP with 60% hydration Rye Levain.

SFBI Pain au Levain with caraway seeds and cornstarch glaze, 100% AP flour Levain.

SFBI Pain au Levain, 100% AP flour Levain.

Hamelman Olive Levain with 125% hydration bread flour Levain.

SFBI Pain au Levain with 80% hydration, modeled on SteveB's post using drywall taping knife for shaping.

Wow!  A busy and tasty year. 

alan

These were a few of my favorite things

Whole Wheat Fig-Pecan with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain

Hamelman Olive with 125% hydration Rye Levain

SFBI Pain au Levain with caraway seeds, cornstarch glaze and 75% hydration mixed flour Levain

Hamelman Sesame Semolina with  with 125% hydration Rye Levain

Hamelman Pain au Levain with 2 starters, stiff and liquid Levains

Hamelman Pain au Levain with Whole Wheat and 61% hydration stiff Levain

Forkish Field Blend #2 with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain

Forkish Artisan Bakery Style Country Blonde with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain

Snyder Pugliese Capriccioso with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain

SJSD with 100% hydration mixed flour Levain

son of SJSD with 75% hydration mixed flour Levain

Sesame Semolina Capriccioso with 50% hydration mixed flour Levain

Rye with caraway seeds, cornstarch glaze and 100% Rye Levain

And then, there were the batards.  Maybe another day...

Happy New Year, alan