Baker's percentages calculator

This tool is my gift for the lazy, and for those who flunked math. You can easily enter the size of your sponge and main dough, and baker's percentages are calculated.

http://www.glennbech.com/bakerspercentage/index.html

If anyone wonder; Baker's percentages are basicly the ratio of other ingredients, like water to the amount of flour. It's a great way to compare recipes.

Suggestions for new features are also welcome. Thins I've already thought of is ;

- A Scaling factor. Enter a number (for axample 5.4) and scale the recipe by that amount.

- Warnings and suggestions (When sponge is to small/large), hydration levels over 80% or below 50%, salt leves are too large etc.

Please go and play with it .-)

Making a shovel for putting pizza, baguettes and bread in the oven

I got a little bit inspired the other day and decided to create one of those baker's shovels that is used to insert bread into the oven.

I started with a piece of oak wood about 160 cm long. The process is pictures can be found here. it's not very beautifull, but it's something I made, and I'm very proud .-) You know, a little like the fact that every mother thinks their child is the most beautifull.

(Click the image on the left) for a larger version.

My next design, (when this one breaks) will be lighter, and I'll remember to use nails and glue instead of screws since the wood is dry and cracks when you try to connect the screw the boards together.

Thawning and dehydration of bread

One of the difficult things about baking bread is how to preserve it after it's done. Freshly baked bread, still warm, is probably one of my favorite things to eat. However, getting up two or three times during the night just to have the perfect baguette for breakfast in the morning, may be a bit "over the top".

Two ways to completely ruin a frozen loaf of bread is to thaw it in a plastic bag on the kitchen table, or even worse, nuke it in the micro wave oven. Both approaches produce a wet and soft crust.

In this little study I’ve tried tree approaches to thawing frozen bread, one where the loaf is wrapped in plastic, one wrapped in cloth, and one in paper. I've measured the weight of the loaves when I took it out of the freezer, and 12 hours later.

Here are the results. (Total weight loss over approximately 12 hours.)

Plastic: 0% (start weight 149g, end weight 149g)
Paper: 1.9% (start weight 104g, end weight 102g)
Cloth: 4.9% (start weight 122, g end weight 116g)

Other details; the bread was baked with a 65% hydration, baked into round loaves and cut in halves. Three halves have been used in this "experiment". This means that all loaves have a “cut”, and is not totally surrounded by crust. This probably has an effect on the total result, but the comparisons should be valid.

As you can see, the loaf wrapped in plastic doesn’t get dehydrated. This is of course expected. That is probably not entirely true though. Water will evaporate from the bread and exit into the plastic bag. However some (or most?) of this water is then absorbed by the crust, making it soft. How much water that is left in the plastic bag is difficult to tell without a more exact kitchen scale.

The paper- and cloth- wrapped loaves does loose some weight (water), but as the water is transported away from the bread, and is not locked in, like in the bag, the crust stays nice and crispy.

The paper seems to preserve the loaf better, (weight wise) than cloth. But both of these approaches gave good results taste wise.

However, when tasting, the crust actually is crispier in the cloth wrapped bread. And the overall taste is not that different. This probably means that the cloth is better for keeping the crust crisp, at the cost of more dehydration.

I may do this experiment again later, with a whole loaf of bread, with the crust intact to see if the difference is dramatic.

Bread for breakfast

I got very lucky with these one. I wanted a hard crust, with soft inside, so I used a rahter wet dough as you can see from my measurements.

Working with wed doughs are challenging, but putting oil on the hands and baking surface makes the whole pocess a lot easier.

I also used a preferment with 100 g / 1dl of flour with 2 grams of yeast for this recipe.





Preferment

100 grams of fine wheat flour
1 dl of whater
2 g yeast. (a small ball the size of a pea) .

Mix the flour yaeast and water well (I use a blender, not sure if that's a good idea since it got real messy and was hard to clean afterwards). Put this mixture in the fridgee overnight ( or about 2-3 hous in room temperature) in a jar or other suitable container.

I don't think it really matters what you put it in. I used a plastic cup of sorts. For those of you that's not into the jargon this is a "preferment". This allows you to use far less yeast than in a normal recipe.


Main Dough

1 Kg Fine wheat flour
8 g yeast
6 dl of water (30 degrees c)
20 grams of salt
The preferment from last night.

Mix everything together at let rest for an hour or so. Form in to desired shape, and let the breads rise to double size. sprinkle with water, and bake for about 30 minutes until golden and crisp.

I wanted a hard crust, so I put a small cup of water in the oven with the bread, a nice trick I picked up recently.

And that's it !

Sourdough disaster!

It's always a bit de-motivating when you spend a lot of time on a project, and it doesn't go according to plan. I guess that happened to me. So have a look and learn, see how things can go when working with starters, chefs and sourdough recipes.

My Recipe was as follows;

1 kg of Fine what Flour
6,5 dl of Luke warm Water.
24 grams of salt
500 grams of sourdough starter made from fermented fruit. You can have look at a recipe for this starter earlier in my blog. http://www.glennbech.com/2006/04/baking-with-sour-dough-how-to-make.html

The first thing that struck me was that the dough was extremely wet... I know all of the recipes from that particular book emphasize on using wet dough, so I didn't think much of it.. After struggling a bit with it to form three loafs of bread, I covered it up to rest for an hour or so.

The next thing was that to follow the recipe, I had to use 100% of my starter. I was not very keen on that and wanted to keep 100 ml for further use, so I gambled that 430 grams of sourdough would be enough ( 70 grams short, or 14% less than stated ) .

The results were disastrous and the sourdough did not rise properly, the recipe told me to put the loaves on a sheet of baking paper, cover them up and let them rise. Instead of rising "upwards" these bastards chose to rise "outwards". Instead of bread, I got pancakes!

After 2-3 hours of "rising" I gave up, covered in plastic and went to bed. The next morning, not much had happened, and I threw the breads away without baking them.

I am going to make the qualified guess that three factors made this dough a disaster;

- The starter wasn't well enough developed. I kept it and have been feeding it, so I hope it will come along nicely after a few more days.

- I took a shortcut and kept 80 grams (1 dl) of starter. Used Less that the recipe stated.

- My starter is probably (for some strange reason) more liquid than the starter the recipe was based on, making the total amount of liquid in the dough higher than desirable. Hence the pancakes...

At least, these are my theories and the things I'll try differently next time!

Here is a step by step illustration of the baking disaster.

1. The loaves are a bit small, but I still hope they will rise, I took the dough out from my Kenwood kitchen machine, and made three loaves, you can only see two because I had another "accident" with the third. Not my day!



1. After half an hour or so of rest, I do the finishing touch on the dough and put them on a paper sheet and cover, so the rising process may begin. I was pretty happy with my result, and pleased with myself.



2. Im starting to suspect that this is not going to be the bread of my dreams .-)



3. Even After two hours the loaves are not rising at all but just floating out like giant pancakes ... This is pretty much how they looked 12 hours after as well.
Can't get much worse tha this ? to bad I don't have a profile shot of the doigh, mabe 1 cm (0,5 inches) high.

It's in the fridge. Tomorrow is baking day

Its in the fridge, After mixing 300 grams of fine wheat flour with 3 dl of fermented apple liquid and adding 1 dl of yesterday's product, I now have a dough that I can use to bake bread of tomorrow. I hope Im in for a pleasant sureprise. I'llet let you all know anyways .-)

By the way ; I stumbled upon a rather large comminuty of food entusiasts today that has a thing going on at http://www.egullet.org/ and have already gotten some feedback on my sourdough baking. Take a look and see if it's something that is of interest.

One of the comments I got, was that there is really no use in starting the sourdough on fruit, as the bacteria present i the air and flour will eventually take over the process that the fruit peel bacteria has started. I'll definily check this out and report back.

I'm always interested in busting mythts, and doing things the simplest possible way. I might consider experimienting with a starter of pure fine wheat flour to have something to benchmark rising abilities and taste with.

Home made Pasta with cream sauce and bacon

I decided to experiment a bit in the kitchen today and came up with this dish. I wanted to get rid of some vegetable stock I had in my freezer, I also wanted to test out my new Pasta machine. I guess this recipe works fine with any kind of pasta. The "main" ingredient is really the sauce. I learned a few lessons from this and you might want to alter the recipe based on my experiences.

Sauce

5 dl of vegetable stock
1 dl of cream
Salt
Pepper
1 tea spoon of good quality olive oil

Topping

Bacon

Garnish

Sugar snap peas chopped
Cherry tomatoes

How to make the dish

Just reduce the vegetable stock until 1/5 or original volume. You have to know your stock to find the best spot to stop the reduction of course. I had a fairly diluted stock in my freezer.

Add the cream, salt and pepper and olive oil. The reason for the pinkish colour of the sauce is tomatos in my veggie stock.

Fry the bacon in small pieces and keep warm.

Cook pasta to taste and mix in the sugar snap peas, this will add something extra to "chew" in the pasta. Pour the sauce over, add the bacon and serve at once

Lessons learned

- The bacon, or any other meat salt and fatty is always (I assume) a good idea with Pasta and cream sauces. It adds salt, and a nice aroma of smoke.
- The Cherry tomatoes look great but doesn't add much to the dish. I Might leave them out later.
- I used a strong flavored (flowery taste) olive oil in the sauce, I'm not sure if I liked the taste it added. Im not sure why I added the oil in the first place.
- Remember to add salt to the Pasta water. (Doh!) and don't over-cook it. - Pasta Sticks! Mix in the peas and sauce quickly and to avoid sticking.
- Always serve on hot plates. Adding home made pasta to a cold plate is a 100% guarantee of sticky pasta.
- The sugar snap peas were an excellent idea. They really add something both in taste, texture and visual impression. I guess any green chewy vegetable would do the trick.
-Good quality, home made vegetable stock is nice to have in the freezer, but is even better to have in a sauce.

Baking with sour dough; How to make a loaf of bread in only three weeks!

Bread was first leavened by the Egyptians around 2300 BC. They discovered that a mixture of flour and water left uncovered for several days bubbled and expanded. If mixed into unleavened dough and allowed to stand for a few hours before baking, it yields light sweet bread.

This kind of natural leavening remained the basis of Western bread baking until the 20th century when bread made from commercially prepared yeast was introduced.

In this little experiment of mine, I'm baking like the Egyptians. Since it's impossible (to my knowledge) to buy dried sourdough starter in Norway, I'm creating my own from fermented peel of apples. Buying a finished one is also considered cheating, and will not produce bread with a small hint of the aroma from the fermented fruit. I guess all kinds of fruit peel will do. I read that mangos are excellent and I guess grapes are good since they use it in wine making.

The thing that fascinates me and what makes me do this the hard way, is the fact that I'm doing something humans have done for thousands of years. I’m also trying this out to see if the bread tastes better. I'm always interested in finding out for myself if slow or expensive means high quality.

Please note that I'm making a "fine" sourdough for "fine" bread. It's also possible to make a more "healthy" wholegrain dough using rye. I've done that earlier with little luck. Killing my colony of friendly bacteria with a triple dose of salt, one day before baking might have something to do with the horrible result.

This recipe is taken from the book "bread" written by Sidsel Hjelme, and published by Cappelen. I hope they don't mind.

Baking Natural leaven bread is a time consuming process. You should plan ahead and start 17 days before you invite your guests for soup. Don’t let the fact that the time from start to finish is over two weeks for baking bread. Most of the time, the bread is making itself, and after you finish this, you'll have your starter forever if you only remember to feed it once a week or so.

Day 1

Peel apples until you have about 300 grams of peel. I had to peel about 7-8 medium sized apples to end up with 300 grams. I tried to mix up different sorts of apples, but I really doubt it matters when it comes to taste of the final bread.

Put the peel in a large glass jar together with 2 liters of water, and leave for about 14 days. I spent $5 on a jar with a rubber-band seal on my local IKEA. I suggest you smell the Jar every once in a while to see if it's finished or not. When finished, the smell should be bit like wine; my guess is that we now have an alcohol containing liquid in the kitchen.


(Aproxemately) Day 14

The fermented apple peel liquid should now be ready for the baking process. Take 300 grams of fine wheat flour and mix in 3 dl of your fermented liquid.

I made sure that pieces of the peel didn't end up in my dough, but I doubt it will affect the taste or finished product in any way if something falls in. After two weeks in my jar, the liquid is no longer clear and some particles have fallen down to the bottom of the jar.

Day 15

Take 3 Dl of fermented apple liquid and add 300 grams of fine what flour. Add 1 Dl of the product from day 15. Let this rest in room temperature for another 24 hours.

Day 16

Take 3 Dl of fermented apple liquid and add 300 grams of fine what flour. Add 1 Dl of the product from day 15. Instead of leaving the dough in room temperature, put it in the fridge for the next 24 hours.

Day 17

Baking day ! I'll post a good recepie in a week or so when my dough is finished.