Good Big Loaves

Yesterday I made the second batch of blended white flour/whole wheat flour sourdough sandwich bread. It came out pretty well. Here are the proportions:

1 1/2 cups sourdough starter
1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
1/2 cup milk
2 Tablespoons maple syrup
1 Tablespoon butter
1 cup whole wheat flour
5 cups white all-purpose flour

mixed together, sprinkled with two heaping Tablespoons kosher salt and left alone for one hour... then kneaded (working in another two cups or so of white flour) for fifteen minutes. It rose for about five hours. Shaped into sandwich loaves and placed in well-buttered medium pans, it rose another two hours or so in the oven with a pan of steaming water before being baked at 350 degrees (stayed in the oven, with the water removed, during the preheating time) for about an hour.

This time everything came out wonderfully except that the oven bounce (the rise in the first part of baking) was pretty weird. The loaves were close together in the center of the oven, and they each split along that inside edge and pushed out as if they were trying to touch each other. It was too late by the time I noticed, but they're still good; just a little awkward looking.

Next time: separate them in the oven before turning it on.

Baguettes 2

Rose the baguettes for eight hours while at work, then baked them at 425 degrees for about 25 minutes, spraying the oven walls with water a few times in the first half of the baking. The long rise in the baguette pan caused a bit of trouble: the loaves stuck pretty hard to the pan, and stayed soft, almost like muffins, on the bottom. I put them back in the oven, upside-down on the rack, for ten more minutes. That was too much; they're a little scorched and the crust is too thick. Also, the scores I made in the top crust didn't open.

Next time: draw the scores more nearly lengthwise, instead of crosswise. Flour the pan more thoroughly, and maybe try to loosen the loaves or even turn them over just before baking.

sourdough baguettes

Today:

1 1/2 cups starter
1/2 cup cool water
3 cups white flour

mix together, sprinkle with 1/2 Tablespoon salt. Leave for 15 minutes. Knead for ten minutes. Divide in two, let rest 15 minutes, shape into baguettes. Leave in pans to rise for 7? 8? hours.

Hooray for White Flour

This time it came out well. Here's what I did:

1 1/2 cups starter
1 cup lukewarm water
1/2 cup milk
1 Tablespoon butter
2 Tablespoons maple syrup
1 cup whole wheat flour
4 or 5 cups white flour (King Arthur all purpose, though it's not locally grown wheat)

...mixed together with a dough hook, sprinkled with 2 Tablespoons kosher salt and left to rest for an hour. Then I kneaded it, put it in a greased bowl and let it rise for about five hours. I greased a couple of small loaf pans and shaped sandwich loaves, warmed the oven (just warm-- like 80 degrees or so) and let them rise again for about two hours. Took them out of the oven, preheated to 350, put them back in and baked for forty-five minutes with a pan of hot water making steam underneath them for the first half.

Next time: use more water, like 2 1/2 cups, to have enough dough for the large loaf pans. Leave the bread in the oven while it's preheating, but take out the pan of water (it seems to encourage an uneven rise). Maybe spray the oven walls with water early on, instead.

The last batch of pancakes didn't have any baking soda, and I liked them better. One funny thing the soda seems to do is make the cakes dry out really fast while you're cooking the first side. Without soda, they're not as bubbly, but I did the fold-in-beaten-egg-whites thing and they came out great. Next time they'll be half-and-half white and whole wheat flour (decadence!).

Sourdough Pancakes

Yesterday morning I made some pancakes using the crabapple starter-- I liked them, and Kate ate them so she must have liked them all right.

I've used up my bag of Gleason's whole-wheat bread flour. Right now the flour I'm using is milled at Butterworks Farm and grown somewhere in Quebec. So, not strictly localvore, but I'm giving myself a lazy pass (it works like this: "I'm a basically happily lazy person and should give myself credit for finding and using flour that's at least local to the Northeast"). Since our localvore challege week starts today, I have to exert myself slightly more and give myself a "wild card" exemption for it-- but I don't mind.

So, the pancakes: I just halved a recipe from Sandor Katz's cookbook, except I didn't halve the butter or the egg (not much sense trying to use one-half a chicken's egg, and somehow I'm all out of quail eggs, and more butter is a good thing for pancakes). They were all-whole-wheat pancakes, but came out pretty light and tender, I thought. Used a bit of baking soda, which according to the recipe is there to cut the sour taste of the starter, but I think it must also play a big part in leavening the cakes. (Baking soda combines with the acid in the sourdough to produce carbon dioxide bubbles in the batter.) I don't think I'd mind sour pancakes-- maple syrup, after all-- and I'm curious to see if the recipe would work as well without the soda, depending more on the yeast for leavening. Maybe I'd have to help it out with the egg separation thing (mix the yolk into the batter, beat the white separately and fold it in just before cooking)-- I actually kind of like doing that, and for a small batch of pancakes it's not really any more work than beating the egg whole, mixing it in, getting out the soda, measuring it, mixing it with water, and folding that in. The other thing I'm going to do next time is put in some blueberries. I'll have to ask Kate if blueberries we picked in Pennsylvania are okay for the localvore challenge.

Last night at 10:30 I shaped the Reinheitsgebot dough (which had risen since that morning at 9) into two loaves, put them in the pans, and set them to rise overnight. This morning at 7:00 I scored them and put them in a 350 degree oven for thirty-five minutes, turning the loaves at the fifteen-minute mark like I did with the crabapple loaves yesterday.

I just ate a slice of the Reinheitsgebot, with butter, and another slice of the crabapple, toasted with butter, to see what the final differences were. They both rose about the same in the oven, strongly but a little wildly, and looked about the same, but smelled and tasted different: the crabapple loaves smell pretty strongly savory, like cheese, while the Reinheitsgebot loaves are much milder. Both are okay, but not great: I still think they're a little under-done, and both rose sluggishly in the pan until they were in the oven, at which point they went nuts and rose hugely in the center but barely at all at the ends. And the cheesy taste of the crabapple loaf worries me a little-- it didn't at first, but it seems stronger today than yesterday, and Kate raised her eyebrows at it.

For the next batch, I'm going to try to get the starters working a little faster by feeding them twice a day rather than once. I might also use a little less starter per loaf. And I think I'll try a couple of adjustments to the baking: the final rise I'll do in the oven with the light on, to warm everything up, and then I'll bake for, say, 45 minutes at 325.

Two Crabapple Sourdough Loaves

This will be a little rushed because I have some errands to run.

After rising for about five hours in the pans, the two crabapple loaves went into a 350 degree (F) oven for 35 minutes. I scored each loaf with a razor blade, lengthwise along the top. The loaves switched places in the oven and turned halfway around after fifteen minutes of baking (well, they didn't do it themselves: I did it).

The bread smelled great almost as soon as it went into the oven: sweet, sour, toasty, fermented. When it came out, I did the thump-check (tapping the bottom of the loaf to see if it sounds hollow, which supposedly means it's done), took the loaves out of the pans and wrapped them in a cotton cloth on a wire rack to cool. After half an hour (well, twenty minutes... maybe fifteen) I took the more beautiful of the two loaves and cut five slices off for my lunch: one plain, one with butter, one with butter and cherry tomatoes, one with cheddar and cherry tomatoes, and one with butter and maple syrup. VERY GOOD. The bread was still pretty hot, and moist enough inside that I'm not sure it was really all-the-way cooked. I've never quite trusted that thump-check. Also, I was pretty careful to keep the scores shallow-- around a quarter-inch-- and I think that was a mistake; one score never really opened, allowing the bread to tear while baking along a side corner, and the other opened WIDE along the score line, tearing more than I wanted it to.

On the campaign-finance thing: of course, it's more complicated than I thought (and almost certainly still more complicated than I now think, having educated myself on Wikipedia). As far as I can tell, the basic argument against reform is this: restrictions on how much money people can give to political campaigns, and on advertising for political causes, infringe on those people's right to free speech. I suppose that's true-- but in effect, it means that most people are denied a "right" granted to anyone with enough cash. That is, the right to speak one's mind isn't quite the same thing as the right to speak one's mind on prime-time national television. Is it?

First try, step three

The crabapple dough that I kneaded last night rose in the bowl for nine hours. At eight o'clock this morning I turned it out onto a floured countertop, divided it in half with a dough knife, shaped the halves into ovals and let them rest for ten minutes, buttered two medium loaf pans, flattened the ovals to inch-thick near-rectangles and rolled them up into loaf shape. I put the loaves seam-side down in the buttered pans and covered them loosely with cotton cloth, and set them aside to rise again.

My second batch-- the no-crabapple sponge-- maybe I'll call it the Reinheitsgebot batch-- had also risen. I mixed in white flour, butter and salt in the same proportions as last night for the crabapple dough, kneaded it for fifteen minutes while listening to a discussion on NPR about the campaign-finance case soon to come before the Supreme Court, and set it aside to rise in the bowl.

On the campaign-finance case: corporations are made up of individual people, who (if they're citizens) already have influence on elections: they can vote. I see no reason why we should allow people who have more money to have more free speech than anyone else. I would prefer a system in which candidates had to demonstrate a high level of popular support (by a number of signatures, say) and then each got the same amount of money from a general pool held by the government. Anyone who didn't go through this channel wouldn't be allowed on the ballot. I'm curious to hear arguments against such a system... I guess I'll go look for them before my next post, when I've baked the first batch.

Crabapple sourdough first rise

After letting the crabapple sponge sit in its bowl for about four hours, at ten o'clock this evening I mixed in

3 cups of white flour
1 Tablespoon of butter

(I'd run out of the local whole wheat already) and then sprinkled

1 Tablespoon of kosher salt

over the top and let it sit for twenty minutes. Meanwhile I made one cup of the no-crabapple starter into a second sponge, using three cups of Bob's Red Mill whole-wheat flour (not local, but okay for the purpose of judging these first loaves against each other, which won't be all-local anyway) and set it aside to rise overnight (I think it'll go a lot slower, from the behavior of the starter).

Getting back to the crabapple dough, I folded in the salt, turned the dough out onto a floured countertop and kneaded (my favorite part) for about fifteen minutes, adding about two cups more white flour. I made it into a round shape and put it back in the bowl, covered with a cotton towel, to rise overnight.

Crabapple Sourdough Sponge: first try

This blog is a record of my ongoing experiments with sourdough bread. I'm getting tips from a few sources, including my own experience, my mother, and Sandor Ellix Katz's book Wild Fermentation. What I'm going for is a good-tasting, whole-wheat bread made without any commercial yeast, and with all local ingredients (I live in Montpelier, Vermont). It's mostly just for my own entertainment, but also because I'm doing the "localvore challenge" in a couple of weeks and would like to have bread to eat.

Six days ago I mixed one cup of local whole-wheat bread flour from Gleason's Grains with one cup of warm water and two crabapples' skins, unwashed, picked from the tree in our front yard. I used a wide-mouth quart mason jar, to be able to see what was going on in there, and screwed the top down just enough for the threads to catch, but not enough to make an airtight seal. I also mixed a jar of just flour and water, leaving out the crabapple skins, to see if there would be a difference.

The jars stood on the counter away from drafts and direct sunlight for three days. They were both bubbly and fragrant when I lifted the tops. The one with the crabapple skins smelled like apples, and a little like alcohol; the other one smelled a little like cheese. I strained the crabapple batch through a wire sieve to remove the skins, which went into the compost, and then poured the starter back in its jar. That afternoon, and for the next three mornings, I stirred two tablespoons of bread flour into each. I used the same fork to stir the flour into both jars, but always started with the no-crabapple batch.

After being stirred, the starters slowly separated into two layers visible through the jar: the solids sank to the bottom, and a brown liquid sat on top of them. Over the day, bubbles formed and the solids were carried up to the surface. After a while, almost all the solids formed a bubbly mass above the layer of liquid, except for a thin, light-colored dusting at the bottom of the jar. The bubbling-up took about eight to ten hours in the crabapple batch, and more like fourteen to sixteen hours in the no-crabapple batch. The smells of both batches got stronger: the crabapple batch, when it's ripe, now smells almost like acetone.

Today at six in the evening, once the crabapple batch had bubbled up (I fed it this morning around seven), I poured off a cup of it into a mixing bowl and set it aside while I poured the rest (about a third of a cup) into a fresh jar and mixed it with a half-cup of water and two more tablespoons of the bread flour. The cup of starter in the mixing bowl was mixed into my "crabapple sponge:"

---Sponge---
1 cup starter
2 cups warm water
1 Tablespoon maple syrup (local)
3 cups whole-wheat bread flour

I stirred them thoroughly with a dough hook (beautiful thing), covered the bowl loosely with a cotton cloth, and set it aside.