In preparation for today’s bread baking, I doubled my sourdough starter last night before heading up to bed. The picture at the right illustrates what I found this morning before coffee! It was covered with plastic wrap and didn’t make a mess, but it was close!
Once again, this morning I’ve tested the concept that even a hastily prepared loaf of bread is better than none at all.
When I got home from work on Wednesday, after having just provided chili and bread for a workplace birthday party, I decided it would be good to start another batch of dough. Now, as any baker knows, once the process has begun, you pretty much need to stay on a schedule or the bread won’t be as good as it could be.
However, the forces of life tend to creep in and the schedule goes awry. Last night I had every intention of baking the bread, the oven already set to 550. Then one thing led to the next, got too tired, and headed up to bed. Around 4 AM this morning, I came down to an oven, still at 550 from last night (oops!), and the dough well proofed in my large ceramic bowl.
It was time to either put this bread in the oven or forget the whole thing. There wasn’t enough time to scale and shape. So, I basically just divided the dough into reasonable sizes, did the best I could to shape them without degassing, and slid them into the oven in two batches.
And once again, the baguettes wouldn’t win any prizes for looks, but they taste just wonderful. A very nice crumb and crust.
Sometimes it pays to just put the dough in the oven and see what happens.
I’ve discovered that the original no-knead recipe featured on this blog some time ago is also great for pizza dough.
The pie pictured here started as a lump of no-knead dough that I spread out into a crust shape after 10 or 11 hours of fermentation. I did all the spreading right on the pizza peel pictured above. I used liberal amounts of flour – stretching the dough into a disc shape, sprinkling flour across the top, flipping it over, repeating this process until the crust was roughly the same size as my work surface.
The reapplications of flour were necessary because as the dough is spread out, the non-floured inner dough is brought to the surface and tends to stick to the peel.
I wasn’t sure how this was going to work out as it was my first time making pizza this way. My traditional method has been to use a dough with a much lower hydration that is spread out on a cold greased pan – that also works well, but it’s a totally different method. When I had the crust fully formed, I jostled the peel a little bit to make sure the dough was sliding freely. It was. So I proceeded to layer on the toppings.
Unfortunately, I didn’t count on the fact that the added weight (and possibly moisture) of the toppings would increase the coefficient of friction between peel and dough. When it came time to slide it onto the baking stone in the oven, it wouldn’t budge.
In a somewhat clumsy rescue effort, Jenn helped me slide some parchment paper under the dough. That process tended to dishevel the dough and the toppings a bit, but ultimately, we made it work. And the result was fantastic!
We tried this again last night, this time putting the parchment paper over the peel first – thank the gods for parchment paper! It worked like a charm, and the crust was first-rate.
So that’s one more use for the versatile no-knead dough recipe. Enjoy!
People have been making bread since
the stone age. Of course, with better equipment and knowledge, it gets better all the time. Up to a point. Most of today’s store-bought breads, made in factories across the country, sliced and ready to eat, are barely recognized as food to the artisan bakers, let alone a good source of nutrition.
With our busy schedules, an easy solution is to stop at the grocery store and pick up a loaf when you didn’t plan ahead. A loaf of decent bread costs anywhere between $2 to $5. Further, it gets stale quickly and has little flavor.
Last week I made some dough and didn’t follow through according to best practices. I didn’t have the right size bowl available, and it was too large to fit in the refrigerator, especially along with all the other stuff already in it. So, I left it on the countertop covered with plastic wrap which is acceptable for reasonably short periods of time. I can only say I got lazy and didn’t plan ahead.
When I returned from work, I found the dough busting out over the top of the bowl and generally making a mess. I punched it down and split it into two batches. With the first batch, I made some pita bread and a couple of small baguettes. They didn’t come out too badly, but certainly nothing worthy of a magazine shoot.
Yesterday afternoon, we decided on spaghetti for dinner and I thought I’d try to use the remaining dough, now a week in the frig, to make some bread for dinner. I mixed it with a fresh batch and after a couple of hours, it was somewhat usable. The picture here is of the remaining loaf. We ate most of the first one and had the rest of it toasted this morning. It was better than any bread you can buy in the store. But was it ever ugly!
So, here is my point. People have been making bread for 12,000 years. Without thermometers. Without kitchens. Without electric or gas ovens. Without precise measuring devices or fresh water on tap, without salt, without store-bought yeast. On rocks. Sure. The first breads were not much more than a paste poured out onto a rock and left in the hot sun. But for hundreds of years, people have been making great bread without any of the conveniences we have today. And they were great, nutritious breads.
Today we have cookbooks with color pictures and step-by-step instructions. We have YouTube videos that show the entire process. And you only need four ingredients, flour, water, salt, and yeast. Four (4). No more. No less.
That is about thirty cents worth of stuff. Maybe less.
And yet, there is this fear of failure. What if I don’t mix it right? What if it doesn’t rise? What if? What if?
With today’s quality ingredients available nearly everywhere, you really can’t get this wrong. It might not be perfect. It might be pretty ugly. You might not think it looks anything like what you’ve seen before. But, it will be better than anything you can buy in the store!
Make a batch of dough today. Make a loaf of bread tomorrow.
You’ll love it. And you’ll be loved for it.
If I were going to teach someone to bake bread by giving them some “how not to” lessons, today would have been a good day to begin.
I made the dough yesterday by using what I learned from reading three different recipes, and then used none of them. I substituted egg-replacer for eggs, and almond milk for cow’s milk. Then I miscalculated the measurements of the sugar and salt by an order of magnitude and compensated for the inadequate amount by guessing.
Next, while preparing the evening pizza, I forgot that I left the dough sitting on the kitchen counter top covered with an “unbreakable” Corelle porcelain plate.
I woke around 3 AM wondering what I had done with the dough. If I left it on the counter top, it probably leavened to the point where it would lift the plate right off the bowl.
Sure enough, I turned on the kitchen light to see tiny shards of broken porcelain all over the floor, and the dough looked like The Blob That Ate Kansas City. I was more upset about the dough than the plate.
Anyway, I cleaned up the mess and punched down the dough so it would re-hydrate, turned on the oven and eventually shaped the dough into small loaves placed on an oiled 13 inch pizza pan. After an hour or so of final rise, I put them into a 425 convection oven for 20 minutes and this was the result.
They’re cooling now. Mary and I sampled one and declared it was quite suitable! Next, Kummelweck rolls!
Baking is so much different than cooking. With cooking, you can pretty much throw anything into a pot, let it simmer, taste it now and again, maybe with a glass of wine or two, and adjust the seasoning as you go along. With baking, you really need to focus on technique, and precise measurements.
Yesterday I made the dough for baking some bagels this morning. Reinhart suggests the following steps:
Sounds pretty simple. However, I did it differently. Given that I needed to get out of bed at 3:30 to get them baked in time for work, I elected to leave the dough at a cool room temperature (about 65 degrees) for the night. So, basically, I’ve let the dough proof quite a bit before shaping them into bagels early this morning.
First off, the bagels are cinnamon raisin with walnuts. My sister likes walnuts in her bagels. (She isn’t anywhere around here, so what difference that makes, I’m not sure…) As a result of the overnight proof, the dough was quite soft. My attempt to roll the dough into a “snake” was an issue because the walnuts and raisins created holes and cavities in the dough. As a result, I basically squeezed them into shape. The wrap-around-the-hand-and-roll-together step wouldn’t work. So, again, the ends sort of got squeezed together.
During the boiling and baking process, half of the bagels separated at the seam, forming the letter C as a result.
I’m reasonably confident they will taste OK. But next time, I might actually follow the directions.