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It may be that your pan is a bit too large for the recipe. Keep in mind that professional baking writers like the ones at King Arthur Flour, will bake a recipe many times during testing, and only pick their best efforts for the photo.
Something to look forward to is the annual April Fools Day blog post at King Arthur, showing some of their worst efforts over the year. Some of them are hilarious!
Blanche, did try the windowpane test? Here's a video of it: windowpane test
I usually find when dough doesn't rise as much as I expected it to, it was either under-kneaded or a bit on the dry side. That's something you kind of figure out as you make a recipe several times. Most doughs should be a little tacky but not really stick to your hands. (There are doughs that are supposed to be very sticky, but that's a lesson for another time.)
Hopefully the bread was good tasting, that's the most important part!
The point to autolysis is to let the flour absorb the liquid and start to break down before the yeast is added. Some authors recommend adding salt after the autolyze step, others add it up front. Some add it as the very last ingredient during mixing. Salt absorbs water and that will produce a noticeable 'tightening' of your dough if you add it last. The challenge is you don't want to wait TOO long, or it might not get thoroughly mixed in.
I don't know that it would make much difference whether dry milk was added before or after autolysis.
Not to confuse you, but you will find some whole grain recipes that utilize a soaker or a mash, where some of the whole grain flour is mixed with water (the latter is generally heated) and left to sit overnight. Either way, the point is to soften the whole grains.
King Arthur's weight-to-dry measure conversion is on the light side compared to what some authors use. (I've even seen one that assumed a cup of flour weighed 5 1/4 ounces.) It's generally a bit easier to add flour to a dough that's too moist than to add moisture to one that's too dry. When I make a new recipe, I always assume 4 1/4 ounces per cup unless the recipe specifically states otherwise, and even then I usually hold some flour back until I see how the dough looks.
After looking at the amount of sodium in the sliced deli meats at the store, I'm thinking of doing my own turkey breasts, I just wonder how much sodium they've injected into it?
How do you slice it?
I may have to give this recipe a try, it's a challah that is 50% white flour and 50% whole wheat flour with no salt. The author did it in a mold rather than braiding it.
No Salt ChallahThere's an inconsistency between the recipe and the instructions. 3 cups of flour is less than a pound but it talks about it being a 3 pound loaf. It looks like it is about 72% hydration, which is a bit on the moist side but otherwise the recipe appears to be in balance, though the dough weighs less than 27 ounces. It would not surprise me if I had to add a little flour to make it easy to roll out and braid.
I get annoyed when stores label cuts with non-standard names that don't give you any idea what primal it comes from. I once saw a big hunk of meat in one of the local stores called a 'steamship roast'. It was in the evening after the butchers had left for the day, so I couldn't ask anybody what it was. I did eventually find it but it is not a recognized cut. (It's the round with the rump cut off, which explained why it was so big.)
I looked in my meat cutting books and did not see bistro steak as a recognized cut from the teres major muscle in the shoulder. It is sometimes called a petite tender or the shoulder tender.
Here's a page on the teres major.
Maybe it was a thread on the old King Arthur Flour Baking Circle? Anyway, I'll drop them a note about the Popovers recipe.
As someone wrote a while back, keep practicing your breads, eventually you'll eat well, in the mean time the ducks will eat well. 🙂
Seriously, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Eventually you'll learn to recognize problems before they get serious and you'll know what to do to fix them.
That's what professional bakers do every day, because conditions are not the same all the time and mistakes do happen, so you need to be prepared to deal with problems.
I've had a few total disasters, one was probably due to putting in 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, as the recipe specified, and then putting in ANOTHER 1 1/2 TABLESPOONS of salt instead of sugar! It was a brick and even the birds wouldn't touch it!
The suggestion to use an instant read thermometer is another good one, knowing when the desired internal temperature has been reached is one way to improve your success rate. Eventually you'll recognize by sight, smell or touch (thumping) when your bread is ready.
That is an interesting braid, and the pictures are pretty clear.
I've been practicing a six strand rectangular loaf braid using macrame yarn, but I'm not quite ready to do one in dough.
That wasn't in the whole grains book.
There's a step that some authors recommend called autolyse. This is is a rest during the mixing stage, usually before adding the yeast, that allows the flour to be fully hydrated, ie, absorb all the liquid.
Autolysis was encouraged by Prof. Raymond Calvel, a French baking researcher/instructor who was instrumental in re-energizing the French baking industry after World War II. His book "The Taste of Bread" is an interesting read, but it really isn't a cookbook, there are very few complete recipes in it. He spends several pages just on salt and the role it plays in bread!
The book was written in French ("Le Goût du Pain") but later translated into English. It is fairly expensive, especially in the original French edition.
The variance in steps between recipes and authors is interesting, some of them are probably more a matter of tradition or preference than science. There are baking sites on the Internet that tend to be rather fussy about them, insisting that there is only one RIGHT way to do things. We aren't like that, we don't all follow the same steps, even when making the same recipe. We're happy to share what works for us, and encourage experimentation to find what works best for you.
As BakerAunt says, a little sugar in the proofing water is fine, many recipes even recommend it, as it gives the yeast some sugar to feed on to help it grow. It's only when you have a dough that is very sweet (6% or more sugar relative to the flour weight) that you can start to see sugar inhibiting the yeast growth by depriving it of the water it needs. My mother-in-law always used to put a pinch of flour in the water, that accomplishes pretty much the same thing, though the starch in flour needs to be broken down before the yeast can access the sugar it needs to grow. There are enzymes in yeast that will break the starch down.
An old baker's trick is to add a little vinegar to a recipe, it helps it rise. The acid in the vinegar has the same effect as the enzymes of breaking down the starch into sugar, but is a bit faster.
Here are the steps that Jeffrey Hamelman gives in his book. (Each step is explained in great detail in the book.)
1. Scaling of ingredients
2. Mixing/Kneading
3. Primary (Bulk) Fermentation
4. Folding
5. Dividing
6. Pre-shaping
7. Bench Rest
8. Shaping
9. Final Fermentation
10. Scoring
11. Baking
12. CoolingSeveral of these steps can be broken down into multiple stages. For example, it is not unusual to see a recipe that divides the primary bulk rise up into several stages, punching down or folding the dough between each bulk rise period. As I recall, Julia Child's French Baguette recipe has a rise, a punch down, a second rise, a second punch down, and then a third rise.
Different recipes (or different authors) will vary these steps quite a bit. There are some authors/recipes that recommend you fully deflate the dough before dividing it and pre-shaping it, and others that recommend you treat the dough very gently to avoid deflating it.
So, bench rest is the step that comes after you divide the dough up into individual loaves or rolls and pre-shape them and when you do the final shaping. This rest gives the dough time to relax, which helps the final shaping.
I was looking at the Popovers recipe in the KAF Baker's Companion, and the sodium level it reports for the recipe has to be way off. It says 11 milligrams per popover, but it uses 1/2 teaspoon of salt and that's about 1100 milligrams of sodium, and that doesn't count the sodium in the flour, eggs and milk. My Fitness Pal says it is about 145 milligrams of sodium per popover (12 per batch).
I think KAF has an errata page, but I don't recall the link. If you find out, I'll check to see if the sodium level for that recipe has been corrected.
I suspect I can cut the salt at least in half and it won't affect the recipe much. (I once tried Alton Brown's popover recipe, it uses a lot more salt and we thought they were inedible because of the salt level.)
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This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by
Mike Nolan.
These days I always weigh ingredients that are more than an ounce or so using my digital scale. When making some recipes, like the SFBI pie dough, I even weight the salt using a micro scale that weighs in tenth of a gram increments. I also have a third digital scale that weighs in milligrams.
Dinner here was a NY strip steak, with sauteed mushrooms and baked potato, with blackberries for dessert. The margarine and sour cream on the potato were the majority of the sodium in the meal, but it was still fairly low sodium.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by
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