Underproofing = Giant Oven Spring...and Stamps!

Exaggerated oven spring on Deli Rye

Here's what happens (if you're lucky) when you put the deli rye away for cold-retarded proofing and wake to find that the loaves haven't risen at all. Big oven spring. 

If you're not lucky, you get bricks. Because this is a lower hydration dough than I normally work with, the boules can easily be coerced into springing up into nice tall rounds. Another nicety of a slightly drier dough is reliable ears, or gringe, the peels of crust that curl back from the score. Very nice.

But the real fun today is the arrival of our bag stamp! There are some specific requirements of a cottage food operation, and proper labeling is one of them. There's a lot of other humdrum text required, but your business name and phone number have to be part of that text. In keeping with our plan to keep all of this fun, Cam went online and found Meagan Lewis, who makes hand-carved rubber stamps. A couple of weeks and a few design iterations later, we have a really nice piece of branding in hand.  Meagan did a beautiful job. Like our bread, the stamp is hand-crafted. The stamp arrived in what really amounted to gift-wrapping too...a nice touch!

 

 

 

 

Our Stamp

 It's even fun to stamp the bags (at least it was for the first thirty or so bags).

Bread Bags

So it looks like we'll be ready for next week's debut of the bread share!

Deli Rye Bread with Caraway Seeds

Light Deli Rye

Tried a couple of new formulas over the past couple of days, and the success story (I'll skip the failure) was the Deli Rye. This is similar to the sort of "rye" I grew up eating. Specifically, we used to always have a loaf of Schwebel's Jewish Rye in the house, and I loved it toasted.
Despite disparaging the sort of rye bread sold in stores in the US today, Hamelman (in his book Bread) offers a formula for a light deli rye.  Really, this is a wheat bread with a little (15%) rye flour and caraway seeds. While it's not a traditional rye, I still love this sort of loaf, and was excited to find that this formula produced a mildly sour loaf with a tender spongy crumb and a crisp but not too toothy crust. This one will find its way into the Bread Share rotation for sure. Hamelman calls for spiking the dough with commercial yeast in the final build, but I decided to forgo this addition and I'm glad I did.  The crumb of this bread is exactly as I wanted it.  A more open crumb wouldn't have helped this bread.
I toasted a slice as soon as I could cut the loaf.  Delicious!

Deli Rye Crumb. Very nice!

Two New Fomulas

This weekend we gave a couple of formulas from Forkish's Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast a try.  This book has been a great resource for techniques and formulas, and is a great read for anyone interested in bread in general.  Ken Forkish's story will be inspiring to anyone motivated to try something new, and the beginning of his book is the story of the start of his bakery, with comical failures and lots of "lessons learned."  It' s a good book.

This weekend's formulas included a first; a 100% commercial yeast bread. 

Slow-Ferment Whole Wheat
The 40% Whole Wheat Overnight Bread is a slow-fermented direct dough (everything is mixed at once) that is retarded by using only a small amount of yeast and then proofing the shaped loaves overnight in the refrigerator.  This gives time for more complex flavors to develop than you would be able to get if you used a traditional amount of yeast and had a two-hour rise and proof.

40% Overnight Whole Wheat with Einka Farro

I modified the formula slightly to accommodate the inclusion of a percentage of einka farro which i milled from whole berries I brought back with me from the Methow Valley of Washington state.  I can't say that the flavor was shockingly different, but I like to kid myself that it made a difference.  :)  You have to still use a lot of "regular" wheat when making bread with this stuff, since it doesn't produce a lot of gluten.

The dough over-proofed a bit, but the loaves still managed to spring up acceptably, yielding a much less toothy crust than the naturally leavened breads we normally bake, and a crumb that while not terribly exciting, was still delicate and light.  A nice loaf of bread, and better than what you'd find in the store, but probably not one that we'll make with any regularity. 

The other loaf was also something of a first as well, and I'm pretty pleased with the outcome.  The only downside to in (and this is a matter of opinion) is that there's not a whole lot of whole wheat in it.  Only about 10%.  Of course, there's nothing stopping me from modifying the formula in the future, but I figured I do things "by the book" the first time. 

 Twice-Fed Sweet Levain Bread

Twice-Fed Sweet Levain Bread

Forkish lists this in the section of his book entitled "Advanced Levains" or something like that.  It's not all that complicated...just a couple of extra steps.  He based his method and formula on Chad Robertson's method of using a natural levain but working hard to not develop any sour flavor. Indeed, the flours in this formula pretty much match Robertson's Tartine Basic Country Bread to a "T."  The levain is fed twice over the course of a couple of hours, then when the final dough is mixed, it's spiked with a small amount of commercial yeast.  This allows for a better rise, better oven spring, and a loaf that has different flavors due to the combination of natural fermentation from the levain and the additional flavors that you only get from commercial yeast fermentation.  The loaves looked pretty good out of the oven.

Bird's Eye Blistering on Twice-Fed Sweet Levain Bread

Loaves that incorporate a retarded fermentation (in a controlled proofing environment with reduced temperature) will usually exhibit "bird's eye," a blistering of the crust that can also be achieved by misting the breads with water as they are put into the oven.  Supposedly, these are bad form.  I guess you won't win any awards in France baking bread with these bubbles in the crust, but I find them attractive, probably because I know that it means that the bread has been given plenty of time to develop a lot of great flavors.  Here's a photo taken in the sun that really shows off the bird's eyes.

 I'll try to remember to photograph the crumb on this loaf when I'm able to cut into it.  Too soon, and I have to run some errands.

Bagels and Country Loaves

Country Loaf with a nice little gringe.

Sending a friend back home with bread.  Despite the extra effort that goes into it, making bagels once in a while is a lot of fun.  Working with slack doughs all the time, it's nice to remind myself how nice they are compared to hand-mixing and kneading a 7-pound batch of 60% hydration bagel dough. Very wet doughs are a lot less work once you get used to handling and shaping them.  This morning's country loaves were a pleasure, and the simple scoring opened with a nice, pronounced gringe. Well, pronounced for a boule like this.
I never tire of the anticipation of the oven spring.  Watching a relatively lifeless lump of dough double in size as the yeast go on one last feeding frenzy in the rising heat of the oven is great!  If you get the score right and managed to shape the loaf well, the results are photo-worthy.

Country Loaf Boule

A loaf of bread like this at dinner, slice or torn, warmed in the oven if it didn't just come out a half hour ago, dipped in a little olive oil, maybe with some cracked pepper, garlic, or balsamic vinegar...it's pretty hard to beat.

Better than the entree?

Bagels are also a pleasure to make, but in a different way.  Kind of like pretzels.  If you were a kid (or thought like a kid, anyway) you'd like making bagels a lot more than making bread.

Seeded Bagels

I make bagels with the formula and method that can be found in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Aprentice, a formula and method that can easily be found online. These bagels remind me of the bagels I ate when I was kid.  On Sunday's after church, we'd stop by Bagel Land in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh and buy a dozen or so bagels.  When I was a kid, there were competing bagel bakeries in Pittsburgh.  Bagel Land, Bagel Nosh, all gone now.  Too bad.  At Bagel Land, you could see the bagels being made.  A big conveyor dropped the raw bagels into a trough of boiling water where the bagels floated along like life preservers to another conveyor that I assume led to an oven.  It was pretty neat.
Nothing really beats a big pile of bagels.

Bagels.

And for deliciousness, it's really tough to beat a toasted sesame seed bagel.  What a treat.  We have a couple of chickens, and scrambling up a couple fresh eggs with a toasted buttery bagel...there's no better way to start a day.

Breakfast.

One more parting shot of the pile of bagels to get you hungry on a Friday morning.  Enjoy!

Sesame seed bagels.

Country White Bread and Pizza

Tried a new formula and fermentation schedule over the past couple of days, this time dispensing with the usual cold temperature-retarded ferment that I apply to the formed loaves as they proof.  This loaf I left out to proof overnight, doing the shaping, bench rest, and final shaping at 4am today.  It was a really high hydration dough and didn't want to behave.

Country White Loaf

 This loaf is made with five varieties of flour, including two whole-grain flours that I mill myself.  It's not big on whole wheat...whole wheat constitutes only about 10% of the flour.  There's about 5% whole rye, and the rest is unbleached white flour.  It wasn't supposed to be sour, but the kitchen never cooled down like I expected it to, so it proofed much faster than I thought and developed a bit more sour than I'd planned.  It seemed sort of overproofed, but maybe that was just me getting used to the unexpected high hydration.   I didn't think a lot about this formula, really.  It had the sort of pretty crumb you'd expect of a wet dough like this:

Light, but slightly overproofed crumb of the Country White Loaf.

In any event, the flavor was nice, a little too sour for me to add it to the rotation without modification, and I'd surely want to give it a little less water next time, just so I'm not trying to manage a cibatta-wet dough in bannetons.  Ha!

This will go in the freezer and provide a week's worth of amazing toast.  We also made some pizza tonight, as a sort of dough-preservation experiment.  The dough from a couple of days ago, once divided, was cooked, frozen, and refrigerated.  Tonight we took a ball of the refrigerated dough, a ball of the frozen dough (which had been put in the fridge yesterday) and made margherita pizzas with it to see how it would compare to the pizzas we made the day the dough was done with it's initial retarding.  The results were great.  There's something comforting about a 100% natural levain dough when it comes time to pack it up for later baking.  Not only is everything going to happen at a slower rate than it would with commercial yeast, but I'm convinced (without any scientific evidence to back my empirical observations and assumptions) that natural levains are just more resilient.  Very forgiving stuff.

Pizza.  Three day old dough.  Nice.

I really got a kick out if baking pizzas with dough that had been saved for days.  I assume that it can be saved for months in the freezer.  Both the refrigerated dough and the frozen dough were just fine.  I think the frozen dough fared a little better...it hadn't soured at all, since it was frozen.  It may have lacked the "poofing" of the refrigerated dough, bit it was also not as tough and chewy; qualities that you may or may not want too much of in your pizza.  As an aside, the need for high-gluten flour in making good pizza is a myth.  It's amazing to me how much baking "fact" ends up being wive's tales once someone comes along and calls your bluff.  Exceptional pizza can be made with all-purpose flour.

Deliciousness!

More later!

Rye Pain au Bacon and Roasted Garlic Whole Wheat

This morning's loaves:

Toasted Parmesan

Whole Wheat with Roasted Garlic

Pain au Bacon with Rye and Whole Wheat with Toasted Parmesan

Pizza and two Breads

Pizza is bread.

I've not felt the need to attempt a pizza dough, but while reading Ken Forkish's book the other day, I figured I'd give it a go.  He has formulas and methods for straight, poolish, and natural levain pizza doughs.  Any time I can bake without commercial yeast, I like to do so, so I tried the natural levain method. It was tremendous!   

Margherita Pizza

I never expected such grand results from my first attempt at a pizza.  This is a margherita pizza, and though I didn't have the proper San Marzano tomatoes, they are on the way, and should be here tomorrow.  The store-brand plum tomatoes were a fine substitute for tonight though, and we were very pleased.

The dough is "overproofed" at room temperature for a long time, then spends 6 hours to a few days retarding in the refrigerator. The result is a chewy, crisp, crusty, flavorful pizza with simple toppings and a crumb that is surprisingly chewy and resilient for a dough made with moderate levels of protein and gluten.  Really excited to try this again.  I can't sell this, but stop by with a six-pack of something good and there's a good chance there'll be pizza in the oven.  Ha!  Just give me two days notice.

Here's a couple more photos. Sorry that they're photos taken with my cell phone, but I didn't have time to fiddle with the DSLR.  I needed to get the second pizza in the oven:

Pizza, fresh from the oven. A bit too much cheese.

 Forkish is detailed in his instructions for baking.  You get your stone in the oven, get it as hot as possible, then alternate between high broil and highest bake heat to emulate the radiant conductive heat of a commercial pizza oven.  You can't hit it for real, but you can make a respectable pie at home.

It only takes about 7 minutes, but that's an eternity compared to the 90 seconds to three minutes or so that it takes for a commercial pizza oven to bake a pie.  Lots of people are infatuated with wood fired ovens.  I don't know that there's anything magic about a wood fired oven in the context of bread beaking.  Pizza, yes, as the fire is still burning while the pizza bakes.  But the fire is gone and the ashes swept away by the time you bake bread in a wood fired oven.

I should have gone to the trouble to get the good camera out for this photo.  Alas.  You get the idea.

I have four loaves of specialty bread proofing this evening.  Two are a new one; a rye and whole wheat pain au bacon with toasted parmesan.  This one is made with four flours, two of which I've milled myself from whole grains, including hard red winter wheat from Utah, and a dark northern rye from Bluebird Grain Farms in the Methow Valley of Washington, which I visited a month or so ago.  This bread is really nice when you bake it seam-side up and let it open along the seams from your final shaping.  I prefer Robertson's "Tartine" shaping for boules, and I think they open up nice in oven spring. The other two loaves are a roasted garlic whole wheat, which I've made before, but I'm excited to see how these turn out.

Another bad cell phone photos of bench-resting boules.

I raised the hydration a little and I tweaked the percent of fresh-milled hard red wheat to get it a little more in line with what I expect; lots of good flavor, delicate crumb, soft, but not spongy.  Making this loaf is a real pleasure.  The dough has a fantastic aroma of roasted garlic, olive oil, and wet flour, all on top of the slightly tangy underlying mild and sweet smell of the natural leaven.  It holds a lot of promise, without being terribly complicated.  Very nice.

A Bakery is Born

Welcome to the home of C&C Artisan Breads, a cottage food operation based in Redlands, California.

What's a cottage food operation?  There's a lot of information out there, but in an unusually forward-thinking moment, San Bernardino County government changed the rules last year and put in place a system that permits small home-based operations to produce foods for sale at farmers markets, CSA-style "share" systems, and even through indirect sales through restaurants and grocery stores.

Cottage Food Operation Permits and Applications

There's some simple rules, and the system is designed to protect the consumer by limiting cottage food operations to producing things that won't spoil and have a very low potential to make people sick.  They also limit the quantity of food you can produce for sale as this sort of business, but for the most part, you promise to produce good food in a clean environment, work a few things out with your city, and you're off!  The whole permitting process can actually be completed in a day.  Pretty amazing.

What's C&C?

It's Chris and Cambria.  When she's not teaching, Cam is a diligent dough stretcher.  Now that she's back in school, I've modified the dough schedule so I can do most of the work in the evening.  We're a team in the kitchen, mostly getting in each other's way.

Artisan Breads?

Bread.  The staff of life.  In books about it, bakers wax eloquent and poetic about bread and about its production.  It's a rewarding and meditative process.  I won't waste a lot of copy on it, but I really enjoy baking bread.  So much so that I found myself baking a lot more than we could eat ourselves.  That's when I discovered that sharing bread is even more fun than eating it yourself.  Few things are as universally appreciated as a fresh-baked loaf of bread.

Our Bread

The Country Loaf

We're starting this operation out with a simple model; produce one thing very well and in small quantities.  For the last few years, I've been working toward a particular loaf of what you might call "Rustic" bread.  The Country Loaf.  Basically, it's a high-hydration, naturally fermented ("sourdough," but not sour) boule.  It keeps well, has a crisp crust, and a creamy flavorful crumb.

Since there's only a couple of ingredients, they have to be top notch.  The Country Loaf is made with three varieties of wheat flour, including about 1/3 whole wheat that I mill myself within a couple of days of baking from hard red winter wheat berries grown in Utah.  It makes a difference.  The balance of white flour, artisan bread flour, and whole wheat in this loaf yields the perfect combination of flavor, healthful whole grains, and the light, airy crumb you'd expect of a big hearth bread like this.

The Bread Share

Country Loaf Boule

To help defray some of the costs of baking all this bread, to ensure we have a reliable place to go with all these loaves, and to test the waters of managing a simple "farm share" system, we're baking just four loaves a day, five days a week, selling subscriptions to 20 people for four loaves in a four week period.  While we're still hashing out the details, we're hoping that it's not too complicated.