Under-proving

Under-proved dough is easier to slash, and doesn't collapse after slashing.


Not completely happy with the crumb though.

This is mostly white flour with a bit of chapati flour. Sourdough of course.

Spent grain bread

I've tried to make spent grain bread before, and I always made the mistake of using too much and ended up with a heavy, soggy brick. These days I don't use any more than a handful. It's tempting to use more, but you cannot predict the water content accurately and it always ends up being too much.

Sponge:
15g sourdough starter
100ml boiled, but unfermented hopped wort from Beata Bitter
100g rye flour
a handful of spent grain from Beata Bitter

Dough:
Sponge +
200ml water
11g salt
400g strong white bread flour

Bake at 200ºC for 30 minutes and 150ºC for another 20, or whatever suits your oven.

The bread has a very soft, slightly doughy crumb. A bit too soft and fluffy. I might make the dough even drier next time, although it's already only 60% hydration. The supermarket bakeries clearly use malt a lot. It tastes fantastic, malty and sweet. No noticeable hop flavour.

Don't ...

... bake pizza in a steamy oven, ever. That is all.

Porter and hops bread (World Bread Day)

A recurring theme of this blog is the relationship between bread and beer. Both are among the oldest known cultivated foods and exist in our culture in a kind of symbiosis. We rely on fermentation to give us both products, and for most of history the brewery was close to the bakery ... and often the same enterprise. So my World Bread Day post has to also involve beer.

This is the beeriest bread I've made yet. It doesn't just contain beer as the liquid, it is also raised with beer yeast and has added malt and hops.

I hope it's not too bitter. When I've used beer yeast in the past I could detect residual hop bitterness in the finished bread. That didn't bother me but some people might dislike it. This one actually has dried hops added to the dough too and I wonder if it'll retain any of the wonderful hop aroma, or just their bitterness.

The malt should give munchy bits, dietary fibre and possibly unwanted enzymatic activity that will devour the entire dough during the night, leaving only a puddle of sugar syrup.

If you brew, this is an easy bread to make, because you have the malt and hops, leftover yeast and spoiled beer handy. If you don't, it's probably more trouble than it's worth.

450g white flour
50g spelt flour
20g yeasty gunk from the bottom of the fermenting bucket
13g salt
20g crushed pale malt
2g crushed hops (I used Boadicea)
320g of some unsuccessful home-brewed porter beer

Straight dough, no faffing about. Bake it as you like it.



The hops give the bread a distinctive, though not very pronounced, hoppy aroma, and also, as I thought it might, a bitter finish, which is quite nice once you get used to it. You probably need to like hops a lot though. The crumb is relatively heavy for a white-flour loaf, but soft and moist; the crust is soft and chewy.

My bread is retarded

A bad habit of mine in the past has been over-proving my bread dough. The result was generally that I had a wobbly dough which would start spreading as soon as I took it out of the proving basket, and gave me round, flat loaves. They still tasted good though.

Depending on how much time I have, I now usually retard the dough overnight in the fridge, letting it rise very, very slowly at a cold temperature. An advantage of this is that cold dough is easier to slash, for some reason that I don't yet understand. I baked a loaf this morning from just such dough (mostly white with a bit of spelt and rye) and the slashes opened up beautifully.

There's no photo because I have mislaid my camera and I will have eaten all the bread by the time I find it, so you'll just have to imagine it, or just trust me that it looks great.

Sourdough pizza

I've been making a lot of pizza recently. I'd kind of got out of the habit. I used to make it regularly, but when I moved to my current abode with its weedy electric oven, I found my old method produced heavy, doughy focaccia instead.

Now I've started rolling out the dough thinner, and since my visit to Franco Manca in Brixton I've experimented with a sourdough base. I never thought it would make such a difference, but it does. I used this recipe from a sourdough guru (though he insists "All this praise is jolly nice of course so long as it is appreciated that the original yeasted recipe is Carol Field's. All I did was convert it to sourdough a long time back.") for the dough and the pizza tastes so much better.

I didn't have a written recipe before; it was more: half fill a bowl with flour, bit of salt, glug of olive oil, yeast, glug of lager, enough water to make a dough. And it worked.

I always enjoyed making the yeast dough because it was ready so quickly. Yet after having tasted a naturally leavened dough with a 20 hour fermentation, I don't want to go back. Of course my oven doesn't go up to 500ºC like a proper pizza oven, but it's still nicer than a yeast dough.

I've also learnt not to leave the dough out at room temperature. The gluten will degrade within a day im summer; you can really feel the difference by the second day when it has already lost its strength and you have to add more flour just to stop it falling apart. It's really weird the way it feels almost liquid-like rather than stretchy and pliable.

The person who taught me to make pizza said old dough was better than freshly made, and he was right, but that's only if it's kept in the fridge.

Acetic bread

Note to self: don't make bread dough and then leave it in the fridge all week.

I remembered it this morning and bunged it in the oven. While it was baking, the kitchen smelled like a chip shop from the amount of acetic acid vapour the bread gave off.

Pity, because it has a fantastic crumb and lovely texture. It's just really sour.

Two bread breakfast

I should have posted this yesterday but didn't get around to it. This is the result of throwing two doughs together at 3am the other night. Wheat loaf with 25% and caraway yadda yadda, as above, and a smaller hazelnut and stout loaf using my XXXS beer instead of water. I've decided that after nine months the XXXS isn't ever going to be that good (it was only the second beer I brewed) and will now go into bread and marinades instead of down my neck. It makes pretty nice bread though.

Do I have time now to make another strong stout in time for drinking in the winter? Sure I do, it's only August.

Insomnia loaf

I couldn't sleep. This is weird for me because I can almost always sleep like a log.

My mind was racing with thinking about baking and brewing (shut up). Eventually I had to get out of bed and go and make some dough. Partly out of solidarity with Andy from the loaf who has to do it at three in the morning, and partly because I'll have no bread tomorrow if I don't.

25% rye, 75% white wheat flour, fennel, caraway and linseed, salt and natural leaven.

The London Review of Bread

I was in London this week for the Great British Beer Festival, but man does not live by beer alone -- there's bread as well.

On Wednesday a friend took me to Franco Manca in Brixton Market. It is a splendid place. There's a clay oven in the back of the shop and about eight tables packed with people tucking in to the enormous pizzas that come from the oven. The pizza, made with a natural leaven, is soft, chewy and charred from the oven. The salads are even better than the pizza.



A couple of units down from there was Wild Caper where they also sell amazing looking bread (as well as boring stuff like olives and wine). They were nice enough to let me take pictures of their bread, even though we didn't buy any. I learned once I got home that the bread is also baked at Franco Manca; that's a hard working oven.

Borough Market, as everyone knows by now, is packed with food producers selling great stuff. At Flour Power's stall I bought a piece of rye levain bread (these things are the size of an LP record, or bigger, so they also sell half and quarter loaves). It's gorgeous, really rather sour indeed and with an underlying sweetness and chewy brown crust. It's the kind of bread you can just eat without anything on it. It seems almost a shame to hide it.



Another interesting loaf they sell is one which is just 400 grammes and is slashed so that you can cut it into seven slices. The story is that this slice was a day's bread ration during the Second World War. A sobering thought. I know that some people today don't eat much more than 400g of bread a week, but I don't think that Londoners in the Blitz had the option of filling up on crisps and frozen shepherd's pie instead.

Bread bread bread

I haven't baked for a week, and even resorted to buying bread at the weekend. I had a tasty, tangy baguette and a dull poppy seed roll clearly made from cake flour from different stalls at the market. Saturday night I relaxed and fed my sourdough, and by Sunday evening I had this:

Bread again

It looks like my new, re-grown from scratch sourdough is ready to use. I think it's actually better than the old one. Here's the first loaf.

I have taken to making pretty much the same loaf over and over. This is 40% rye and 60% cheap supermarket bread flour, with a touch of caraway.

Also, I've noticed my bread is best when I bake it late at night after coming home from the pub. Don't ask me why.

I killed my sourdough

I think I killed my sourdough.

I'd been having trouble with mould appearing on the surface and it seemed like I was regularly having to scrape off the mould and grow the starter up from a salvaged tablespoonful.

I added a slug of 10% acetic acid vinegar thinking that would keep the mould at bay. And the lactic bacteria like it acidic, don't they?

It also kept the yeast at bay. Dough made from this starter is now showing no signs of growth. I am quite upset.

Barm and Porter musings

I have been pondering why bakers, apparently around 1800, stopped just using yeast from the brewery and switched to barms.

Everything I have read on the subject of barms suggests that hop bitterness was considered a necessary evil by bakers at the time. They didn't like it, but the hops were needed to stop the barm spoiling.

I had in my mind that there must have been some significant change in the way beer was brewed that forced bakers to switch.

I don't know whether there was a sudden shift to using more hops around that time, which would have increased the bitterness.

The only other idea is that at that time porter was the dominant brewing style, in London at least. Porter had already been popular for decades prior to 1800, but it was made with brown malt. The much more highly roasted black patent malt was invented in 1817, and the porter brewed using this might have given the yeast a burnt, toasty flavour that bakers didn't want in their bread.

Could there be something in this theory? I think it is most probably rubbish, but someone else may know something I don't.

War bread

The economic crisis hasn't got so bad yet that I have to make bread out of whatever is available like people do during wars and famines. However this bread does involve a bit of recycling of stuff that would otherwise get thrown away.

150g cold porridge
Handful of spent grain from Sunday's brew
Left-over sweet wort ditto
Salt
Enough chapati flour and strong white flour to make a soft dough.

I've heard of old-bread soakers and the odd handful of cooked rice making their way into bread, but recycling left-over breakfast porridge into bread somehow makes me feel filthy, like those people who fry everything in the same ancient bacon grease kept permanently in the pan. I try to put such thoughts out of my mind, but at the same time I'm not philosophically keen on my bread becoming a sort of bin for using up old stuff.

The bread is quite nice though. Chewy crust, nice oaty flavour. Here it is pictured with some of Iain's fantastic fennel salami from Gusto & Relish.

It's flat as a pancake because the dough is so soft, but that doesn't bother me too much.

19th century Parisian barm part I

Dan Lepard's fantastic book The Handmade Loaf includes a recipe for barm bread.

Barms in the sense in which Dan uses the word are a particular development in the evolution of bakers' leavening agents. Historically they come after the use of beer yeast obtained from a brewery, and were in turn superseded by the use of compressed yeast.

The book mentions historical barms being made of malt and hops, but does not go into detail. His simplified recipe for modern readers who don't have malt and hops lying around involves heating up a bottle of real ale and stirring flour into it. This has caused a little confusion, as people assume that the yeast sediment in the bottle has something to do with the leavening of the dough. Actually, the use of a bottle-conditioned beer is something of a red herring.

I do have malt and hops lying around, so decided to try doing the whole thing from scratch. The procedure is similar to making wort for beer up until the wort is drained off the grain. Since the use of barm survived longest in Scotland when bakers in England had moved on to using compressed yeast, I also felt a duty to look into local history.

A small ad in the Scotsman:

BAKER (Foreman) Wanted immediately, competent, to take entire Management and work Parisian Barm. Good wages. Jas. Murdoch, Bonnyrigg.

With the help of some old baking textbooks found online, this one for example, we discover that barm was not universally held in high esteem at the time:

Bread prepared by the aid of barms is generally of poor volume and colour, rather liable to be holey, with dull bloom and texture somewhat variable, but the flavour as a rule is good.

Monica Spiller is someone who has written about barms. However, her method uses malt flour and hot water, so again is not done from scratch.

She has a detailed document with various interesting recipes. Interestingly, it includes a section on sprouting and drying wheat grains. This is, of course, effectively malting them, but for whatever reason she doesn't use the term.

An old domestic science book, Hand-Book Of Household Science by Juniata L. Shepperd suggests:

Yeast which is made with hops is able to overcome the power of foreign ferments longer than that made without hops, because the bitter of the hops is not suited to bacterial growth, but since one can use but little of a yeast made with hops without injuring the flavor of the bread, and a weak yeast acts so slowly as to cause disastrous results, it is better to make yeast oftener without hops, and use plenty of it in bread making.

It is clear from the rest of this document that the author is of the school of thought that considered acidity in bread a defect, but that is by the way:

There is another variety of patent yeast known as "flour barm." This is extensively used in Scotland. The chief peculiarity of bread from this is its decidedly acid taste, thought to be due principally to lactic acid. Much salt is used in making this bread, and it has not the flavor of what, in some other countries, is called the best bread.

William Jago’s classic The technology of bread-making, including the chemistry and analytical and practical testing of wheat flour, and other materials employed in bread-making and confectionery (1911) gives three variations; a compound barm (malt and hops), a virgin barm (spontaneous fermentation, flour and water only), and Parisian barm (malt and flour).

The source is given as a Mr Meikle who was apparently a bakery writer familiar with the Scottish baking trade. Meikle's descriptions are interesting because they show an evolution of practice beginning with, and developing away from, beer-brewing techniques. The first barm mentioned, compound barm, is essentially unboiled wort, made with malt, hops and water, then inoculated with an existing culture (this is the "Store" referred to in the recipe below).

Virgin barm, containing water and flour only, differs from a sourdough starter in that it's made with boiling water. Strictly speaking virgin barm should be allowed to ferment spontaneously, but even in 1911 Meikle was saying he had never actually seen this practice; bakers would add "store". Parisian barm includes malt again, together with scalded flour, but no hops.

Meikle's Parisian recipe:

PARISIAN BARM.
15 lbs. Water
3 3/4 lbs. Malt } mash at 160º F.

22 lbs. Flour.
35 lbs. Water at 212º F.
10 lbs. Store.
To lie 12 hours before storing or until it reaches 76º F. ; ready 50
hours afterwards.

The Bread and Biscuit Baker's & Sugar-Boiler's Assistant by Robt. Wells gives a Parisian barm recipe using hops, but it is unfortunately too vague for me to convert the recipe, unless anyone can tell me how much "as much flour as can be nicely stirred in with the barm-stick" is. The basic idea is 1 part malt to 5 parts water for the mash, then add three times as much boiling hop tea.

Why does Wells include hops in Parisian barm and Jago not? I don't know, but I don't see any reason to conclude that one is more "correct." The Meikle-Jago categorisation is pleasingly tidy, but that is not enough in itself to settle the matter.

As mentioned by Shepperd above, one of the reasons to move away from beer yeast in the first place was because the hops made it bitter (it would be fascinating to look into whether this coincides with a shift to using more hops in beer-brewing, thus creating a problem where there had been none before).

On the other hand, barm without hops didn't keep as well. Possibly some bakers just continued using hops and others didn't. It certainly shows that disputes over what is or isn't a poolish, a sourdough, a barm etc. predate internet bread-geek forums.

In part II I will compare a couple of old recipes, convert them to modern units and post the recipe I'm going to use. Part III will involve using the barm to make bread using the quarter-sponge method which was apparently the contemporary method most used.

Beer yeast bread

Simple recipe for this quick bread I made last night.

250g wholemeal wheat flour
250g strong white wheat flour
10g salt
15g yeast gunge (saved from the bottom of the APA fermenting bucket)
330g water (66% hydration)
Some caraway seeds


Mix all the ingredients together and let rest for 15 minutes. Stretch and fold to a smooth dough on an oiled board. Return to bowl and let sit for another 15 minutes. Stretch and fold again and shape, and set aside to rise.

Go to the pub for two hours and drink Harviestoun Bitter and Twisted. On returning, bake in a 200ºC oven for 20 minutes, then 150ºC for a further 25 minutes.

This is nice. Soft chewy crust, soft elastic crumb. It tastes quite salty although it only has the usual 2% salt.

The yeast is quite bitter on its own and has great gobs of hops in it. I'm not sure if I detect any bitterness in the finished bread; maybe I'm just used to it.

Old baking textbooks

Normally I'd be the last person to suggest restricting oneself to online research, but I was surprised how many old baking textbooks are available online, thanks to archive.org, Google Books and scribd.com.

There's The Student's Technology of Breadmaking and Flour Confectionery (1966); an unfortunately re-typeset version of Bread and Biscuit Baker's & Sugar-Boiler's Assistant (circa 1890); and most impressively, William Jago’s classic The technology of bread-making, including the chemistry and analytical and practical testing of wheat flour, and other materials employed in bread-making and confectionery (1911).

These will come in very handy as I look into old doughmaking techniques.

Smokebeer and rustic bread

Two of my favourite beers in the whole world are the Rauchbier from the breweries Spezial and Schlenkerla in Bamberg. They have a lovely smokey-bacon aroma and taste, but this isn't a novelty; the underlying beer is a great lager in its own right. So when I got into homebrewing it was only a matter of time before I would attempt to make a beer from smoked malt too.

I did an experimental brew with 100% Rauchmalz. The shop only had 1kg available when I popped in, so it was a very small brew. People are always warning you not to use more than 10 or 20 % Rauchmalz, but Schlenkerla and Spezial use almost all Rauchmalz in their beer and I don't find it overpowering. I read that they also use a little Munich malt, which makes sense - the Bamberg beers are very dark.

Brewing didn't go too well, and I thought this was a complete write-off. When I filled it into the fermentation vessel I managed to pour about half of it all over the floor and what did make it in was so full of trub and hop gunk that it didn't look like it would ever settle. It has settled further but the layer of trub at the bottom is growing thicker day by day.

More importantly, when I was brewing with it I didn't detect the smokiness at all. I'd already decided that the Rauchmalz I can get here was rubbish and resolved not to buy any more.

I tried some of it today. The smoke has magically appeared. This is shaping up to be good beer. Pity I'll be lucky to get a litre of it.

The bread in front is mostly white flour with a little spelt, made with the yeast left over from my DMS disaster. I like this yeast better in bread than I do in beer. I am really loving baking with the beer yeast. I'm making some of the tastiest white bread I've ever done. I just slap it in the oven and it rises beautifully. I don't bother shaping or slashing it so it turns out an irregular squarish lump, but you can get away with that if you call it "rustic".

Crusty beer bread

This rose all night, so is probably over-proved. The scent of baking bread in the morning is wonderful, though. I'm hungry because I didn't have time to taste it before rushing off to work.

200g wholemeal wheat flour
200g wholemeal spelt flour
200g white wheat flour
12g salt
12g caraway seed
400g Brown Beer
2 tbsp yeast gunge harvested from the bottom of the Brown Beer fermenting bucket

Bake at 200°C for 25 minutes, turning down to 150 for a further 20 minutes.