a better baking day

[kindkit]

By 10 am I had pastry made and chilling in the fridge for the potato, cheese, onion and greens pie I'm making, and my bread almost ready to go in the oven. I feel all diligent and accomplished.

I got a really good rise in the bread, and nice oven spring, good color, etc. Here it is just out of the oven:






For once I think I got it to the right internal temperature so it won't be underbaked in the middle--it's a huge loaf, so that can be tricky--and it did that crust-crackling thing when taken out of the oven, which is also a good sign.

/bread bragging

Well, maybe not, because if it turns out right I may post another picture once it's cut.

Yes, I am enjoying all the things I can do with my new phone.

Comments

[rike_tikki_tavi]

That bread looks great. Is that a wheat sourdough? I've recently started baking bread again and I'm still fighting with crumb structure.

[kindkit]

It's a mixed-grain loaf: 725 g white bread flour, 135 g cornmeal, 90 g rolled oats, 50 g rye, 18 grams salt, about 3/8 teaspoon of instant yeast, and a couple of tablespoons of white sugar. (It's my adaptation of a recipe originally given in cups, in Nancy Baggett's Kneadlesslly Simple, and I still haven't gotten around to weighing out the yeast or the sugar.) Then about 750 g cold water, depending on how wet you like your dough.

After mixing the dough I refrigerate it for 10 hours or so, then let it ferment overnight. It's a no-knead recipe, but I do a couple of rounds of stretching and folding once it's out of the fridge.

I've been experimenting around with baking times and temperatures since I do sometimes have trouble getting breads baked through (partly because I live at a high altitude, so the boiling point of water is significantly lower). Today I baked the bread (in a covered, pre-heated pot) at 425 F for 20 minutes, then lowered the heat to 400 and baked for another 15, then took the cover off the pot and baked for about another 55 minutes. Hopefully that has worked--I haven't cut into the bread yet because it's still warm. Anyway it got up to an internal temperature of 198 F, which is as high as bread can go at my altitude.

Do you make sourdoughs? I keep wanting to try, but the one time I tried to make a starter it got moldy. Plus I don't bake bread super often. But one of these days I want to give it another go, because all my bread books say that a levain or sourdough starter makes much better bread.

[rike_tikki_tavi]

I've just a few weeks ago started my own sourdough again after years of not baking bread. That's also the reason I'm still having issues with structure. The yeasts and lactic acid bacteria are not quite balanced yet. Plus, I love rye bread and that has less gluten so getting it to rise properly is a bit more iffy.

A home made starter can survive in the fridge for over a month without being used, so even if you don't bake that often, it's worth a try. At worst you can just feed if a few tablespoons of flour and water every few weeks. And sourdough surplus can be used up by being added to pancake batter.

I have a good forum for bread recipes and tips for making your own sourdough but it is in German, so I don't know if that would be any help to you.

[kindkit]

Yum, rye bread. That's another of my bread ambitions, to one day make one of those old-fashioned, dense, central European rye loaves. That is to say, to make one well, and not all weird and gooey the way it turned out the one time I tried.

The forum sounds great but unfortunately my German is still at the level of "Die Frau trinkt Bier," so probably no use to me yet! There's an English-language forum called The Fresh Loaf that I know has a lot of sourdough information, though. Maybe I'll give sourdough another try in the autumn--it will soon be too warm here for me to want to bake. In the summer, if I bake bread at all it's just buns, because they're small and don't need the oven on for an hour and a half.