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.