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Sounds like you need a slightly bigger bread pan. Otherwise, you may need to firm the dough up a bit, either by lowering the hydration or with some stretch-and-folds.
When I make the Stella Parks recipe, I use an 8 inch bread pan and it rises to maybe 3/4 of an inch above the top of the pan before it goes into the oven.
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 poundThat 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?
I don't really care for that thick outer edge, either. But we like REALLY thin crust pizza, almost like a cracker crust, that's probably why we like lavash pizza so much.
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 TechniqueI 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'.)
As I recall, you're supposed to be able to get a dime between the bottom of the beater and the bowl.
Are you certain the lock lever isn't failing?
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.
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.)
There's a 'sweet limpa' recipe in the Ginsberg book, but I haven't tried it yet. It is a 100% rye recipe and uses molasses at 17.5% of flour weight, which is about twice as much molasses per flour weight as the McCall's recipe, so I would expect it to be both sweeter and denser.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by
Mike Nolan.
Two days after having the biggest snowfall of the season (5-6 inches), we're supposed to hit the mid-70's this afternoon, so I'm doing burgers on the outdoor grill tonight.
Our grill is about 24 years old and is starting to show signs of age, the knob for the left set of burners won't turn (it was sticky last fall.) I'm not sure I've got the skills and tools to replace the control and I don't know if the place we bought it from is even doing repairs any more. It is wearing out in other places and probably should have new burners as well.
Right now spending money on a new grill isn't in the plans, though I did do some shopping around last fall to see what's out there. Our current grill has a separate rotisserie burner at the back, and I like using that for things like chickens and turkeys. I've done gyros meat on it a few times, too. Most of the grills don't have that feature, though Weber has an add-on kit.
If I was buying a new grill, I'd probably look for one that has better facilities for smoking meats, too.
I am making burger and hot dog buns today, using Jeffrey Hamelman's 'soft butter rolls' recipe. The hot dog buns will have poppy seeds on them, the burger buns will have sesame seeds on them.
Your store-brand whole wheat flour will depend on what wheat blend was used to produce it, in general King Arthur flours tend to be a bit higher in protein content than other brands, that's probably true for their whole wheat products as well.
I haven't looked at a bag of whole wheat flour in quite a while, are they always unbleached?
Probably depends on the mill. On modern roller mills making whole wheat flour is actually extra work, because they have to reblend the endosperm, bran and germ back to the original proportions. On an old-fashioned grist mill, whole wheat flour is basically what you get.
We had spaghetti with meat and mushroom sauce, and cheese toast.
We had BLT's tonight.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by
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