alfanso's blog

Recently I began to try out a rye levain breads, and having leftover rye starter I figured I'd continue on that riff.  I cleave off a bit at a time from the remaining rye starter ball and still have a few bakes left in the slowly diminishing ball.  For the liquid levain, I used a recently refreshed stiff levain stater.

A recent blog entry by David Snyder intrigued me.  I had long ago (if my under 18 months apprenticeship on TFL is long ago!) developed a pattern of being inspired by what I see on TFL and then give it a go.  So off I went to experience a few new things all at once.  Never used two starters in one dough before.  Ditto with any starter >100% hydration.  Also using Bread flour for the first time instead of AP flour (except for the substitution of bread flour for First Clear recently).  I amped the formula up to ~1500g so as to make three 500g batards.

I'd read that the starters take way longer than mine did to mature.  The 125% hydration bread flour starter took 7.5 hours instead of the anticipated 12-14 hours, and the way more viscous rye starter took 9 hours instead of 14-16 hours.  

Following the "make it your own" concept, I went with my standard 300 French Folds, and 2 sets of letter folds at 40 and 80 minutes, with another 40 minutes of bench fermentation time before retarding.  The dough remained retarding for ~3 hours prior to divide (I had things to do...), pre-shape and shape and then back into the refrigerator on their couche.  12 hours total retard time and then score and bake directly from the refrigerator.  13 min - steam, 20 min. - dry heat and 2 min. - vent.

The oven spring was wonderful, and the blisters on the surface almost make me wince in sympathetic pain (au levain!!)

Left: couched and ready for retard.  Right: scored and ready for the oven.

Steam just released and rotated:

The finished product:

The blue ribbon winner:

alan

Not to be confused with the Lansky-Luciano Gang.

I was okay at best with my first try at the Jewish Sour Rye bread the other day, and learned a lot.  But I was anxious to get back Jack and Do It Again.  And there were lessons learned, which I applied here.

I made the rye sour from some of the leftover ball of rye starter from the other day.  20g along with 375g rye and 375g water.  One stage build - 5 1/2 hours to complete.

Lessons applied:

• 2 x 725g batards
• don't bother with the corn meal on the bottom - just gets messy
• Give these beasts plenty of room to grow for their proof
• have all my mise en place
• didn't bother with any alternate scoring
• bumped the amount of caraway seeds by ~50% (I like them!)
• didn't toss out the cornstarch glaze during baking so was able to apply final sheen. 

Overall, I have to say that I am pleased with the improvement between the first try and this bake.

Note added the following morning: overnight the crust had significantly hardened.  Yesterday and last night the crust was pliable and a bit leathery to the bite, but not now.  This is the crust that I had hoped for soon after baking, but I had to wait for it to develop.

Here are the boys just after steam was released

And the final product

A recent comment by fotomat1 led me to the link for PiPs Fighting Gravity blog entry.  I hadn’t seen it before as I had not yet  known of TFL until a number months later.  I was enchanted not simply due to the photographic skill of the pictures, but specifically the photogenic images of his batards.  They struck me as being as beautiful a set of batards as I have ever seen.  So...it was time to give it a go.

Phil’s formula calls for 100% “fresh milled organic” WW flour at 4 x 1000g batards.  I reworked the numbers to produce 3 x 500g batards.  Starting with converting my all-purpose stiff levain scrapings (which are left over in the container I generally use for levain builds), I did a single stage build – per instructions to give me the 130g of levain that I needed for my 1500g mix.  The Total Dough hydration is 88%.

Notes:

• First time at anywhere near 88% hydration for me.
• Never worked with a hydration above 83% before – and that is my ciabatta hydration.
• Never worked with anything more than 40% non-AP flour before.
• I use Pillsbury WW flour, I wouldn’t know how to mill grain, nor do I really ever look for “organic” on the flour label.
• The WW was thirsty enough that working with this hydration was not an issue.  Shaping was a surprisingly simple task.
• 1 hour of fermenting at room temp with 1 set of letter folds, per intructions.  Followed by a 1 hour cold retard.  Then divided, shaped, couched and back into the refrigerator for 18 hours.
• Scored and baked directly from refrigerator.
• Steam 12 minutes, post steam 20 minutes, 2 minutes oven venting.  Total time in oven: 34 minutes.
  

I couldn’t be more pleased!

Left: Ready to come off the couche.  Right: on oven peel and scored.

Steam just released and batards rotated.

Out of the oven.

Update: I was having bad dreams over the oddball moose bites missing from the crumb, so this morning I cut a few more slices past the offending tunnel.  It was breakfast time and I wanted my toast, ya know.  So things are looking a lot more normal further inland on the same batard, and somewhat more in line with what PiPs displays on his blog entry. Here is what I discovered after that spelunking expedition.

From PiPs entry:

And outside of photography skills, and color saturation from my phone camera (Grrr), they are at least in the same ballpark now.

alan

Not to be confused with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Gang.
 
Having no experience with rye sour levains, I thought it was high time to get on the stick and rustle me up a dose.  I think the idea came to me after seeing Varda’s recent comment and quest for NY rye.  So off I went.  

With no First Clear flour, I relied on the Pearson’s Square method to combine differing grains with differing protein percentages in order custom create the high protein percentage that I wanted, somewhere around 15.3%.  The Bread Flour itself is at 13.3% (Pillsbury) and the Vital Wheat Gluten at 56%.  In order to get what I wanted, the Pearson’s Square told me that I need a mix of 95.3% Bread Flour and 4.7% VWG. (95% & 5% for practical purposes here).
 
All I had to start with was my standard kinda-does-everything stiff levain.  Just the discarded throwaways from prior builds, but which I have found can perpetuate themselves endlessly – and rather quickly.  Starting out with not much more in my container than scrapings of maybe two dozen grams I did two builds with just rye and water.
  
Here is the container with 100g of fresh feed mixed together with the 20 or so grams of leftover levain.  On the left is the just fed mix, on the right is 3 hours later.  I discarded ~half and then did another 100g feed, from which I used 50g to start my rye sour levain according to David Snyder’s 3 stage build schedule.

Here is what the rye sour looked like just after the first stage feeding, and what it looked like after the 3rd stage at completion.  For the first two stages, the sour matured at the 3 hour mark, and at the third stage it was completely domed over in just under 2 1/2 hours, well ahead of the recommended time of 4-8 hours.  That’s 750g of rye sour in that second picture.

I made three 475g batards out of them instead of the two ~750g loaves that David displays.  On the left, they are finished fermenting and ready to be glazed and scored.  These babies grew like something out of sci-fi movie!  

This step took only 45 minutes instead of 1 hour to complete.  On the right, they have received the glaze and are scored.  I decided to score 2 of the 3 length-wise (not wise!), the 3rd across the top as recommended.  The shaping was actually better than what's in the picture, but these grew so rapidly that they wound up mis-shaping each other - as evidenced by the middle fellow who was squeezed from both sides.

There are the kids underway.

And the finished product.  

The caraway seeds are there, but non existent in the photos.  This is a significantly darker crumb than the rye breads we had growing up in the Bronx, where all three bakeries within 4 blocks of my street sold them.  The crust isn’t anywhere near as “crackly” as those either, in fact a bit on the softer side.  But for the most part they do taste of the rye bread that I knew growing up.  I’m not that excited about the look of these, but for a first time, I’ll take it.  And that just means that there is room for improvement!

Lessons learned:

• As I already knew, rye doesn’t act much like AP flour.  It is thirsty and my French Folds required much more muscle to perform.  In a home mixer, I can imagine the motor groaning and quitting.
• Note to self - make two 750g loaves next time, not three at ~500g.
• Don’t plan on doing much else once the final dough mixing starts.  The action between prep, clean up as I went along and attending to the next step was almost constant due to the proximity of the steps and rapidity of the dough’s final rise.
• Therefore have as much mise en place as possible.
• In general, the dough was much easier to handle than I had anticipated, knowing rye's sticky reputation.
• Consistent with my warm-ish kitchen and generally spunky levain base, everything happens faster, and the timings for most steps are shorter duration. This I well knew going in, and timed it as such.
• Don’t bother with fancy, alternate scoring.  It looks as though rye doughs have a minimal oven spring when it comes to a grigne.
• Once the rye sour is domed and ready for incorporation, the entire activity can be completed in mere hours.  Total time for the final mix, shape, rise, & bake was under 2 1/2 hours.  Along with the third stage build, all activity today was under 5 hours.
• I would have liked to have baked these longer, to get a better crust coloration, but they didn’t seem to want to be cooperative, and they were finished being baked without being willing to take another deeper shade. 
  

alan

Not quite the same as a comb-over.  Back from my northern voyage where I was able to handily empty out the freezer from the warehoused batards for the in-laws, I had a hankering' to make a batch of Ken's Bakery's Country Blonde batards.  (vs. the FWSY version)

Retarded fully shaped and couched, these rested comfortably in the refrigerator for about 18 hours.  

I really like the cold retard method of already shaped dough as there are some distinct advantages.  The bake day is shortened considerably and the cold dough is easy to score, especially for high hydration doughs.  

The downside is that it extends the prior day, the mix/ferment/shape day, by another hour or more.  And also that the couche requires a significant amount of flour to be applied lest the dough sticks nastily to it upon being moved to the oven peel.  Which has two disadvantages of its own: the dough retains a lot of the raw flour, especially on the underside and which is something that I really don't want in my product, and the couche, over time, starts to grow a layer of permanent hardened flour on it's surface, even after some vigorous scraping.

With a somewhat slack high hydration dough, as this is, the additional flour on the couche is a necessity - specifically because of the extended contact with the couche during the long cold retard.  Lower hydration doughs do not need nearly as much additional flour. 

The do-over is because the last time that I baked these, I had erroneously taken the batards out of the refrigerator way too soon, and sitting in a warm kitchen alongside a 500dF oven, they were murder to score.  Aside from wanting a tasty bread, I wanted to prove to myself that it was indeed the warming up of the prior batch that made it a struggle to get a clean score, hence this morning's bake and blog entry.

These are just over 78% hydration baked at 470dF.  

15 minutes steam, rotated, 23 minutes more and then 2 minutes vented.

For whatever reason, the batards, both inside and out seem to always appear in these photos more red than they actually are.  Crust being browner and the crumb being a little whiter.

Here is what the sad prior bake looked like - someone should call the cops:

A pretty gory crime scene, hopefully not to be repeated!

And here is today's bake.  Happily baking away in the oven, and the finished product

And here is the underside and my poor couche (after scraping!)

alan

Well, really to the In Laws.  I've been baking up and warehousing a few different breads to pack in my bags as treats for them.  They've been documented here before, but here's the lot of them:

1 dmsnyder style son of SJSD batard (sesame seeds added just for kicks!)

1 Forkish bakery style Raisin Pecan Whole Wheat Levain batard

1 FWSY Field Blend #2 Levain batard

1 dmsnyder style Italian Sesame Levain batard 

1 Forkish bakery style Country Brown Levain batard

That should hold them for a while!

alan

Now enamored with stiff levains (until the next thrill comes along), this adventure had me bake a batch of SJSD dough.  But instead of as baguettes, I am also somewhat enamored with batards these days (until the next thrill comes along).

One with sesame, and one with two scores.  Both just for fun.  I'm curious as to whether the sesame will depart a roasted flavor to the bread as it does with the Sourdough Italian .  Still getting a lot of great performance out of retarding them on the couche already shaped, and baking straight from the refrigerator.

Using my stiff levain - hence the "Son of SJSD" moniker, and adding a few extra grams of water to balance out the hydration, these three batards come in at around 475g each. 480dF, 10 minutes steam, rotate and then ~16-18 minutes more.  The final 2 minutes as vented.

Through the "looking glass" during steaming

Steam released, and rotated

The trio

Getting some fantastic oven spring

The kids

I'm running a cycle of breads now, warehousing a few different styles to pack in my suitcase for my In-laws at the end of the month.  As they've been the beneficiary of baguettes in the past and I've been shaping batards recently, I thought that I'd bake up a bunch and store them in deep freeze until the journey.

Today's bake was raisin pecan whole wheat levain batards with a stiff levain. Lately I've been getting really good mileage (kilometrege? for those outside of the U.S. ;-) ) out of these bakes by shaping the dough the same day as the mix and ferment, and then refrigerating them overnight on the couche.  Then a bake directly out of the cooler.

Just off the couche and freshly scored

Steam released and just rotated

The trio

First place winner

Runner up

alan

The way that I’ve been doing levain builds recently has been addition by subtraction, a three stage build, started out more or less as such (for ex:):

stage 1- build 100g stiff levain using a miniscule # of grams of stiff starter.  ~6-7 hours to show any life, then doubles in the next 2-3 hours.
stage 2 - discard ~50g, add 50g of new water and flour, same stiff levain.  Takes 2.5 hours to double.
stage 3 - discard ~50g, add ~100g water and flour, same stiff levain.  Takes 2.5 hours to more than double.  And this is what I use.

The discarded build goop gets collected in a covered container and refrigerated.  Each new discard is folded into the existing discard.

The process has since morphed into a two stage build taking some of the scrapings of the discard from the previous levain and using it as if it is my output from a 1st stage build.  Then on to the 2nd and 3rd stages as described above.

dabownman “challenged” me to reuse the discard, and so I did.  This levain is 300g of refrigerated discard with a baby boost of 100g of new feed.  Mixed cold straight from the fridge 2 nights ago, turned once to distribute the ingredients, and then shoved back into cold storage for the night.  Yesterday morning I retrieved it and let it come up to room temperature by placing it in a pan of warm water.  It is still incredibly active – the top of the yellow sliver of post-it note was the level of the cold discard.  

The height in the photo is after a mere hour and change.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been trying to do something different with these bakes to “make it my own”, see my post on Semolina Batard for an explanation.  
Ingredients are the same as in FWSY Field Blend #2, with the exception of using a stiff levain instead of a liquid levain and adding mere grams of extra water.

300 French folds later:

4th Letter Fold - my baby boy’s all grown up!  Each of the 4 letter folds is 25 minutes apart.

25 more minutes of bench rest and then into the fridge for a bulk cool down.  Total post-mix & fold bench time – just over 2 hours and significantly less than FWSY outlines for a bulk bench fermentation.  After a protracted cool down, maybe 2-3 hours due to outside commitments, divide and shape.  These are ~575g each.

This morning, once the oven was on for 45 minutes and Sylvia's steaming towel was steaming, I pulled the batards out of the fridge, scored them and loaded the oven deck.  I also add another two cups of water into my lava rock pan.  Did I hear someone utter “mega steam?”

Pre and Post-retard and after loading onto the oven peel:

475dF for 10 steaming minutes, then release the steam, rotate batards and bake for another 15 –17 minutes.

Now, these batards were quite close together on the oven peel, but you can see how they almost touched side walls once our friendly yeasts decided to give one last hurrah as they double-timed it toward their final death spiral.  The proximity of the batards helps to insulate each other from the oven heat, which in the long run is not what we are aiming for.  But it sure is gratifying to see these kids bloom.

Getting steamed, and steam is released and batards are rotated.

Although I’m comparing Ganny Smith apples to Fuji apples here, it does seem evident that my scoring and loading directly from the fridge to oven beats the pants off of the Country Blonde bake, where I had let the couched batards sit in a warm kitchen for a half hour prior to scoring and loading.  These are both high hydration doughs and the scoring on that bake was hampered severely by the warmed surface of the dough, hence the oven spring also suffered.  At least this it the theory I’m sticking with until I can be convinced otherwise.

The other proof of concept here is that the accumulated discard from multiple builds over a few weeks can be mighty potent and re-employed with really fine results.

alan

“My recent straying from baguettes to batards is a mere bagatelle, a minor distraction”, Alfanso said when recently quoted in the World Baking Journal**.
Alfanso was also quoted as stating that he was smitten by shaping of the dough the day prior to the bake, and to let them mature as already couched and shaped batards in the refrigerator overnight.  Hence, a simple bake was all that was seemingly necessary the next morning.  Fire up the oven, let the baking deck come up to temp for an hour, and toss the dough in.  Voila. Bread!  But sometimes all is not what it seems in Carb Land.  A case in point shall ensue...

I’d been wanting, but forgetting, to snap a few “in process” photos.  Until this morning.  These are three ~500g each of my version of Ken’s bakery’s Country Blonde batards.

The Good
The couched batards just out of the refrigerator.  They are camera shy in this photo.  The couche was covered by plastic bags to retain moisture.

The big reveal!  The couche is heavily floured as there is a lot of moisture that these batards contain.

High hydration somewhere north of 78%.  From couche to hand peel.

From hand peel to oven peel.  You can see in these photos the abundance of flour needed to have the batards release from the couche.  If you look closely, you can see the seam.  I set these into the couche seam side down.

The Bad
The three batards scored and ready to be baked.  
As this is new territory for me, I seem to have erred by having removed the batards from the refrigerator a half hour prior to the bake.  Rather than immediately before baking.  In that ensuing half hour, in a warm kitchen and their proximity to the oven, the surface of the batards had softened to the point whereby scoring was particularly difficult.  The blade, even with a light dip into olive oil, dragged mercilessly.

The result.  You can see the inconsistency of the score and the lack of oven spring.

The skin still blistered beautifully.  Blistering was already evident at the 10 minute mark when I opened the oven door to release the steam and rotate these babies.

The Tasty
Do I really need to bore you any more with this section?  We already know how good our breads are!

Next time, I’ll remember to remove the batards from the refrigerator just before bake time.  That is, if I can remember...
Oh well, live and learn.  Umm - live, eat and learn!  

**Sorry, but to my knowledge there is no World Baking Journal.