[Mike Nolan]

I made a chicken dish last night, for lack of anything better I'd call it chicken ragout.

First I sauteed onions, red peppers, pimentos, celery, carrots, potatoes, tomato sauce and some pea pods in butter and a little white wine, added salt, pepper, sage and celery seed and poured it over top of chicken breasts cut into fairly large pieces, covered it with aluminum foil and baked it in the oven for about an hour.

Makes great leftovers, and the sauce is great with my freshly baked bread.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I messed up the 6 strand braid, unwound it as far as I could, and redid it, but it still wound up a bit mis-shaped, though not badly so. One or more two tries on the recipe and then I'll post it, maybe by then I'll have a picture-perfect loaf too.

I need to have my son bring a couple of loaves from McGinnis Sisters when he comes to visit this summer, so I can comparison-taste. (Of course it isn't a true taste test unless he also brings some of their famous spinach dip, even if it does have garlic in it.)

[Mike Nolan]

Well, I've watched the video about 6 times, done it twice with my macrame practice strands, so I think I'm going to try a six-strand braid on the semolina bread I make tomorrow.

I'm still tweaking the BBGA recipe, but it's getting REAL close to the bread at McGinnis Sisters in Pittsburgh!

[Mike Nolan]

I saw a recipe a while back that had a soaker, a pre-ferment and also called for a cup of sourdough starter. Too complicated for me!

The rules for the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie permit but do not require the contestants to make a biga the day before the competition. I assume most of them do.

[Mike Nolan]

Bread is a series of trade-offs, time for flavor. There are subtle differences in what happens in a starter (like a biga or a poolish) versus retarded fermentation, there's more enzyme and bacteria action going on in the latter, the longer it sits around the more it starts to develop sourdough-like characteristics. I don't think it would be wrong to say that sourdough is the ultimate in retarded fermentation, as it represents the longest point on the time-for-flavor scale.

Does it make a BIG difference? You'd probably have to run side-by-side tests to see if you can even tell which is which.

When I was testing the baguette recipes for Peter Reinhart's 'Artisan' book, I tried delayed fermentation periods of up to 7 days. (After about 7 days the dough got funky, 1 of 3 test batches had to be tossed out on day 6 because I no longer trusted it.)

After about 4 days, the dough and resulting bread took on characteristics similar to a sourdough, with a slight tang in the taste. I thought the bread was best after about 48 hours of retarded fermentation, my wife and son couldn't detect any significant differences. The dough felt different, though, and I think there were differences in the crust as well.

[Mike Nolan]

We have a bakery with French-trained bakers in town that imports #55 flour from France and bakes it in a steam injection deck oven they imported from Italy. According to the people in the local French club their sourdough baguettes are as good as what you will find in most of the boulangeries in Paris. I agree that it's VERY good, my wife thinks it's a bit too sour for her. Their crust is incredible, you just can't duplicate what a good steam injection oven can do at home.

But they've been unwilling to sell flour to folks, they'd rather sell the bread. There's a place in California that sells #55 French flour in 2 kilo bags, but with shipping it gets kind of pricey.

[Mike Nolan]

Aaron, have you checked with the restaurant supply folks to see if clear flour is available in bulk?

As I recall, when my ex-neighbor checked on it, GM had it in 50 pound bags in the eastern US and on the west coast, but not in the central US. (Unless I wanted to order a pallet--40 bags.)

Stover & Company (Pittsburgh area restaurant supplier) has Bay State Milling clear flour in 50 pound bags. Star of the West Milling also sells clear flour.

It is not quite the same as adding bran to flour, clear flour has a yellow tint that make it almost cream colored. That's not a problem when making rye bread.

I've added rye chops to rye dough, it adds a crunch like cracked wheat.

[Mike Nolan]

Ask 10 bakers how to make rye bread and you'll probably get 15 or more methods. 🙂

I haven't been to Seattle, so I don't know what their sourdough is like. Not all San Francisco sourdough breads are really sour, it depends on the mix of bacteria in the mother culture. I suggest reading Chad Robertson's Tartine Bakery books for procedures for making a sourdough that isn't oppressively sour.

For what it's worth, my wife can't tolerate the sourdough breads that I buy from local bakeries here in Nebraska because it is way too sour, but she handles many San Francisco sourdoughs just fine when we've been out there.

[Mike Nolan]

To be honest, I'm not sure what an altus does or what's happening chemically, I just know that it makes a big difference in the bread.

[Mike Nolan]

I thought Autocad had an auto-save feature in it, like Word does. Maybe you need to do one 'save' just to get it started?

I've lost track of the number of things I lost in 40+ years as a programmer due to programs failing or related problems.

[Mike Nolan]

If you start with a cup of dry rye bread, you will probably need to add about a quarter cup of water, maybe up to a half cup. It'll expand as it soaks up the water, then press the remaining water out. (I've used a potato masher to do that.)

[Mike Nolan]

I watched that segment of Deli Man about a dozen times one evening, and I had figured out the part about thinning the center of 3 strands and pinching them together to essentially make six strands for braiding, with one end already pinched down. I'll have to watch the video you just posted a link to and see if I can duplicate it with my macrame practice strands, I'm not sure the one in the film is the same as the classic 6 strand braid.

From what I've heard from people who live in SF, Wise Brothers is a fantastic place. I think I was there once, some years ago, when I took a meandering walk from the Moscone Center back to my hotel near Union Square. (At least the pix on the web look familiar.)

[Mike Nolan]

I did some looking around and although I don't have a lot of resources on sourdough, I don't see anything in any of them that suggests an autolysis step. Not sure why.

[Mike Nolan]

I recently read an article that said salt and yeast co-exist just fine as long as you don't do something like dump salt into a container of proofing yeast. That wasn't as true with cake yeast, but today's active dry or instant yeasts are less sensitive. (Of course if you quadruple the salt, as I did once, you'll get an inedible brick.)

Anyway, the point to autolysis, at least according to its originator, is to let enzymes go to work on the flour, which helps the yeast access the sugar in the flour later on. If you add yeast you're basically making a preferment, like a biga or a poolish. That's a good thing to do, too, but it invokes different biological processes and leads to different (though good) results.

I've seen a number of recipes that use a preferment AND autolysis, and even a few that use a preferment, autolysis and a mash or soaker. (A mash, as I understand it, involves heat, a soaker stays at room temperature.)

Cass, I'm sorry your article didn't post properly, I'm not sure what went wrong. It doesn't seem likely that it would have run afoul of the anti-spam filter. (According to the logs, the anti-spam filter I use has filtered out over 400 spam posts this month!)

[Mike Nolan]

The weather here has turned quite cool, temps in the 40's and rainy, so I made a cheese souffle for supper tonight and we're planning on a pot roast for tomorrow.

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