The Magic Gluten Development Project

I will get to experimenting with other kinds of bread soon I hope, though I have difficulty escaping from making French bread, not necessarily because it is the most versatile bread (all the holes does not make ideal bread for sandwiches, french toast etc, and sometimes something with a soft crust is nice). However, French bread is the most fun to make, and this is a strong draw, as I definitely do not make bread just for the sake of having bread.

I find the challenge of making the same kind of bread every week is replicability. I am experimenting with little things every week, so I don't expect the final product to be the same, but I'm beginning to think that even if I did the exact same thing every week, the final bread would still have a different crumb each week, because there are so many variables.

This week, I experimented with autolyse in order to strengthen the gluten development of the dough. Autolyse is an overly fancy term that basically means when mixing the final dough, after adding the flour to the water and poolish, you let the flour sit in the water for a few minutes, and allow the flour to develop strands of gluten on its own. Like many things in baking bread, this seems a little like magic, and it does work. The gluten was noticeably stronger than just mixing in the flour and working it into a dough immediately. I would recommend trying this method, as it is no work, and fits into the process of making bread quite nicely; I am always doing other things while making bread, as the process takes hours, but only a few minutes a time actually doing anything.

I've found some more great videos of interesting bread ovens, which I'll post soon.

A Metal Drum for Tandoori

These tandoori ovens are more than just metal drums, but they are still pretty simple. The idea of tandoori ovens is pretty intriguing, though unfortunately probably difficult to replicate at home. Generally the temperatures are extremely high, and the naan bread is baked vertical right on the side of the oven. A baking stone does a nice job of naan, but it would be nice to try vertical baking. I am curious to know the physics of how the bread remains on the side of the ovens, so if anyone knows, please add some salt in the comments.

Here's a short video of the metal drum tandoori ovens in action:

Naan Bread in the Tandoori Oven

I have no rights to this video.

Enjoy!

Post-Education Bread

For the first time in weeks, I managed to find time during the weekend to bake. I made three loaves of french bread. After not baking bread for weeks, I did not experiment with amounts, but stuck to what I did last time I made bread in my bread log (which sounds like it should be a dusty little hardcover notebook, but is actually a .odt document on my computer). The only method I experimented with was how I stirred the final dough. Typically, I make the poolish (preferment), and the next day add more water, yeast, flour, and salt to make the final dough.

When many people think of making dough, they think of something that is dry enough to not stick. However, a high flour to water ratio will create a dense, heavy crumb. In the range of acceptable water-flour ratio, French bread is has the highest water-flour ration that I know of, while pizza dough is generally the upper limit on a high flour to water ratio. There has to be enough flour (and enough gluten development) for there to be enough structure, but not too much. The challenge of dealing with a wet, sticky dough is that it is almost impossible to knead. I have been experimenting with simply stirring the final dough, not in a round and round motion, but more like a one-way digging motion (towards me). As I add more and more flour, the dough becomes more of a single mass, and doesn't stick to the bowl as long as it's moving. It's a little hypnotizing, and so far I've been relatively pleased with the gluten development. I think there's a lot to be said for the action of kneading, especially the body temperature helping the bread a little, but for French bread, it is a lot of trouble.

As is typical after an enforced break from baking, I was a little forgetful of the details- this time I forgot to add steam to the oven. My method, since I don't have a spray bottle, is to boil the kettle and put boiling water in a roasting pan beneath the baking stone. This time I forgot to do this and the crust cracked a little due to the lack of moisture.

I'm looking forward to having weekends to bake, and trying some different recipes over the summer.