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I think the concept of yeast getting 'exhausted' or using up all the sugars in the flour is more myth than reality. I once tried making a bread where I let it bulk rise for about an hour 5 times, it was still rising fine, and the bread was excellent, a very complex flavor.
I've also made breads where the dough sat in the refrigerator for several days, taking out just what you need to make bread that day. I thought that on day 2 it had the best flavor, by day 4 it started to take on some characteristics of a sourdough, with a bit of a sourdough tang to it.
Punching the dough down every day is probably a good idea.
There are some pizza parlors that age their dough for 48 hours before baking it.
According to researchers, what happens on a microscopic level with whole grain breads is that the sharp edges in the bran cut the forming gluten chains, so you don't get a big gluten net to hold in air.
Peter Reinhart's Whole Grains Breads book has a number of 100% whole grain breads, but also a number of transition breads with increasing amounts of whole grain flours. The Broom Bread recipe in that book is 100% whole grain, it is excellent and rises fairly well, but it takes a long rise.
With whole grain breads you have to knead longer and allow extra rising time.
Another possibility is to add extra gluten by adding some vital gluten.
If gluten isn't your problem, you could also try some rye or barley flour recipes, they have some gluten but not as much as wheat flour. I found a 100% rye flour recipe online a few years ago, it takes some practice to not get a brick but it is still fairly dense, like a firm pumpernickel.
Welcome to My Nebraska Kitchen.
Today I made a big pot of chicken noodle soup, the only salt I added was 1/8 teaspoon in the noodles. The stock was from my freezer, and may have had some salt in it, but not a lot.
I used pepper, thyme, sage, dill, parsley and basil.
I used some chicken breasts from the freezer, I think it would have been more flavorful if it had some dark meat. I'm going to try adding some mushrooms to half of it for tomorrow.
Dinner tonight was boneless pork chops, with an orange-cranberry raisin sauce.
Agreed, a very nice looking star bread.
I will certainly report anything interesting, but I've been substituting herbs and spices for years as a workaround for my wife's garlic allergy. I find marjoram is a good herb, it isn't an overpowering flavor and its unfamiliar enough to most people that it adds interest. It's a close cousin of oregano (but milder, imho), and is often paired with it.
I've been experimenting with savory, but in small quantities. (Winter savory is different from summer savory, too.)
I've been using a lot of dill weed with fish, I really like a dill/lemon/butter sauce on a mild fish, like cod or salmon. I have some more exotic spices that I plan to start playing with.
I like nutmeg on meat (and one of the original uses for nutmeg was as a meat preservative), but it can get overpowering and too much nutmeg can cause problems, nutmeg induced hallucinations have been reported. My wife doesn't care for nutmeg as much, so I use it very lightly.
My food tastes aren't really 'haute cuisine' either. I think many restaurant foods have too many ingredients in them and aren't properly sauced. (I'm not a big fan of balsamics.)
Restaurants, snacks and prepared foods are probably the biggest things I'll have to cut back on, plus things like sausages and cheeses. Cutting back on restaurants won't be that hard, we don't eat out much because of my wife's garlic allergy anyway. I don't think I use that much salt when cooking (certainly not as much as CIA recipes do), cutting back a little shouldn't be too hard. There's little or no salt in my stocks and soups, for example. Increasing some other herbs and spices will help take the place of salt as a flavoring.
I'm also looking at some variant on the Mediterranean diet, though neither of us like things cooked in/with olive oil and processed olives are high in sodium. But I'll be looking into using more whole grains in my baking.
I honestly think limiting myself to 48 ounces of fluids a day could be a bigger challenge.
Wow, you were busy, Luvpyrpom!
I haven't cooked or baked anything in over a week, because we were in Orlando for a Disney family Christmas. Instead, we sampled some of Orlando's great restaurants, including Morimoto's and the Brown Derby in Disney's Hollywood park. My waistline shows the results.
I also caught a cold that is trying to morph into a sinus infection, so I'm on antibiotics and the Chicken Soup diet for the next few days. Good thing we have no plans for New Year's Eve.
If space and money weren't a problem (which they always are), I'd look at a 12 quart mixer, but I doubt I'd use it very much, these days a full batch of Double Crusty Bread or Challah is about as much dough as I make at one time.
When I went to pastry school at SFBI, our instructor said that the most expensive ingredient we used all week was pistachio paste, even more expensive than the gold foil we decorated some pastries with.
If you ever get a chance to tour an industrial bread operation (I've done it twice), jump at the chance. It is truly eye-opening to see loaves of bread as far as the eye can see. But what you really want to watch for is how they do quality control. (And they won't generally talk about that much, for good reason, also because it's not very interesting except to another baker.)
A commercial bakery of the size you've worked in (600 loaves/day is a fairly big shop) has access to a few ingredients (types and grades of flour, for example) that we don't really have access to at home, as well as a few pieces of equipment, like a 40 quart mixer, tightly controlled environment proofers and steam injection ovens, but I think a good home baker can do about 95% of what those bakeries can do.
Dough behaves differently in a 40 quart mixer than at home, but mostly that's a matter of limiting over-oxidation of the dough while working it more evenly. Proofing in an 80/80 box (80% humidity at 80 degrees) is a little tricky to match at home, and there's no substitute for that steam lever, but I think I can get close enough that I'd stack some of my best efforts against any bakery in town.
Peter Reinhart talks about the batch of bread that won his prize as being magical, and that magic is something I try to achieve every time I bake, and it really only gets magical once every few weeks.
The bakery I would almost pay to work at for a week is Chad Robertson's Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. His books are delightful to read and his bread is out of this world on an average day and almost a religious experience on a day when the magic happens.
Where the home baker fails is consistency. A commercial bakery HAS to be consistent, because customers demand it, but some days it's just better than others. Our families will eat what we bake for them even if we miss the mark from time to time. (Ï'm not sure my wife even notices when I slightly under-proof or over-proof dough or when the baking is just a tad short or over, though I do.)
I've probably only thrown away loaves of bread around 20 times over the years, and some of those were experimental recipes. My wife will never forget the time I (apparently) put in 4X the salt instead of 1 part salt and 3 part sugar in an Austrian Malt bread. But to be fair, I remember the time she tried to make an angel food cake using powdered sugar instead of cake flour, and we both remember her first attempt to bake me an angel food cake 45 years ago, when neither of us knew that the lower element in the oven in our apartment wasn't working, so essentially she baked it under the broiler.
Of all the books I have on baking bread, Hamelman's book does the best job of translating what happens in a commercial scale bakery into the home.
What has always amazed me about small scale bakeries is the breadth of their daily output, not only do they do dozens of loaves of several types of bread every day but also several dozen types of donuts plus cookies, rolls, brownies, cakes and pies.
When we were first married there were two incredible bakeries in Evanston Illinois, and at least one of them, Bennisons, is still there and still going strong, though under different ownership. Their lead baker is truly a master baker, and he has the Couple du Monde cup in his window to prove it. I'd stage for a week under Jory Downer at the drop of a hat, too, in fact he's the reason I joined the Bread Baker's Guild of America. Just being a member of an organization that has bakers like Jory, and Peter Reinhart and Jeff Hamelman is worth the $85 annual dues to me, though their quarterly newsletter is also worth the annual dues.
I've got beef stock, chicken stock, brown chicken stock (the bones are roasted first), turkey stock, duck stock, goose stock, veal stock and demi-glace all in the freezer, plus beef shank bones, beef neck bones, beef knuckle bones and veal shank bones for mid-winter stock making. (Nothing heats up the house better when it gets cold and snowy than simmering stock overnight.) Might be a ham bone or two, too.
Most of the stocks are in relatively small containers, a cup or less, so that I can add them to recipes. (Ikea makes some very good containers for this.) But I do have a few 3-4 quart containers of beef and chicken stock, so that I can make soup, which I usually make in 8-10 quart increments.
I've also got frozen soups: Vegetable Beef, French Onion Soup and Chili. There might still be some ham and bean soup left, too, but I think we ate up the last of the chicken noodle soup. (Found out the hard way that chicken and dumpling soup doesn't freeze well, the dumplings just fall apart.)
Tupperware makes an 8 1/2 cup round container that I wish they sold separately, that's just about the perfect size for soup for two for a meal plus a little left over for lunch the next day.
That's not a question that can be answered in a few words. In general, a portion of the flour, liquid and yeast in the recipe is replaced by some of the sourdough starter, but getting a starter to that point is complex and the timing of the recipe will need to be adjusted as well.
I've written many times about the tradeoff between time and flavor. Sourdough breads to me represent taking that tradeoff to the maximum.
The simple answer is no. If you've ever toured a commercial bread factory (no way you can call it a bakery), you'd know why. They have access to ingredients (including types of flour) and processes we don't. Their unbaked bread doesn't look anything like yours, why should you expect it to bake up anything like yours?
That being said, good technique will help your doughs achieve larger volume and greater flavor. And IMHO the latter is more important than the former. Unless you really like Wonder Bread.
Read Jeff Hamelman's book where he goes through the stages of making good bread. I find I tend to skip or minimize several steps, especially the short rest between scaling/preshaping and final shaping. The type of mixing/kneading you do also has a big impact on the final result.
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