Making Bread Like in the Old Days?

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Unco B

And I mean in the old days like a few thousands of years ago. Archaeological evidence has been found that people have been making some form of bread for almost 30,000 years! But I want to fast forward to Egyptian times (about 3000 years ago) as they seem to be credited with the first “mass” production of yeasted bread and generally establishing what we now know as Artisan Bread. If you look at the ancient pictograph above, what we do today to bake our bread really hasn’t changed much since those days… or has it?

The basic technique of mixing flour water and salt and adding a leavening agent really hasn’t changed much since those ancient times. But let’s make no bones about it: What we do today is MUCH easier than how they did it back then.

Think about it: The way we make Artisan Bread – whether at home or commercially – today is graced with a plethora of conveniences that our predecessors just didn’t have. Bread making has come a long way since then. Let’s look at a few things that we take for granted.

Our forefathers had to grind their flour. Though the Mesopotamians invented the grinding wheel and what we know today as milling, this was low production, highly manual intensive work to get flour. Even today, there are countries where community millers still exist. And if you think about it, the type of wheat or grain people baked with was highly regional. They basically baked with what grain crop was grown in the vicinity.

We, on the other hand, go online, and get our organic, hard red or white wheat, either stone ground or steel rolled or processed with a Unifine mill. We can get AP flour, bread flour, high-extraction flour, whole grain. We can get wheat, spelt, rye, millet, ancient grains like einkorn or durum. The variety that we have accesses to – literally at our fingertips – is mind-blowing!

Also, look at our baking apparati! At home we have our electric or gas ovens. For the more rustic-thinking, there’s the Ooni and other hearth-like ovens. Commercial bakers have deck ovens or huge stone or brick hearth ovens. For those using the traditional wood-burning ovens, sure, there’s a lot of labor that goes into maintaining a fire. But consider this: Our environments are controlled and somewhat predictable. Ancient bread makers didn’t have HVAC.

Furthermore, not everyone had a baking hearth. Most villages had a community oven. In his wonderful book, The Apprentice, chef Jacques Pepin described being a boy in a village in France where on a certain day, the whole village would bake at the community oven. Us? We preheat our oven at home and pop our bread in any damn time we choose!

Also, think about how information was passed on from baker to baker back then. It was all word of mouth. And it was truly a craft where master bakers took on apprentices, and the apprentices went on to being masters and pass that on. But today, we open up our browser and look at bread making blogs and join home baker forums. We learn in a matter weeks or months what would have taken years for an apprentice to learn.

For instance, I went from this:

To this:

…in just a matter of months. Sure, it was a lot of learn by doing, but I also had the luxury of the Internet to help diagnose issues. And mind you, that loaf above is one of my so-so loaves. I’ve been able to reach a level of consistent quality not just by doing it a lot (I do bake practically every day), but having information readily at my fingertips. And I’m not alone in this. What I’ve seen other home bakers create is absolutely amazing! And I’ll submit that it’s the quick, free-flow of information that has enabled people to get to relative mastery much sooner than in the old days.

And while there are people who have totally geeked out on creating and maintaining a sourdough culture, I’m not one of them. I generally use a poolish or a biga to get the slightly sour taste in my bread. But I can do this because of the easy availability of commercial yeast. That said, I actually do maintain three active cultures but I bake several different types of bread. My cultures are tools, not pets. 🙂

Back in the old days, people had to create and maintain their starters. But let’s take a deeper dive into that. They didn’t have refrigeration. They didn’t have convenient little tupperware or glass jars. They didn’t have high-precision gram scales to get the right proportions. They certainly didn’t have silicone spatulas to clean out their bowls! Get the picture? While there is still a definite amount of craft that goes into our baking today, our lives are SO much easier than the artisans of old!

But from the standpoint of tradition, very little has changed. If there was any good about this whole 2020 lockdown, the fact that so many turned to baking – myself included – has been a real bright spot. And based on my participation in bread making forums, there’s a widespread, renewed enthusiasm for making bread. It’s heart-warming to see so many keeping the tradition alive!

Working with High-Extraction Flour

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Unco B

As I was watching a YouTube episode from Proof Bread in Mesa, AZ, Jonathan mentioned that Proof uses Type 85 flour, which is a high-extraction flour where 85% of the wheat kernel is retained in the milling process. At the time, I was trying to make a transition to including more whole wheat into my bread for nutritional reasons and Jonathan mentioning his flour really intrigued me. So that put me on a quest to find Type 85 flour.

I did finally find a Type 85 flour through Azure Standard, but they were sold out. Then I ran across their Ultra-Unifine Unbleached Bread Flour and got really intrigued. This is what sold me:

“We’ve taken a strong, full-bodied hard red wheat flour and refined it slightly by removing about 10% of the bran,” said Azure Mill Manager. “In the milling industry it’s known as a particle reduction processing technique. We’re taking an already fine Unifine flour, sifting out some of the bran and giving you a finished product that has softer flavor notes, rises better and adds a little lightness to your artisan breads.”

I love this flour! But I have to admit that though it kneads and folds and feels like regular bread flour when you work with it, it acts a lot like whole wheat flour when it bakes; that is, it doesn’t have the oven spring that I’m used to with white bread flour. But that is to be expected because even though 10% of the sharp bran particles have been removed from the flour, there’s still a lot of the germ and bran left over. So given that, I’ve had to make adjustments.

First of all, just like with baking with 100% whole wheat flour, I’ve upped the hydration ratio when I’m working with this flour. I experimented with 73%, then went up to 75%, and today I prepared a 78% straight dough.

The 73% hydration dough produces an okay oven spring, but has a fairly dense crumb as one would expect from a whole wheat flour. It’s not bad, and by no means does it taste bad, but it is a little dense.

The 75% hydration dough has much better oven spring with a much more open crumb than the 73%. And it amazed me how just a 2% increase in water content could have such an effect on the oven spring.

Finally, the 78% hydration dough… Well, I think I found the sweet spot. As I mentioned, I just did a straight dough today. I made two baguettes and a small batard, and they all turned out fantastic!

You’l notice that the crumb on the batard is a little wonky – not sure what that was about, and though the baguette crumb seems to be dense, it’s actually not. As opposed to big holes, there a lot of small holes. The bread is amazingly light in texture.

I didn’t change a thing with respect to how I prepared the dough. I just added a bit more water. It really made a big difference. And while I think this might be the sweet spot for hydration, I think I’m going to try a dough at 82% hydration to see how that works.

So now that I’ve got the basic sweet spot, I’ll start working with a poolish and then I’ll cold proof overnight. I’ve found with high-hydration flour, a cold-proof works best and the dough will hold its shape better when I score and put it in the oven, promoting a more vertical rise as opposed to spreading out. I’m also going to see what adding a bit of diastatic malt powder will do to open it up even more.

Stuff like this just gets me SO jazzed about baking bread! There’s a definite precision that you must observe, but at the same time, variations in the environment force you to make adjustments on the fly. It’s a lot like golf where even though you develop the basic swing, conditions like wind direction and humidity force you to make adjustments. And it’s that constant challenge of making adjustments that keep you coming back for more!

Experimenting With Proofing Temperature

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Unco B

The picture above shows two loaves I created from the same base dough (77% hydration). I proofed the loaf on the right at room temp (~80-degrees), and the one on the left I proofed for 30 minutes at room temperature then popped it in my dough retarder for an hour to not just slow down the proof but to chill the dough.

Based on the final results, chilling a slack, high-hydration dough maintains the shape much better whereas not chilling that same dough will spread out. Both loaves are roughly the same height, though the left-hand loaf is just a tad taller. But the big difference is that the chilled loaf has much more consistent vertical spring throughout the entire loaf, and did not expand length-wise. It did expand a bit width-wise, but that’s okay. I expected that to happen with my scoring. As you can see, the bread really opened up where I slashed it.

To be open and honest, I didn’t come up with this idea. I happened to be reading a blog post last night where the author suggested chilling a nearly-proofed loaf for about an hour in the fridge. The thinking was that it would chill the outside skin of the loaf and be much easier to score. I had to try it today and the results speak for themselves.

While there’s plenty of oven spring – and I’m actually expecting a nice, open crumb with both loaves – there’s not as much spring as I would get with regular white bread flour. The base dough was made with that high-extraction bread flour that contains more of the wheat kernel than regular bread flour. And even though it has a high protein content at 14.7%, the fact that there is more bran and germ in the flour affects the overall structure. Given that, I’m probably going to have to fortify the flour with some vital wheat gluten. But that said, I will be chilling all my high-hydration doughs from here on out or even doing overnight proofing.

Working out things like this is what has made my bread making journey so rewarding. I have fewer and fewer outright fails now than when I did in the beginning. But now, even my less than ideal loaves are much smaller “fails.”

As Mel Gibson said in the movie The Patriot, “Aim small, miss small.” For me, improving my technique has been about making little changes. With this particular experiment it was about tweaking one little thing – temperature. And that one small thing produced tremendous results!

“Fake” Sourdough…

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Unco B

See that loaf above? Beautiful right? It has a nice, sour taste to it that’s perfectly balanced with the rest of the flavor profile. To most people who’d eat it, they’d think that it’s a loaf of sourdough bread. But it’s not. It was started with a poolish I made the previous day. So technically, based on the accepted convention, my bread really isn’t sourdough… or is it?

Traditional sourdough is made from a culture where wild yeasts and bacteria work together to leaven a dough. The result is that the bacteria produce both lactic and acetic acid which provide the sour taste. Bakers yeast, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as tolerant to acidic environments. But it can leaven a dough all by its lonesome.

So given that my poolish bread was started with bakers yeast, how does that account for the sour taste of my bread? The only thing I can think of is that since I do a long ferment of my poolish – like 18 to 24 hours – the wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria have time to develop and make a contribution to the fermentation process. And given that I literally start my poolish with less than 1/2 gram of yeast (literally 0.4 gram), there’s plenty of room for the wild yeasts to do their thing, which in turn help to feed the bacteria.

And this is where it gets a little interesting. The bakers yeast kicks off the process, but the environment may become too acidic for it. I’m kind of wondering if it actually gets killed off when the dough becomes acidic. The reason I say this is because a notable trait of a traditional sourdough is that fermentation takes a long time. My poolish bread takes several hours to go through bulk fermentation. The dough for the loaf above took almost six hours to get through bulk fermentation! That’s right in line with using a sourdough starter.

So this gets back to the question: Is sourdough a taste, or is it a technique? Or maybe I’m just full of crap. After all, I did recently write that I just want to make great bread. I love the fact that my poolish bread imparts a distinct sour flavor to add to the overall flavor profile of the finished loaf. And I’ve done it enough now where I can reproduce it every time. But in the end, what makes it a great loaf is the process. So yeah… technique…

Poolish In the Morning, Fresh Bread in the Afternoon

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Unco B

I know, I know… There’s all this craze about good artisan bread taking at least two days. I do it because the results are amazing. No doubt that using a 12-24 hour pre-ferment or a levain provides extra flavor complexity. But sometimes, I just want to make bread and have it ready the same day. But that doesn’t mean I have to completely sacrifice all flavor complexity.

From what I’ve been able to gather recently, one of the trends that seems to be occurring in artisan bread baking is that bakers seem to be leaning less on the leavening agent to provide flavor complexity and more on other factors such as flour. Myself, I now almost always have at least 25% whole wheat flour in my dough. I also started using high-extraction bread flour, where more of the wheat kernel is extracted than regular bread flour (think Type 85 flour). Just that change in flour has provided incredible flavor complexity to the 1-day loaves I bake.

This recipe is a riff on a poolish-based bread. It actually uses a poolish, but instead of fermenting from 12-24 hours with half a gram of yeast, I ferment it for 4 hours with 2 grams of yeast. We don’t get all the benefits of the microbes kicking and creating sourness (though there is some), but we do get the benefits of using a poolish which provides much better dough extensibility.

Also, it’s optional, but I add 1.5% diastatic malt powder to help the yeast along and promote great oven spring and crust color, especially if I use a 50-50 whole wheat to bread flour ratio. It really helps guarantee that the Maillard reaction occurs and we get the flavor benefits from a darkened crust.

With this recipe, if you start at around 8 AM in the morning, you should have bread by 4 PM. Here’s the basic recipe:

Create the Poolish

250 grams fine-ground whole wheat flour
250 grams bread flour
7.5 grams diastatic malt powder (optional)
500 grams 100-degree water
2 grams instant yeast (about 1/2 teaspoon)

Mix dry ingredients with a whisk until well-incorporated, then add the water, making sure no there are no dry spots. Mix until there are no large lumps. The dough will be a little shaggy and super wet – it’s 100% hydration so that’s okay. Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl you get everything. Finish mixing until smooth.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set aside in a warm place for 4 hours. I place my container in the oven with an open oven door to provide a warm environment for the yeast to do its thing.

Final Dough

500 grams bread flour
7.5 grams diastatic malt powder (optional)
16 grams salt
4 grams instant yeast (1 level teaspoon)
21 grams honey (optional) – that’s about a tablespoon

250 grams 100-degree water

Tip: If your kitchen is anywhere near 80-degrees like mine gets in the summer – I have horrible HVAC ducting in my home – drop the hydration down to 73% or even less (FYI, at 73%, you’ll add 238 grams of water). In really warm environments, it will be difficult for a dough to hold its shape. And even 73% is pushing it. The boule I made above was done at 73%, but it it was originally shaped as a batard, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the batard to stop laying flat, so I re-shaped the loaf into a boule where I could control the surface tension better. Another option might have been to roll out a couple of baguettes.

Mix the Poolish and Final Dough

Measure out the 250 grams of water, then if you want to use the honey, add it to the water to dissolve it. Add the water to the poolish, then mix to create a slurry.

Add all the rest of the dry ingredients to a large bowl. Mix thoroughly and set aside. If you used small container for the poolish, you should transfer it to a larger bowl. This will be your mixing bowl.

Add dry ingredients to the poolish in batches until well-incorporated and you form a shaggy dough. At this point, if you’re using a stand mixer, mix on low to medium speed until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, then transfer to the container you’ll use for the bulk ferment (I don’t like to use the stand mixer bowl because of the raised bump at the bottom. If you’re mixing by hand, once everything’s incorporated, since it’s a fairly wet dough, give it several stretch folds in the bowl until you feel the gluten strands developing.

Bulk Ferment

Note that the bulk ferment comes in two phases. The first phase, which is the first hour and half to two hours involves doing gentle stretch and folds. The second phase is letting the dough rest for a couple of hours.

Let the dough rest for 10 minutes then do a stretch and fold. Stretch and fold every 30 minutes two more times. After the third stretch and fold, give the dough the windowpane test to make sure you can stretch it thin without the dough tearing. If it tears, let the dough rest for another 30 minutes, then do a stretch and fold one last time. By this time, the dough should pass the test. If not (which is probably due to temperature), lather rinse and repeat the stretch and fold.

TIP: Be extremely gentle with your stretch and folds, especially an hour into the ferment. You want to avoid tearing the dough and you also want to retain as much of the gases as possible.

Let the dough rest and finish bulk fermenting in a warm place for a couple of hours, but check it after an hour. It probably won’t be done fermenting after an hour, but it’s a good thing to check its progress. By the end of two hours, you should see at least a 50% rise. At that point, you can let it go a little longer if you want or you can start shaping.

Divide and Pre-shape

The great thing about this particular dough is that you can pretty much do what you want from here. It produces about 2 kilos of dough. And since it’s a fairly high-hydration dough, you can make boules or batards or even simple baguettes if you want.

For boules and batards, you can split the dough into two or four equal pieces. For baguettes, there’s enough for eight sandwich size baguettes or 5 or 6 larger baguettes that’ll fit in a standard oven. No matter how you divide the dough, pre-shape your loaves into tight balls, lightly flour the tops, then bench rest them for 15-20 minutes.

Shape and Proof

Tip: Since this recipe produces two ~2-lb loaves, I make one that day, then pop the other shaped loaf into my fridge to proof for 24-hours. That way the family can have a loaf of fresh bread each day. Or… you can even freeze the dough after shaping. When you’re ready to bake, let it come to close to room temp and let it finish proofing. You won’t be killing the yeast by freezing it; you’ll only force it into hibernation.

Shape the loaves then proof for 45 minutes to an hour or until your dough passes the finger dent test. In warmer weather, I usually check proofing at 30 minutes. It’s usually not done by then, but there have been times where it has finished proofing in that small amount of time.

While the loaves are proofing, set your oven to 475-degrees. If you’re using a Dutch oven, pop it in the oven to pre-heat.

Bake at 475-degrees.

For boules and batards: 35 minutes

For baguettes and small, round loaves: 25 minutes

Azure Market Organics Unbleached Bread Flour, Ultra-Unifine

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Unco B

I am SO giddy about this flour! In my previous post, I sang the praises for the Azure Market Organics 100% Whole White Wheat Flour and now, I’m even MORE giddy about this bread flour. It not only goes through the Unifine process, Azure also performs an extra sifting stage to remove about 10% of the sharp bran particles.

So what we’re dealing with here is a high-extraction flour that has so much more nutrition than regular bread flour. And get this: It has 14.7% protein content! That’s 2% more than King Arthur at 12.7%! It’s amazing!

The first thing I noticed when I opened my bag was that the flour color is pretty dull, and Azure states it will get even more dull over time. But it’s silky-smooth in texture and it is an absolute DREAM to work with!

This morning, I made two 50-50 white whole wheat/bread flour batards. I used the whole wheat flour for a poolish and the bread flour for the final dough. The overnight ferment really helped smooth out the wheat flour (though to be honest, that flour’s already smooth). The results were spectacular. The poolish was nicely puffy with a distinct tang in the morning.

As for the final bread, as expected, it didn’t spring up as much as other loaves because of the high wheat flour content. But with the bit of extra protein in the bread flour, the crumb was not nearly as tight as with other white flours I’ve used.

Look, I Just Want to Make Great Bread

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Unco B

The Covid lockdown has had an interesting effect across the world: Lots of people started baking bread. I’m one of them and I’ll be the first to admit that I jumped on the bandwagon! And all throughout this time, there seems to be this one term that gets thrown around by beginners and experts alike when it comes to baking artisan bread: sourdough.

It seems, to me at least, that the term sourdough has also seemed to become synonymous with making artisan bread. There’s so much buzz about sourdough that when you go on online forums, all anyone talks about with respect to baking bread is baking sourdough bread, as if it’s the ONLY valid way to make bread. Of course, that’s not true. There are different ways to ferment flour and water.

I’ve felt so inundated by the term sourdough, that I’ve developed a bit of a mental aversion to the term. And to be honest, I feel just a little guilty about having this aversion to it which is why I’ve been writing articles in an attempt to articulate why I feel this aversion. But after a lot of careful thought, I think I can finally explain why I feel this way.

It boils down to this: Once you add a leavening agent to flour and water, the process is pretty much the same. Of course, you have to react to variants in hydration and environment, but irrespective of your leavening agent, you react to those variants in the same way. Hot room? Shorter bulk and proof times. Higher hydration? Stretch and fold; and you pre-shape with a scraper, forming a ball with the rotate and pull method. Whether you started with instant yeast or a poolish or a biga or a sourdough starter, after that, you handle the inoculated dough the same damn way!

Sure, there is an art to creating and maintaining a sourdough starter. For instance, I’m totally blown away by Nancy Silverton’s (of La Brea Bakery fame) Grape Method (look it up, it’s cool). But to me, the real art is in the actual manipulation of the fermented dough to produce loaves of bread. It may start with the starter, but it becomes bread through working the dough. And also, though I’m still pretty much a beginner at this, I’ve developed this sense that the actual craft of artisan bread is not just creating a single loaf of bread, it’s in creating different types of bread in a consistent fashion.

For instance, here are a few pics from recent 2-pound batards I made:

I just pulled the loaf on the far left out of the oven a few minutes ago. The thing about these loaves is that they all look, feel, and taste pretty much the same. Of course, that’s due in large part to my proofing baskets. But still, they’re all pretty similar. To tell you the truth, I’ve only just reached this point in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been working hard on consistency in my process; working on the craft.

And herein lies my slight aversion to the word sourdough. The starter is only a single piece of the puzzle. You have to construct the dough and build and shape its gluten structure for it to become a great loaf of bread. And for me, as I entitled this post, I just want to make great bread, no matter what leavening agent I use!

Unifine Is Oh So Fine!

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Unco B

Yesterday I got my latest shipment of wheat: A high-extraction bread flour and 100% whole white wheat flour. Both were produced by Azure (azurestandard.com) and milled with their Unifine mill.

I first ran across the Unifine milling process while researching sources for Type 85 flour, which is a “tweener” flour; not quite white, not quite wheat. With Type 85 flour, 85% of the wheat grain is extracted in the milling process, providing for a flour that works like bread flour (usu. around 62-65% extraction), but has much more intrinsic fiber and nutrient retention.

I stumbled upon the Unifine Mill website, thinking that it was an actual miller. Intrigued, I read through all their information, and then changed my search for millers that used the Unifine mill. And that’s how I found Azure.

I haven’t yet opened the bread flour, but I opened up the white whole wheat flour and baked with it today. The thing that struck me immediately was the texture of the flour. It is so fine that it feels like bread flour! It’s absolutely silky smooth, and it’s light in color. But you know it’s whole grain flour once it gets wet – it turns much darker. But I can’t believe how nice the texture is and that’s due to the Unifine milling process. It produces really fine whole grain flour, but still retains all the nutrients and fiber!

I just baked a 50-50 loaf, making an overnight poolish from the white whole wheat flour. It turned out amazing!

With that amount of whole grain flour, I was expecting a bit of a grainier texture in the crumb. It’s smooth! Absolutely smooth! #mindblown For the savvy out there, yeah, I didn’t get a big oven spring out of it because I baked the loaf way early so I could feed my wife. It was only three hours into a 12-hour cold proof. On the positive side of things though, the texture was unlike any loaf I’ve done with partial or even 100% whole wheat. No graininess, no grittiness. As smooth as if I baked it entirely with bread flour!

Needless to say, I’m completely sold on this flour. If you can find flour produced by the Unifine process, try it out. You will NOT be disappointed!

Adding Nuts, Garlic, Herbs, etc.

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Unco B

Since we live so close to Gilroy, CA, the famed “Garlic Capital of the World,” garlic in our area is – shall I say – plentiful, to say the least. As such, garlic has become an absolute staple in my kitchen. I kind of freak out if I run out! 🙂 Needless to say, I love garlic and one of family’s favorite breads for me to make is a Garlic-Rosemary bread, topped with cheddar.

I used to mix the add-ins right along with the flour, water, salt, and yeast. And using a stand mixer, things would distribute evenly. But if any time I used raisins or cranberry, the dough hook would obliterate them! So before I made those loaves above, I decided to educate myself on adding things to my dough, and luckily, Proof Bakery had just posted this video on adding “inclusions” to dough.

Mind you, like all Proof Bakery videos, they tend to talk – a lot. But other than Bake with Jack, I look to this couple, especially Jonathan, to provide valuable insights into the bread making process. Here’s the video:

Having done this yesterday, allowing the dough to first build up some strength is the key. For my bread, I didn’t add my garlic and rosemary until I was ready to do my third stretch and fold (I did four in total, spread out by 1/2 hour). By that time, the dough had already developed plenty of strength to handle folding in the garlic and rosemary.

Sharing My Mistakes…

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Unco B

One of my favorite YouTube channels to watch is Bake with Jack. Jack is based in the UK and has a no-nonsense approach to making bread and I’ve learned so much from watching his videos and internalizing the philosophies he shares. During the lock-down, Jack kind of disappeared. But recently, he came back and said that while he was still going to provide instructional videos, he needed to take some time to develop other things in his life. Good for him!

But in the same video, he shared the triumphs of several of his students and subscribers, but he also interjected that it’s also good to share are mistakes and failures. His viewpoint is that social media is flooded with everyone’s perfect loaves; not the previous loaves that led up to those triumphs.

So I’m going to share some of the epic fails and loaves I created when I first started out. I went through them this afternoon and was chuckling at just how bad they were. That said, not one of them tasted bad, they just didn’t rise very much or were a little misshapen. Looking at them, they’re a good reminder of where I started.