The sesame bread's ugliness was the result of accidentally folding the dough as I plopped it into a preheated Dutch oven. The BBB's ugliness seemed to be the result of the yeast collapsing—the bread probably rose too high, too soon.
I figured the sesame bread's problems (more details here) would be fixed by using the new baking stone I got for the oven. Some additional help would come from my new proofing basket and bread scorer (aka lame, which rhymes with mom).
Want a lame? Let me know! I have lots of them. They're dangerously sharp, so keep them out of the reach of kids and blindly wandering fingers, but they're good for scoring bread and, I hear, for opening packages.
Sure enough, the new equipment made handling the bread dough easier (although I didn't use the lame this time). The bread looked much better.
 |
| Sesame bread that does not look like a monster face |
I need to make a few improvements to the process of transferring the bread to the oven. First, make sure the lame's at hand when I need it. (You'd think that after buying a 12-pack, I could find one when I needed it.) Second, use a different pot to cover the bread for the first half of baking. I used a Dutch oven that has handles even with the top, but had a near-disaster when I tried to remove the pot. A lighter pot with handles farther from the top would be much easier to manage. Third, just get better at handling the seeded dough, so seeds don't end up everywhere (on the kitchen floor and counter; all over the oven, popping like popcorn...).
But mostly the transfer/baking process worked pretty well. Using baking parchment to transfer the dough was easy and effective. I removed the parchment halfway through, when I removed the Dutch oven covering the bread.
Backing up a bit, the process of fermenting and mixing the dough was a bit different this time—it was faster. I noticed no difference in flavor, but a few white patches were visible inside the bread. That might be because the dough didn't sit as long as last time, or maybe I just undermixed the dough. (The easiest way to mix is squishing it between your fingers, which is fun, so I should just enjoy that.)
Depending on how long you refrigerate the dough after mixing it or shaping it, this bread can take anywhere from 21 hours to a week, start to finish. (Taking more time is supposed to be better, flavor-wise.) The last time I made this bread, it took 4 days; this time it took a day and a half. I made the pre-ferment Thursday morning, mixed the dough that evening, shaped the loaf Friday morning, and baked Friday afternoon. (I'd worked from home, to avoid exposing coworkers to my cold, so I had more flexible time than I usually do on a weekday.) The amount of time I spent actually working on the bread was minimal—most of the time was just waiting for the yeast beasties to do their thing.
Most importantly, the bread tasted great. I brought it to a friend's house Friday night, where it served as a pre-dinner snack as well as dinner accompaniment. Yay, success! I froze the remaining few slices Saturday night, since this bread went stale quickly the last time we made it.
For the second loaf of bread, Bohemian black bread (BBB), I needed to slow down the yeast beasties to avoid the problems I had the first time. Some ways of slowing the yeast involve adjusting the ingredients:
- Reducing the yeast
- Increasing the salt
- Decreasing the food (sugar, whole grain, ...)
Other ways of slowing down yeast involve time and temperature. I didn't want to mess with those because I wanted to keep this as a simple bread machine recipe.
I ended up reducing the yeast and increasing the salt, along with accidentally increasing the food.
- Yeast: 1 t instead of the 2.5 t the recipe called for (was 2 scant last time)
- Salt: 3/4 t instead of 1.5 t (was 1/2 t last time)
- Molasses: 2 T instead of 1.5 T (oops; I was looking at the wrong ingredient list when I measured this)
I cooked it on whole wheat mode, which is probably what I used last time. I then let it rest overnight, since this bread tastes better the second day.
 |
| Bohemian black bread |
The bread looks fine (albeit slightly lopsided) and tastes great! I think that increase in molasses might be a good thing. I suspected that part of the bread might have a flying roof (a hollow area just beneath the crust), but after eating half the loaf, I still haven't found any big air pockets.
 |
| No flying roof here |
What's next? A knitting convention! Which is relevant to bread only in that I'm taking off Thursday to go to an afternoon class. Having Thursday morning free means that I might be able to prepare one of Josey Baker's time-consuming recipes for this weekend. Maybe I'll bake one of his sourdoughs, at last.
No comments:
Post a Comment