Loaf for tonight

Idea: Bake a light rye without sourdough but with big flavor and good shelf-life.

Light Rye

Rye Poolish

• 80g rye flour
• 120g warm water
• 8g honey
• 6g fresh yeast or 1/2 tsp dried yeast

Let ferment for one hour

Stale-Bread-Soaker

• 25g stale rye bread, chopped
• 120g hot water

Mix and let sit for about an hour.

For the final dough:
Dough

• Stale-Bread-Soaker
• Rye poolish
• 320g strong white flour (here: Type 550)
• 40-100g warm water to make a soft dough
• 10g salt

Bulk Fermentation: 1 hour, fold once after 30 minutes.
Final Fermentation: 45-70g minutes.

Bake at at 250°C for 5 minutes, then reduce heat to 220°C and bake for further 45-50 minutes. Optional: Sprinkle with coarsely ground barley malt before putting it into the oven.

I’m happy with the results. The new oven’s heat seems a little kinder and less aggressive than the old one, but is doing a good job of trapping the heat and moisture inside.

The finished loaf:

And in other news…

…I have a working oven! Yay!

New loaf tonight starting here (or scroll down below stickies).

German bakers sue Aldi

According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung German bakers have filed a lawsuit against Aldi Süd. Officially it’s about their false declaration of Aldi’s “Roggenmischbrot”, which needs to have at least 50% of rye in it, but apparently has not.

But of course the emergence of Aldi’s new baking shop system with fully-automated ovens that produce warm bread and rolls by a customer’s press of a button, is bound to make some German bakers unhappy as well.

That is a no-brainer. If the customer can have oven fresh bread for a lower price and does not find that the “German craft bakery” produces better bread, German bakers need to act, but not by going to court, in my opinion. If they cannot compete with an Aldi roll, it’s not Aldi’s or the market’s fault. Quite a few bakers are following the “light, quick, profitable” trend and have already taken it to pathological extremes. An “ordinary breakfast roll” from the typical “craft bakery” has never been produced quicker, has never been bigger and fluffier and has never weighed less. And it never tasted worse.

The site of the Association of German bakers sports the slogan “Besser, wir backen das Brot” – “You’re better off if you let us do the bread baking”. It seems to me the proof for that assertion needs to be rewritten again.

Oven died

Either I was getting too close to the inner secrets of true artisan baking and the gods had to punish me or it was just a matter of time before it had to happen. Either way, my oven cratered. It blew the main fuse and now it can reach 150°C maximum.

Hey, I still can reheat rice and lasagne. Stay tuned for recipes on how to transform food from the fridge into a perfectly warm dish.

If anyone wants to know, the oven was a low-end Siemens, probably built in late 90s. Considering that it was used for things it wasn’t designed for sometimes twice a week for the last couple of years…thumbs up! Parting with it would be a sad thing.

I still have my pizza oven. Woot!

Brushed up

My blog hibernation resulted in increased productivity. My baguettes are currently going through changes as I am trying a new technique of steaming. I find this very interesting, bordering on exciting.

In a brave effort to achieve the results of a professional bread oven, I have tried numerous approaches to make better baguettes, the last one being brushing the tops of the loaves with water in the first minutes of the bake. The results were quite flat loaves with a gray, dull and soft crust. The loaves flattening is an indicator for reduced surface tension, so that was something useful, because baguettes tightening up and becoming almost perfectly round is a common problem in domestic ovens.

The latest change made the difference. Apply water along the slashes of the baguettes for about 4-5 times for the first 5-8 minutes of the bake. Overdoing it will result in unattractive crusts, but using a brush that has only touched the surface of water and wetting only the inside of the slashes, i.e. the dough that is rising out of the center of the uncooked dough, turns even slack doughs into fluffy baguettes. I never had success with yeasted poolishes until now, first picture is such a dough.

Well, ideally. there are fine points because nature is not cheap like that and it’s not self-working. I admit this is not pretty nor elegant, either, it’s a trick. But since I found the results so remarkable I had to inform everyone.

Zeb (Joanna) from Zeb Bakes was kind enough to try it, cf. her blog post. Thanks a lot, Zeb.

(Probably going to add to this post over the next days or weeks.)

German coffee roasters and price rigging

The German Cartel Office has, again, fined a few of the biggest German coffee roasters to a total of 30,000,000 Euros because of price rigging. Among the fined are

• Tchibo
• J.J. Darboven
• Melitta
• Kraft Foods
• Seeberger
• Westhoff
• Lavazza, Germany
• Segafredo Zanetti, Germany

The roaster Dallmayr went without fine because of self-denunciation.

Source: Financial Times Deutschland

…rather gives the term “Frühstückskartell” (“breakfast cartel”, literally) a second meaning.

Background: Firms that agree with each other, either formally or informally, to sell goods to a certain price, consequently undermining the free market are guilty of “price rigging”, an illegal operation in Germany.

Baker’s math – a handful of practical examples

A bit of number crunching is a baker’s daily business. Here are a few calculations I feel myself forced to use rather frequently (except the last one, which is more of a very theoretical nature). Note that these calculations do not work for volumes like cups (or handfuls, gills or shovels) but only for weight / mass measures. I like to use g and kg, but if you prefer ounces, stones, atomic mass or any weight unit, fine. Weight reflects the number of molecules of the ingredients that connect with each other. Volume doesn’t.

Straightforward scaling, etc.

1. How do I calculate the hydration of a dough?

Answer: Hydration is given by weight of water to weight of flour (and all other dry mass that will bind water except salt and yeast). Example: The recipe uses 600g of flour and 400g of water. The hydration is 400 / 600 = 2/3 = 0.666… = 67%. Note that liquids in general are not 100% water. Full fat milk for example has about 87% of water. When calculating hydrations, you have to take this into account where large amounts of it are used.

2. I got a recipe from the internet that uses X grams of flour but I want make a loaf using Y grams flour. How to fix this?

Answer: Scale every ingredient with factor X / Y. Example: The recipe calls for 700g of flour, but you want to use 500g of flour. Multiply every weight in the recipe with 500 / 700 = 5 / 7 = 0.71…

3. I made a dough with a hydration of X %. If I use Y lb. of flour, how much dough will I have not taking into account salt, yeast and all other small quantities?

Answer: You will have exactly (1 + X/100)*Y lb. of dough. Example: Hydration is 68% and 1 lb. of flour is used. This will yield 1.68 * 1 lb = 1.68 lb. = 1 lb. 10.9 oz. = 762g of dough.

More hydrations

4. I have a recipe here that uses a hydration of X %. I want to have exactly Y kg of dough, neglecting salt, yeast and other small quantities. How much flour do I need?

Answer: You will need Y / (1 + X/100) of flour. Example: Recipe has hydration of 70% and you want to make 300g of dough. Flour needed is given by 300g / 1.7 = 176.4g.

5. I wanted to make a dough with X % hydration and used Y g of flour. Now I accidentally added Z g of water, which is way too much. Since I can’t take out the water, how much flour do I add now to get the correect hydration?

Answer: You will have to add (Z / X) – Y of flour. Example: 500g of flour is in the bowl and you want 65% hydration. You accidentally added 430g of water, which is too much. Then you must add (430g / 0.65) – 500g = 162g of flour.

Further playful examples

6. During baking dough for a medium-sized loaf of bread will lose 20% of its own weight. I am using a hydration of X % and need the baked loaf to weigh Y g. How much flour do I need for such a loaf?

Answer: You will need (1 / 0.8) * Y / (1 + X/100)) lb. of flour. Example: You want 750g loaves and are using a hydration of 71%. You will need (1 / 0.8) * 750g / 1.71 = 548g of flour.

7. I want to test the effect of a specific ingredient on height of finished loaf of bread baked in a rectangular tin (which then is a measure for dough volume). I have made 8 different loaves using the following quantities of the ingredient: 0%, 2%, 4%, 6%, 8%, 10%, 12% and 14%. I have measured the height and have the feeling the greatest height is somewhere in the middle, but where is it exactly?

Answer: If the greatest height is somewhere in the middle you probably have results like shown in the picture below. Even with such a small amount of samples it is possible to graphically determine the maximum by drawing the resulting curve. In this case the best bread volume would be at around 5% of the ingredient.