Search Results for '("C'

[Mike Nolan]

I think the reason is because semolina isn't ground as finely. The more finely you grind a flour, the less it weighs per cup, cake flour being a good example. (Powdered sugar is another good example, it is much lighter per cup than granulated sugar.)

A cup of durum wheat berries is 192 grams, other hard wheat berries are about the same, soft wheat berries are a bit lighter, 168 grams per cup.

[Mike Nolan]

Which of these types of flour is the heaviest (weight per cup according the USDA)?

[See the full post at: Daily Quiz for April 21, 2020]

[Mike Nolan]

There are many good ways to create a starter, some ways, like the pineapple juice method, may succeed where others fail. I guess it's somewhat dependent on what micro-organisms are in your environment. I've created a total of 3 wheat-based starters using 2 different methods and one rye-based starter (with a second one under way), all of them worked, some much faster than others. The first rye starter was ready in about a week, for example.

I stopped maintaining the wheat-based ones because my wife was having problems with the breads I was making, too sour for her, I think. One of these days I'm going to try a variant on Chad Robertson's method, as detailed in the Tartine cookbooks, adapting the feeding schedule so it doesn't require throwing out 95% of your starter frequently. His method is supposed to produce a starter that generates less lactic acid.

[BakerAunt]

Clearly I lucked out with my unconventional starter over 25 years ago. Mine used 1 cup of skim or low-fat milk (cannot recall which I used), 3 Tbs. plain yogurt, and 1 cup of flour. I may not even have been using King Arthur flour at that time. I looked at the directions, and initially the warm milk (100F) was mixed with 3 Tbs. yogurt (no idea what kind; it might have been my homemade yogurt). After 18-24 hours in a warm place and a curd formed, the flour was mixed in. It was covered tightly (I use a glass jar with a rubber or silicone gasket and a wire closure) and left it in a warm place for 2-5 days until it was full of bubbles. From then on, I used it regularly and fed it, and it lives in my refrigerator. Once or twice it was neglected longer than it should have been, but I was able to bring it back. It moved to Texas with me, in its own little cooler, and it moved to Indiana in the same small cooler. My husband thought it was weird to have it in the refrigerator, until I started making the sourdough crackers and pizza crust. He's become a sourdough convert.

I've given starter from it to three people over the years, but I don't think any of them kept it going.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

French law is pretty specific about what bakers can sell as 'French bread'. It must be a lean dough, ie, the only ingredients are flour, water, salt and yeast or levain. (A little dough conditioner is allowed to compensate for certain flour conditions, but the list of conditioners allowed is short. Prof. Calvel's book goes into the history of dough conditioners in France and how they impact the quality of the bread.)

Every recipe I've seen for Vienna bread is an enriched dough, usually with egg and oil/butter in it, and often a little sugar. As a result, a Vienna bread generally has a much longer shelf life than a French baguette, which goes stale in a day. That's why there are so many French recipes for using up old bread.

[Italiancook]

I finally made French Bread from The Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery. The author uses the term French Bread and Vienna Bread interchangeable. I think there's a difference between the two breads but don't know what. The bread is brushed three times with egg/water wash -- once before second rise & twice while baking. Thus, the crust is absolutely gorgeous. This cookbook was published in the early 1970s, and the bread is too salty for my 2020 tastebuds. I made the decision not to reduce the salt, because I wanted to replicate what I had served at dinner parties in the 1980s. People really loved it then, which goes to show we were all eating too much salt in the good old days. I made it in the food processor, as I did then. The difference is that I used bread flour today, instead of the AP recipe calls for. That used the last of my expiration date 2018 bread flour. I had to add a fair amount of water to the dough, which I never had to do with AP flour. But I'm pleased with the crumb, so no harm done.

BakerAunt, this cookbook has a recipe for Limpa!Below is a list of the ingredients, which Mike says we're able to post, in that it's only the instructions that are copyrighted. In case you want to compare and contrast.

LIMPA (from The Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery)

1 tsp granulated sugar
1/4 cup lukewarm water
2 tsp. caraway seed
1 tbsp salt
1 package dry granular yeast or 1 cake compressed yeast
1/3 cup brown sugar or dark molasses
2 tsp grated orange rind
1 1/4 cups milk, scalded
1/2 cup water
3 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3 tbsp melted shortening
3 cups sifted rye flour

[Mike Nolan]

The amount of 'old dough' added to a new batch varies a lot.

I've seen a number of articles that say the old dough makes up anywhere from 10% to 1/3 of the new batch.

But I've also seen videos where the amount of 'old dough' being added to a large commercial mixer was more like a few cups of dough, which I think would be way below 10% of the resulting batch.

My guess is the less old dough you inoculate with, the longer you have to give it to percolate. That's the classic baker's tradeoff, trading time for flavor.

As to converting to baker's percentages, remember the total new flour weight becomes 100%. The old dough is treated like adding yeast, even though there is technically flour and water in the 'old dough', but it isn't part of the 100%, just like salt or yeast wouldn't be in a straight dough formula. Flax meal and chickpea flour would (IMHO) be part of the flour weight.

It's taken a while for me to get my head around old dough formulas, but basically the old dough will have the same hydration percentage as the current batch, so both the water and the flour in the old dough can be ignored when computing hydration, as you're adding in something that's at the same hydration level as your dough.

So, your formula would look something like this:

Cake Flour or TP00 1.5 pounds
WWW Flour 1 pound
flax meal .25 pound
chickpea flour .25 pound

That gives you 3 pounds of flour, so that's your 100%.

To that you add 2 pounds of water, giving you a hydration level of 67%.

You also (presumably) have salt and old dough to add in, both as a percentage of the flour weight. How much old dough you use is probably something you'll need to experiment with. Oh dear, more excuses to make pizza! But you need to work backwards, if you want to add 1 pound of old dough to your next batch and have 5 pounds of dough to bake with, you need to make 6 pounds of dough, which would be 5 pounds of new ingredients and 1 pound of old dough. Does that help?

[aaronatthedoublef]

I've never tried the dough throw method but I'm not sure how I could not degas it when I cut it into smaller balls.

I've hand stretched dough in college and it degassed it but if the dough sat it would puff back up (on big nights we would roll out pizzas ahead to keep up with demand and they rose as they sat).

I used to hand stretch dough but it's less messy to roll it and most of my family actually prefers it without the big crust edge. I also don't let the dough rise once it's rolled.

[Mike Nolan]

I've tried the 'throw the dough against the counter' method a few times, it does create a little flour dust, but not too bad, I've actually had my mixer throw out more flour.

If you go to this site you'll find several pictures of me throwing bread dough while getting an Alexander Technique lesson (to improve my mechanics without stressing my body):
Alexander Technique

[Mike Nolan]

I wonder if when spinning pizza dough if you need to degas it first or if it just naturally degasses due to the spinning action? Not that I ever expect to spin pizza dough, I can't juggle, either. I wonder if my older son has tried spinning pizza dough, he's juggled for years and sometimes performs at Renaissance Fairs. (I asked him, he said 'not well'.)

[RiversideLen]

I guess it depends on what style of pizza you're making. My dough naturally degasses because I roll it out to a uniform thickness (thin).

[Mike Nolan]

There appear to be two camps on deflating dough, most authors are solidly in one camp or the other, although it may depend on the specific recipe. Peter Reinhart has some recipes where he stresses deflating the dough fully and others where he recommends handling the dough carefully to avoid deflating it.

I've always deflated the dough as much as I can during shaping. I've tried a few recipes that stress gentle handling to avoid deflating the dough, those recipes haven't been that successful for me.

The physics of dough bubbles is interesting. There are a number of bread articles out there that say bubbles are only formed by the sheer action of mixing and kneading, and that the yeast doesn't create additional bubbles during bulk or final proof, citing Boyle's Law. According to this theory, the gas generated by yeast increases the size of existing bubbles, but doesn't create any new ones. (Chemical leavening is a different matter, the chemical reaction of an acid with a base does create bubbles.)

I've never figured out how this reconciles with no-knead recipes, though. It does seem to explain why intensive mixing produces a fine grain texture, because you get lot of little bubbles rather than fewer but bigger ones.

Deflating dough doesn't eliminate bubbles, according to these same sources, it just makes them smaller again.

BTW, the 'throw the dough on the counter 600 times' method (see Simon, the sexy French baker does create sheer action--LOTS of it! And it produces dough unlike any I've made using any other methods, it is just a lot of work to do it.

[BakerAunt]

On the subject of new bakers, here's a link to a short (11 minute) NPR story on the science of making bread:

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/13/833428230/the-science-of-making-bread

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

I honestly don't know if whole wheat flour is always unbleached. I can't say I've ever seen a package that indicated it was bleached, but I haven't really looked, either.

The fineness to which flour is milled is a separate factor, not something easily discerned from the package in the USA. (European flours are often labeled in ways that make this a bit easier to tell.)

[BakerAunt]

We do not have quite enough of that wonderful rye bread for tomorrow. As I was working on the rabbit and egg cake, I pulled out the Zo bread machine and my standard bread machine recipe that uses 1 ½ cup bread flour, 1 ½ cup whole wheat, and 1 cup of some rolled grain. I decided to use white whole wheat flour and ¾ cup 5-rolled grain cereal (BRM) and ¼ cup of KAF’s malted rolled wheat. I added 2 Tbs. of oat bran and 2 Tbs. fine cornmeal. It's now in the oven.