Wild Yeast

My daughter M (the one who hid a dog in her room for several days before springing the news? yes, that one) has moved on to her own apartment but is often over here, killing time between work and class, radiating sweet smiles and depositing piles of unfolded laundry wherever she goes. She is content to graze on whatever she finds, and rarely comments on it — a change, on the whole, for the better. I no longer hear “Why can’t you buy macaroni and cheese in a box like a normal person?” or “Why do you have to put fruit in everything?” whenever she goes near the kitchen.

Occasionally, M does weigh in.  ”These are good.”

(Read more…)

See this week’s yeast spottings…

Just to be clear, this is not what is referred to as a water bagel.

This is what happened when I added approximately 50% more water than I should have to the final dough of some sourdough bagels. Unlike another bread I made in the same week, where the overwatering was deliberate if misguided, this was pure accident.

What to do? Add 50% more of all the other ingredients to preserve the dough’s bagel identity? Not an option, since I had neither more sourdough starter nor high-gluten flour on hand. Toss the dough? Perish the thought!

There was only one option left that I could see: process and bake the dough as if it were ciabatta. That is, I folded it several times during the bulk fermentation to get the strength that is difficult to achieve in a mixer when the dough is so wet. (Of course I was helped here by the high-gluten flour and the sourdough as well.) Then I used my usual ciabatta technique to cut the dough into roll-sized rectangles and proof it in a very-liberally-floured couche.

(Read more…)

See this week’s yeast spottings…

I suppose this bread is a study in how it is possible to lose sight of the preponderance of evidence and allow yourself to be led in a different direction by becoming fixated on a single detail.

Although this was a perfectly fine bread, it was surely not what Görel had in mind when she asked the Bread Baking Babes to undertake Brunkans Långa, the “long loaf” from the Brunkebergs Bageri (bakery) in Stockholm.

(Read more…)

I posted these dragon tail baguettes a while ago, and  here, as promised, is a video showing the shaping technique. I love it because it yields a connected string of easily-break-off-able, single-serving-sized rolls, without having to individually shape each one.

Note that the final shaping, which is shown here, is done on a fully proofed baguette just before it goes into the oven. The shaping of the original baguette is not shown here, but I’m planning to have a video of that soon, too. For a 50-cm (20-inch) baguette, eight or nine segments is about right.

Continue to video…