Bread, wheat, and the new year
I apologize for not having posted for a while, and I will be on hiatus until after April/May. Here's to 2nd semester Junior year and to a successful high-stakes (or high-steaks?...nevermind) testing result.
Anyway, here's a pic of the bread I baked during the break. I was initially baking some neopolitian-style pizza based on a recipe from Maggie Glazer's Artisan Baking Across America (a beautiful book that I got at Half Price Books for more than half off, heh), but since I was the only one eating the pizza, I decided to make the excess dough into smallish boules.
I used a poolish pre-ferment based on regular all-purpose flour with an additional 20% whole wheat flour by weight. I don't remember what the ratio of pre-ferment to the finished dough but I do remember the dough having about 60% hydration.
The pizza dough in the book was interesting because it didn't follow the standard (ok, standard for me) 6-12 hour 1st rise, then 1-1.5 hour proofing pattern, but rather it had a very short 1st rise, probably something on the order of 1 hour and then a very long proofing in the refrigerator, close to 12 hours.
It was extremely dry when I was baking this (cf. the crazy wildfires in North Texas) so by the end of the proofing, there was a thin skin of dried out dough, which might have impeded the full rising.
For the pizza, I took the dough out of the fridge and streched it out into a thin round-ish sheet (frankly, I didn't succeed here; they ended up being weird oblong-shaped pieces of dough) and I topped it with olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, salt and pepper. I popped them onto my baking stone set on the top shelf of the oven with the broiler set on high. They were done within 10 minutes and they were quite tasty when warm.
The bread involved some shaping, which turned out ok, except for the problem of the dried skin that made it hard for the boule to close up tight on the bottom. My manhandling and extreme shaping probably popped a lot of bubbles, and I didn't really let the shaped dough proof for long enough.
Anyway, lessons learned: use a better rising container to keep the moisture in, up the hydration when the ambient relative humidity is almost 0, and kneed vigorously but handle gently.
Anyway, here's a pic of the bread I baked during the break. I was initially baking some neopolitian-style pizza based on a recipe from Maggie Glazer's Artisan Baking Across America (a beautiful book that I got at Half Price Books for more than half off, heh), but since I was the only one eating the pizza, I decided to make the excess dough into smallish boules.
I used a poolish pre-ferment based on regular all-purpose flour with an additional 20% whole wheat flour by weight. I don't remember what the ratio of pre-ferment to the finished dough but I do remember the dough having about 60% hydration.
The pizza dough in the book was interesting because it didn't follow the standard (ok, standard for me) 6-12 hour 1st rise, then 1-1.5 hour proofing pattern, but rather it had a very short 1st rise, probably something on the order of 1 hour and then a very long proofing in the refrigerator, close to 12 hours.
It was extremely dry when I was baking this (cf. the crazy wildfires in North Texas) so by the end of the proofing, there was a thin skin of dried out dough, which might have impeded the full rising.
For the pizza, I took the dough out of the fridge and streched it out into a thin round-ish sheet (frankly, I didn't succeed here; they ended up being weird oblong-shaped pieces of dough) and I topped it with olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, salt and pepper. I popped them onto my baking stone set on the top shelf of the oven with the broiler set on high. They were done within 10 minutes and they were quite tasty when warm.
The bread involved some shaping, which turned out ok, except for the problem of the dried skin that made it hard for the boule to close up tight on the bottom. My manhandling and extreme shaping probably popped a lot of bubbles, and I didn't really let the shaped dough proof for long enough.
Anyway, lessons learned: use a better rising container to keep the moisture in, up the hydration when the ambient relative humidity is almost 0, and kneed vigorously but handle gently.
posted by a lau @ 21:00
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