alfanso's blog

I felt that I could take the Pan de Cristal a further step if I kept at it.  And so I did.  Further micro improvements from last time.

The first that I went with but abandoned after two attempts was to combine a biga with a levain.  While the results were okay, they were not all that much better than with just a straight levain mix. The downside is that it has an additional few steps to accomplish without the payback.  So I abandoned that process and returned to a single preferment - the 100% hydration strong white flour levain.

Other breakthroughs, beyond those reported last time, included:

• Discovering that I could indeed retard the dough overnight, rendering a bit more flavor but principally to get the 95% hydration goop to firm up a little more.  And this worked.
• Changing out from a quite well-floured workbench for the dough to be dumped onto for dividing.  Instead saturate the workbench with water sufficiently.  The dough is easier to manipulate, and with a pair of wet hands was slightly malleable and easier to transfer to the oven peel with minimal deformation.
• Learning that the shorter the time the dough rested on the peel before being loaded into the oven the less propensity it has for spreading out.

There’s no getting around that this dough is still a trick to wrangle with, but I think that I finally unlocked the door to producing a quality Pan de Cristal.

Here's a partial stack from previous runs these past few days.

When loaded into the oven, these plump up quite impressively, only to settle back down some after a while.

The finished product.  These cannot be scaled, so eyeing the size of each baton is necessary.

A bird's eye view of the runt of the lot that was not up for giveaway.

And a snail's eye view.

Looking in from the outside.  You can see how open the crumb is, and how thin the crust is on these breads.  A structural marvel.  The crust just shatters as it is bitten into, while the crumb stays moist and delicate.

The formula for these is on the earlier entry.

4 x ~300g batons 

Pa de Vidre / Glass Bread

I’d made this once before a few months ago after warehousing Abel’s posting for over a year.  Time to try again and figure out the mysteries & miseries of how to make this bread “properly".  And it took about 4-5 iterations over the course of a week, each time trying a new thing or two.  Until I had a breakthrough two nights ago in the mixing phase on my final failed attempt.  But with some additional tweaking, last night’s product came out of the oven looking pretty darned close to what I was after.

There were two key elements to the success.  The first was to the initial mix being performed by hand rather than relying solely on my mechanical mixer.  This step now develops a smooth fully incorporated dough ready for the mixer.  The second was the careful handling of the dough during the transfer from bench to oven peel.  the “wettest” and lightest handling of the divided dough as possible.

Pan de Cristal is a fairly amorphous animal that dares the baker to move it from bench top to oven peel without partially or totally destroying the anticipated shaping or the structure of the dough.  At a total of 95% hydration (90% water, 5% oil) with 90% white flour, it is not one to accommodate any type of man-handling.  So I knew and so I’ve learned.

My first attempts last week varied the hydration from 95% - 85% in failed effort to get the dough to behave.  But the hydration isn’t really the issue.  It’s like having musical notes on a page - which account for only 10% of what the final sound is - the other 90% is the skill and soul of the musician.

When I decided to forego the dividing and shaping altogether by placing the entire BF'ed mass into a baking dish, the notes didn’t play so well.  But at the point I had already unlocked the “secret” to getting a well mixed and well developed dough.

This dough rises very fast due to the IDY, Levain and sugar. In my kitchen, 90 minutes was about all it took to triple in size.  The addition of Letter Folds at 0, 30 and 60 minutes provides the strength this dough needs to be workable at all - at least to me.

An earlier failed attempt at 85% hydration.  The crumb was okay, actually fairly good.

This was the 95% hydr. failed baking pan attempt.  At this point two nights ago I'd figured out how to get a quality mix and Bulk Ferment.

And the resultant batons.  Just did not work - at all!  Dense and overly chewy.  At least the crust was in the vicinity of where i wanted to be.

The lead photo and these next few were last night's success story.  I don't think the look of the bread is all that off from what I imagine it should be.

The bread is incredibly light and airy and when freshly baked or reheated/toasted the crust takes on that snap which likely gives the bread its name, while the crumb remains moist and tender.  I am not often a fan of the "rustic" look of bread that has more than a minimum of raw flour on the crust.  And so I appreciate that these do not.

On the levain feeding side of life: My 100% hydration AP levain was last fed on 08 Dec.  After two feedings yesterday, 07 Jan, it was quite happy again.  Posting these last two sentences to disseminate the knowledge that a well developed 100% AP levain in the back of the refrigerator can sustain a full month, at the least, without being fed, and spring back to life in a pair of feedings.

Our friend, who'd sampled a fair amount of my breads before, was joining us for lunch yesterday.  But she'd never had my ciabatta.

Yes, I've posted this before, as both an AP Biga and AP levain, as well as a levain tritordeum version.  This mod is minor, but brings me back to the more basic FWS combo.  A place where I most prefer to reside.  Mr. MeGee’s version uses olive oil, and in that regard I’d been true - until now. Here it is simply a levain FWS bread with a very minor boost of IDY, y nada más.

My feeling was that the olive oil was coating the gluten strands making then slick and therefore might be inhibiting their structural growth, and also causing a minor increase in mixing time which, with an old KA dough hook mixer, is too long to begin with.

Once more, here is the formula at 1500g.  I removed the olive oil and added that amount to the bassinge and the hydration is now 79%.

~500g x 3 ciabatta loaves

It’s been so long since I made this bread that I forgot how delightful it is.  My initial go-to instinct was to build a 125% AP levain and then run a most reliable Hamelman Vermont SD.  This, after waltzing with Maurizio’s Cinnamon Raisin SD baguettes and my Sesame Semolina baguettes.  Intermixed with learning the tricks of the trade re: croissants, pain au chocolate, pain aux raisins and some cinnamon buns with raisins and walnuts.  Still work to be done on all fronts there.

However, time to return to something more simple.  Until, with visions of golden raisins dancing in my head, I decided to return to the pain au levain with WW and then add raisins to it.   I had already built my 125% levain and was ready to go when I had this revelation.  And then noticed that the Hamelman formula calls for a 60% hydration levain.  I altered the hydration of the levain in the formula sheet to match my now bubbly 125% concoction, printed off the formula and was on my way.  Along with the addition of 20% golden raisins.

The raisins make this somewhat dessert-like, and the crust has a good snap to it.  It will make superb fresh bread as well as superior toast - either with a soft cheese like Brie or with the morning butter.

Although I’ve published this twice before here and here, as there were two mods to the formula I decided to put three on a match.

Hamelman Pain au Levain with Whole Wheat, 125% AP Levain and 20% Golden Raisin.

350g x 4 baguettes/long batards

Well, it’s a been a bit of time since posting.  Last night I had itchy fingers to go back to a favorite but with a pair of twists.  My most-favored sesame semolina based on Mr. Hamelman’s 125% hydration AP flour version.  However this time I subbed out the levain for my old favorite 75% mixed flour levain.  

As long as I maintain the same percent of preferment flour, switching things around like overall as well as levain hydrations is a breeze.  I also had the urge to make a Brobdignagian baguette/long batard to go along with one normal sized.  What could be normal than that?

1 x 1150g long batard/baguette, 1 x 375g long batard/baguette.

itch scratched!

And on to other recent things

I had a desire to start to learn croissants and laminated dough.  So…many iterations later, I have somewhat cured the itch and figured out many angles to greater success.

Starting with the still edible but quite problematic: poorly laminated with a lot of tearing and leakage, shaping issues, determination of "correct" size to make into the triangles, under-baked bottoms, etc.  And one by one, I started to incorporate a few different methods. With the help of watching a few videos over ad nauseam particularly Bien Manger.

I won't go into too many details here, but settled on T45 pastry flour to cure minor elasticity problems and the T45 dough is also a tad smoother.  Went from 2% milk to powdered milk to whole milk.  Bought an appropriate large maple wood rolling pin 18 inches long.  Misunderstood that the 27 layers were not for the entire dough, but for the butter along, and so I needed to perform one more lamination step to get there.  Baby steps.  Much helped by my wife leaving town for a week so that I could spend a lot of time trying things out and searching for better methods and results.

At this point, if there are two remaining items to check off, the more important would be that I’m still seeing only the initial image of a honeycomb crumb.  The second is that without a sheeter, it is near impossible for me to roll the dough out so that it is consistently smooth and even along the entire length of the dough.  A sheeter would make life all the more easy, but I have neither the space nor desire to get one.  That would be lunacy for an apartment-based home baker.

Here you can see the start of something good.  However the number of laminations are incorrect.

Starting to get the hang of shaping but still have some consistency issues.

Much improvement on the layers of butter, now counting at 27.

These are now full sized and looking pretty good.  Still more work to do!

A  partial run of pain au chocolat.  Shy on the chocolate, I doubled up on the next run.

 I also decided to use the same dough the next time to make pain aux raisins for the first time.  Also a first time for making pastry cream.  Pleased at both for a virgin bake.

I’d been warehousing another Abelbreadgallery creation since our incredibly able Abel published this on TFL in Jan 2018.  And yesterday finally decided to give it a go.  At 75% hydration, this is near the upper end of my non-ciabatta type of bread limits.  Considering the length of time in retard and the growth of the loaf, both in retard as well as in the oven, I'm surprised at the tight crumb for a 75% hydration dough.  Nonetheless, a delicious slice of bread.

Being alfanso, I had to tinker just a tad with the outcome and rather than duplicate his boule and xusco (batard in Catalan).  I tried to emulate his xusco and used the remainder for two wheat bran covered baguettes.  Somehow I think that the wheat bran interfere with clean scoring on baguettes.  Or maybe it’s just me.

Abel's Xusco 

And mine.  A fair representation, so I'm satisfied at the look and outcome.  The baguettes shaped nicely, but seemed to have a mind of their own in the oven.

750g x 1 xusco

340g x 2 baguettes/long batards

The formula normalized to 1000g

Back once more from roaming the earth and, within way less than a day home, my wife coaxed me into thinking about a next bake.  I left it to her imagination what would be next, but she deferred to me.  

In the past I'd baked the Hamelman black olive levain a few handful of times, particularly in response to our building's chief engineer's constant "whining" about when I'd bake it again and slip him a loaf.

A 65% hydration dough with 25% olives makes for a hearty if not particularly open crumb.  In keeping with my M.O. of mostly avoiding posting the same thing twice here on TFL, there was just enough tweak to qualify for this post.

Changes from the original included using 100% LL instead of his 125% LL, changed to AP flour from higher protein bread flour, substituted rye flour for WW, and used rather large quarter-sliced "spears" of large green Spanish Queen olives rather than smaller and diced Kalamta flecks. Otherwise I abided by the original formula.

These olives are quite salty, so they were scaled and quartered, placed into a water bath for a while to remove some salinity, and then toweled dry.

Abel Sierra posted somewhere that baguettes should be couched seam side up.  I did so with one of the two.  But then in my infinite wisdom, once loaded into the oven, I neglected to track which of the two loaves were which since I rotate loaves a few times during the bake.

I can't check what the crumb looks like on either the batard or the more open grine baguette as they were both delivered to the chief engineer and our office manager.  Intact! 

One does exhibit a more open grigne than the other, but I am clueless as to which was which.  The batard was couched seam side down.

At 65% hydration and weighed down by the mass of olives, the crumb doesn't exhibit a lot of openness.  The old saying is you can't eat the holes.

The formula normalized to 1000g 

• Mix water, flours and levain.  "autolyse" for 30 min.
• Add salt.  Pinch and Fold.
• 300 French Folds - 150 FFs, 5 min. rest, 150 FFs.  Into oiled container.
• Bulk Ferment 2 hours at 78dF room temp.  3 Stretch and Folds on wetted counter at 40, 80 & 120 min.
• Add olives on first S&F.
• Retard a few hours.
• Divide, pre-shape, rest 15 min., final shape and onto very lightly floured couche.  Back to retard for ~12-16 hours total refrigerated rest time.
• Oven to 480dF for ~ 45-60 min.  Sylvia's Steaming Towel 15 min. prior to bake.
• Loaves onto parchment covered oven peel, score, and load oven.
• 2 cups near boiling water into lava rock pan.  Drop oven temp to 460dF.
• 13 min w/ steam.  Release steam, rotate loaves.
• Baguettes/long batards took 25 minutes, batard ~28.  3 more min. of oven venting.

1x600g batard, 2x425g long batards/baguettes. 

I'd been warehousing Abel Sierra's post of pan de cristal for forever.  But no more.  My first attempt 2 days ago taught me a few things about a few things, and the results, while okay, were tasty but nothing more to write home about nor to write up on TFL.  And so I made what turned out to likely be the corrections necessary.

Abel's masterful interpretation has the hydration in the 115%-120% range.  I have neither the nerve nor the skill to attempt to be in that neighborhood.  I made several changes from his posting and from what I was able to cull from past ciabatta experience as well as from a few videos in hopes of attaining a similar outcome.

This was a two preferment affair, 100% hydration flour, and a 66% hydration biga, which I added for strength, because sure as the day is long, this dough needs strength and not extensibility.  In order to avoid too much heat from mixing friction I use the levain and the biga straight from the refrigerator and the bassinage incorporated cool (but could/ should have been cold) water. 

The total hydration is 95% - 90% water and 5% oil.  And it needs to be handled as little and as gently as possible.

I suppose to be more "authentic" I could have trimmed the width of the loaves and made 4 or 5 instead of 3.  But for a second attempt and first successful one, I'm pretty pleased.

The pile of goop after tripling in the tub  during BF.

Divided and placed onto fairly well floured parchment.  No proofing time needed.

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Just after loading. the dough is so wet as to appear to have no structure.

Steam released and loaves rotated.

I'm not a fan of anywhere near this much raw flour on the surface.  But with a dough this wet, it may be hard to avoid.

The loaves are very light having shed a lot of moisture during the bake.  The "bald spot" on the lower left was the result of a giant gas bubble developing during the bake.

Another summer gone, and another summer away from baking.  Prior to taking my bake break, I mentioned to my Barcelona friends that upon return, I would also return to complete some unfinished tritordeum business.  That being to use the grain in a ciabatta.  My recent go-to ciabatta formula is a modified version of Scott MeGee’s biga based dough.

Two runs, two types of tritordeum used.  Each was a mix of 50/50 AP/tritordeum, employing the Hamelman-like AP levain at 125% hydration.  With bassinage and 3% olive oil, the overall hydration of the total dough stands at 79%.  In both cases, the water and the levain are kept refrigerated until mix time, owing to the mixing friction of my old Kitchen Aid planetary mixer raising the temperature as it developed the dough.

As with other ciabatte formula mixes, as the speed of the mechanical mixer increases, I seek two distinct signs that the dough is sufficiently developed.  Not only do I listen for the slapping sound of the dough against the sides of the mixing bowl, but I also wait to see the dough being intermittently picked up off the bowl onto the dough hook and then re-deposited onto the bowl.  Once these two qualifications are met, the dough has gained sufficient strength, and the mix is over.

The first bake used the 'T150’ flour.  The result was a relatively handsome set of loaves although the crumb, while tasty, left a lot to be desired as far as open structure - especially for a ciabatta.  I will attribute this to three culprits.  1) Tritordeum is referred to as a low gluten flour in the online literature, 2) the ‘T150’ is akin to whole wheat flour, which will “consume” more of the hydration and also contribute to a tighter crumb, and 3) to my being away from the baking craft for a few months and therefore this served as my refresher bake.  I’ll pretty much dismiss the last point as I’ve stepped away before and found little to no degradation in my skill set.

The second bake was with the ‘T65’ tritordeum, and I had just enough of that flour to fashion two 500g loaves before my store of the grain was depleted.  On this run, one can see that the crumb is more open and fairly close to when I use 100% KA AP flour at ~11.7% protein.  I also decided to allow for a rest time of 20 minutes between the initial incorporation of water and the final mix.

In both cases the shaping was decent, but fell short of being as consistent as I would like.  The girth of the loaves also didn't equal what I’ve produced before with all AP flour - the barrel just wasn’t big enough in circumference.

My opinion is that while the ’T150’ version creates a pleasing and tasty bread, it would be hard pressed to pass muster as a ciabatta from the crumb alone and delivered a heavy and dense character to the bread.  I would not recommend this as a ciabatta bread.  It was quite tasty - just don’t sell it as a ciabatta to avoid disappointment.  

The ’T65’ version has more of the ciabatta open crumb characteristic with a crumb that is open enough for what one might expect from a ciabatta at the lower end of the hydration scale.  And I think that this version could very easily please most palates and not disappoint when presented as a ciabatta.

This was just furthering my experimentation and knowledge of the grain itself and what it potentially can and cannot do well.  And I feel that the 'T65' version holds up quite well to an AP flour with the added benefits and enhanced flavor profile of the tritordeum grain.

In each run all loaves were ~500g. 

'T150' Tritordeum

'T65' Tritordeum

And for comparison, here is what the all AP version of this bread looked like from two previous bakes...

Last week I was trying to enjoy my trip to NY, and I met up with The Roadside Pie King for a couple of slices of pizza (imagine that!).  But then Abe sent a link to me from the ace bakers at The Weekend Bakery and encouraged me to give it a go.  Upon returning home the other evening, I decided to do just that yesterday and a bake this morning.

But, as fate often intercedes in moments like these, alfanso decided to go almost far afield from their posted formula and do some funny stuff in an effort to "make it his own".

***Edit: Mistakenly posted as T160, but it should have read T150 - which is similar to the US Whole Wheat/UK Whole Meal.  Spreadsheet corrected as well.  The toasted sesame seeds refer only to wha is mixed in and not what is rolled onto the crust.***

I have a fair amount of the tritordeum T150 left from my trip to Barcelona in April, so I decided this would be a fine time to incorporate some into this mix.  Changes from the WE Bakery posted formula:

• Use the tritordeum T150 "whole grain" rather than semola rimacinata.
• Not refresh my now last-refreshed two week old levain,  as I still had a lot of it in the refrigerator begging to be used as-is. Rather use it straight away.
• Stick with my 75% hydration AP levain rather than their 130% hydration concoction.  Just abide by their pre-fermented flour percentage.
• "autolyse " with the levain.
• Eliminate the IDY from the final dough as I was heck-bent on following my standard routine of retarding the dough.
• Retard the dough both before and after divide and shape.
• Use toasted sesame seeds in the interior and coat the exterior with them as well.
• And, oh yeah, make these into baguettes/long batards too.

4x400g baguettes/long batards

Perhaps a more open crumb at 72% hydration?  But I'm not hung up on that sort of thang.

The formula normalized to 1000g