[Mike Nolan]

I made another batch of peanut butter cookies today, I put some mini semi-sweet chocolate chips in a few of them.

I think I left them in the oven for about 30 seconds too long, they're a little on the dark side, just this side of burnt. But Diane likes them that way.

[Mike Nolan]

I think the latest semolina dough would have benefited from some stretch-and-folds, that does seem to help the shaping.

My baguettes often looked like a snake that swallowed 3 rats, though I found with practice I got better at it, I think the pre-rolling part of the shaping is key. I watched the staff at SFBI roll out baguettes during one of the lunch breaks when I was taking my pastry course, they even let me roll out a few, and said I was doing pretty good, though they were much faster.

One of the advantages of making epis de bles is that the cuts tend to mask the uneven-ness of the baguette. (And it definitely maximizes surface area, the crusty outside is the best part of a baguette, IMHO.)

One of the things I noticed from the picture yesterday is that the sesame seeds are heavier on one side than on the other, probably has to do with the angle at which I hold the shaker. I thought this batch had enough seeds on them, my wife commented on the previous batch that there weren't many sesame seeds at all.

I think Hamelman recommends dipping the shaped loaf in a tray of sesame seeds, which is probably a lot faster in a production shop. (As I noted in a recent BBGA thread, a lot of production practices are geared towards speed and consistency.) I've always thought that might wind up with too many sesame seeds on the loaf, maybe next time I'll try it. I always wind up with a lot of them falling off the loaf and going to waste on the parchment, presumably any that don't stick would just fall back into the tray.

[Mike Nolan]

Artisan to me means meeting a high standard of quality and consistency, and the latter includes shaping, proofing and baking.

There has been an interesting thread in the BBGA forum lately, and one of the full-time bakers made a comment about a loaf (one that probably looked better than my latest semolina bread) that I think defines the standards an artisan baker tries to meet:

I wouldn't present that loaf at the end of a practical baking assessment and expect to pass.

Loaves that are by design not uniform (or at least close to it) might be called 'rustic', I suppose.

[Mike Nolan]

We had chili again tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

It'll probably take me a few more rounds to get it to the point where I'm really satisfied with it, but it was definitely an improvement over the first batch with the Azure semolina/durum flour. I haven't made pasta with it yet, that's on my list for this week.

Although I'm not selling my breads to anyone, I'm still thinking about that possibility, and a salable loaf is my standard. I'd rate this one as 80-90% of the way there.

[Mike Nolan]

Today's semolina bread came out pretty good, nice oven spring, decent crumb, though it did sort of blow out a little at one end, I think it needed a little more proofing. My shaping was a bit imperfect, too, my goal is to get the middle 2/3 of a loaf to have the same size (width and height) so that the slices are more uniform for sandwich making.

The changes I made (ratio of semolina/durum to bread flour, adding OJ, lower baking temperature) all seemed to have positive impacts, the crust isn't quite as dark or thick and the bitter taste from the bran is either gone or lowered to the point where it isn't obvious.

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[Mike Nolan]

We tried some of the Westphalian bread with the Cabot Seriously Strong cheddar cheese that we used for the fried cheese sandwiches, it was kind of an odd pairing, the bread just overwhelms the cheese.

[Mike Nolan]

I think we're going to have tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches on honey wheat bread.

[Mike Nolan]

We cut into the Westphalian Pumpernickel, or perhaps I should say I tried to cut into it.

The outside is pretty hard, especially where it has cracks, and the interior is soft and kind of wet, and the knife stuck. I'm not sure if the center is under-done, but I would call it under-dried out.

I tried making the first slice with with my everyday bread knife, you can see how it got gummed up.

The Japanese bread knife my son gave me a year ago seems to do a better job slicing it. I normally keep that knife in the box because it is really sharp and I've cut myself on it more than once already.

You can also see where a chunk of it broke off as I was trying to slice it, I suspect that's due to the cracks and harder exterior.

The taste is interesting but it is different than what I was expecting, and quite different from the bread I had in Germany. The odor is very much that of molasses.

I need to some research before I try making it again, and maybe cut the recipe down a bit, it makes a loaf that weighed in at well over 3 pounds.

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[Mike Nolan]

The BBGA has some Excel templates including for a multi-stage bread, but they have a lot of stuff in them that might not be relevant.

I'm starting to learn Python, it has an interesting set of tools, including ones for building Excel spreadsheets. But it is a slow process.

The pumpernickel bread probably needed to be a bit moister or packed into the pan more solidly, that's why it has all those cracks in it. We'll know this afternoon if that had much impact on the interior or the texture.

[Mike Nolan]

When we were in Germany (nearly 17 years ago) I had some really dark rye bread that I think may have been similar to a Westphalian pumpernickel.

Yes, I think it has some similarity to the wrapped rye breads. And unlike a lot of recipes, it doesn't rely on coffee, cocoa or food coloring to make it dark.

This first loaf mighty wind up being difficult to slice, but I'm hoping the flavor makes up for any slicing issues, and if there's a next time I'll probably add even more water than I did this time.

[Mike Nolan]

I hope they can get it done on schedule, I've heard too many stories of remodeling projects in the last year or two that ran months because of shortages in supplies and labor.

[Mike Nolan]

I forgot to post a picture of the Westphalian pumpernickel loaf as it came out of the pan. We're both looking forward to trying some tomorrow afternoon, probably with some sharp cheese.

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[Mike Nolan]

I was wondering about how commercial bakeries produce Westphalian rye bread, my wife thinks in volume it might be easier than in small quantities, since commercial mixers are designed to handle stiff doughs better than most home mixers.

The ingredient list is simple enough: 750 grams of coarse rye meal, 750 grams of boiling water for the scald (though I added water, and could probably have added more, I think my rye was more finely ground than a 'coarse meal', and that soaked up a lot of water), another 350 grams of rye meal and 12 grams of salt in the final dough. No yeast. In fact, the scald probably kills off any yeast present in the rye, so what happens during the overnight rest for the scald is amylase activity to break down starch, not yeast activity.

[Mike Nolan]

In a two-stage bread, the starter is one column and the final dough is a second column, there's a third 'total' column as well.

If you refresh your starter like this: 500 grams of starter, 500 grams of flour, 500 grams of water, then in the starter column the flour is 100%, the water is 100% and the total yield for that stage is the amount you would add to the final dough, for example, 120 grams of starter. You'll have to weight it at least once, I guess, since a lot of recipes say to use something like a cup of starter, and the weight of that would vary based on the hydration level of the starter. 'Starter' becomes a row in the table and the amount you add is in the final recipe column.

This tells you that the starter is fed at a 100% hydration level (a common way of feeding a starter). How much starter you use when feeding it is a separate matter, it isn't clear to me exactly how that affects the starter over time. In the Tartine Bread books, Chad Robertson recommends using a very small amount of starter, like 1%, when feeding it, so he'd use 1 gram of starter to 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water. He calls this an 'immature' starter.

I was recently reading a journal article in which the hydration level of the starter was one of the keys to the microculture the starter develops, higher hydration starters favor a different mix of yeasts and bacteria than lower hydration starters. How often you feed it, what you feed it and what temperature you keep it at are the other components, the article suggested that no matter how you get your starter going (build one, buy one, get one from a friend), those four factors (feeding frequency, hydration, flour, temperature) determine the microculture of the starter over time.

For example, one of the main LABs in sourdough is Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis (new nomenclature, lactobacillus was split up into several genuses, with fructilactobacillus being one of them) and in a starter kept at room temperature, fed at least daily, and at 100% or more hydration F. sanfranciscensis will become the dominant LAB, no matter where you live.

I've seen some recipes that have as many as five stages. The intermediate stages, like a starter, soaker, scald or mash, generally get added to the final dough stage, but not always, there's a really complex rye recipe where the stage 1 starter gets added to stage 2, along with other ingredients, then that stage gets added to stage 3, along with more ingredients, then that stage finally gets added to the final dough stage.

The BBGA formatting standard has a place for total % of prefermented flour, I'm not sure what that's used for, but is one of the factors you can manipulate, producing a bread with a different percentage of prefermented flour in it.

I'm playing around with a tool that would allow you to enter your ingredients and the baker's percentage of each (and total yield for each stage) and build an Excel spreadsheet for that recipe so you can adjust the total yield for the recipe and have it recompute each component. (I have plans to go well beyond just a simple spreadsheet generator, but one step at a time!)

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