KK Bread Making Tips and Tricks

[tekobo]

44 minutes ago, Pequod said:

Sourdough demi baguettes with fresh milled, ancient grain Kamut harvested from a nearby Egyptian tomb.

Smelly old tomb or not, those baguettes look fantastic.  Bravo P.  

Here is my offering for today.  Two of the loaves were made with cooked porridge and almonds. Yummy toasted lightly.  The third loaf included grated old bread, the heavy seeded rye to be precise.  Yet to cut into it but I am interested in what that does for the taste and texture.  

[tekobo]

11 hours ago, Christinelynn said:

No big clunky things on my counters @Wingman505! There is already a toaster oven that drives me absolutely nuts!!  If it fits in the cabinets, we can talk... 

I am totally with you Christine.  My main kitchen counter is kept clear of any permanent fixtures.  I subscribe to @Syzygies (or his wife's!) set up, with more obtrusive items kept in other rooms for use there or brought into the kitchen when needed. It works well and means you have good kit when you need it but you don't have to look at it all the time.  

[Wingman505]

Holy cow @tekobo @Pequod, that looks amazing!

Edited May 18, 2020 by Wingman505

[MacKenzie]

Tekobo, what awesome looking bread, I wish I was in line for the taste test. 

[tekobo]

Thanks for the reminder about my Pullman tin.  I tried it on one of my seeded loaves.  The result was a less dark and crusty, easy to eat and easy on the eye loaf. It's the one on the left in the second photo.  

 

[MacKenzie]

Lovely looking seeded bread. 

[tekobo]

On 5/18/2020 at 4:29 PM, Pequod said:

Sourdough demi baguettes with fresh milled, ancient grain Kamut harvested from a nearby Egyptian tomb.

Look at that!  I came back to this thread to comment on something that I had learned from @Syzygies.  Had to hunt for the quote and, en route, I saw these pictures of Pequod's.  Not fair.  That looks so good.  Still learning here. 

[tekobo]

On 4/18/2020 at 10:21 AM, Syzygies said:

To give one example of the dozens of issues that a spreadsheet resolves for me: I can change my sourdough starter from 100% hydration to 50% hydration, then back to 80% hydration, without changing the true hydration of my bread recipes. The spreadsheet adjusts for me. I find it mind-boggling how many recipes out there just ignore the hydration of the starter. The authors have no idea what the true hydration is for their recipes.

I  have been doing pretty well with my bread baking.  The loaves rise reliably and folk like the taste.  There was one Tartine No 3 loaf that came out flat as a pancake when I first tried it back in February.  Thought I would try it again last week.  I felt like I was back where I started.  Sticky dough, wouldn't turn out of the banneton easily and it even stuck to the pizza stone in my indoor oven and ripped when I tried to drag it off.  Aaaargh.  It was so bad that I just slipped the loaves straight in the bin.  

Then I remembered Syzygies' comment above about hydration.  The recipe included soaked buckwheat groats and creme fraiche and called for 85% hydration.  Waaaay too much liquid overall.  I tried again the next day, dialling back hydration to 75%.  The perfect loaf.  Not as precise as S's spreadsheet but realising that the author of the cookbook may not have taken into account the variation in the amount of soaking water I might use helped me solve this problem.  And helped to restore The Husband's faith in my breadmaking.    

[Pequod]

15 hours ago, tekobo said:

Look at that!  I came back to this thread to comment on something that I had learned from @Syzygies.  Had to hunt for the quote and, en route, I saw these pictures of Pequod's.  Not fair.  That looks so good.  Still learning here. 

It only looks good because it is. 

15 hours ago, tekobo said:

I  have been doing pretty well with my bread baking.  The loaves rise reliably and folk like the taste.  There was one Tartine No 3 loaf that came out flat as a pancake when I first tried it back in February.  Thought I would try it again last week.  I felt like I was back where I started.  Sticky dough, wouldn't turn out of the banneton easily and it even stuck to the pizza stone in my indoor oven and ripped when I tried to drag it off.  Aaaargh.  It was so bad that I just slipped the loaves straight in the bin.  

Then I remembered Syzygies' comment above about hydration.  The recipe included soaked buckwheat groats and creme fraiche and called for 85% hydration.  Waaaay too much liquid overall.  I tried again the next day, dialling back hydration to 75%.  The perfect loaf.  Not as precise as S's spreadsheet but realising that the author of the cookbook may not have taken into account the variation in the amount of soaking water I might use helped me solve this problem.  And helped to restore The Husband's faith in my breadmaking.    

I know I've name dropped my BFF (Bread Friend Forever) Trevor Jay Wilson here before. Summarizing his mantra: Hydration is for squares. Okay...not really. But his point is: hydration is one of the last things you worry about in perfecting a loaf. For most amateurs (me), dough handling is far more important than hydration. His Champlain Sourdough recipe is only 75% hydration, and yet has a beautifully open crumb if you follow his dough handling techniques. 

[tekobo]

13 hours ago, Pequod said:

It only looks good because it is. 

Laughed out loud.  

On your BFF, he is indeed good and I learned a lot from watching him. My point was less about chasing hydration and more about realising that I needed to use my brain and not assume that a recipe's author had actually taken into account how I soak, drain and handle the dough at my end.  Soooo many variables with bread and I am the biggest one.  

[Pequod]

4 hours ago, tekobo said:

Laughed out loud.  

On your BFF, he is indeed good and I learned a lot from watching him. My point was less about chasing hydration and more about realising that I needed to use my brain and not assume that a recipe's author had actually taken into account how I soak, drain and handle the dough at my end.  Soooo many variables with bread and I am the biggest one.  

Yes, absolutely. And there are great differences between flours and different brands of the “same” flour (e.g. what we call “bread” flour in the US) in terms of water absorption, protein content, etc. Professionals have the advantage of same ingredients, conditions, recipes, every day. We home bakers will never have that level of practice or repeatability. So...that’s my long winded way of nodding up and down. 

[tekobo]

I keep my starter in the fridge and usually refresh it just once before making up my dough.  This weekend it was about three weeks since the last time I refreshed the starter and so I decided to refresh it three times before making up the dough.  What a difference!   My leaven usually floats but it was soooo beautifully light this time. Danced round the kitchen at the sight of this:

Yesterday I made the coriander and carraway loaf from Tartine No 3.  Tonight I made a seeded loaf.  Squashed onto the baking stone from my 23, sitting in my 32.  Looking forward to having a lot more room when I pick up @RokDok's extra baking stone for the 32 which he has kindly said that I can have. 

Cooling.  Looking forward to breakfast tomorrow.

[MacKenzie]

Looking beautiful.  

[RokDok]

19 hours ago, tekobo said:

 Looking forward to having a lot more room when I pick up @RokDok's extra baking stone for the 32 which he has kindly said that I can have. 

Haaa - looking forward to you coming over !

Do get some stout-drinking practice in !!

[David Chang]

i am planning to bake my first sourdough on the 19 kk this week. just to run through what i need to do and please correct me if i'm wrong. 

1. preheat kk to 500f with drip tray on main grate level and upper grate with stone. 

2. after an hour of heating up, place loaf on top of stone. add about 500g of ice in the drip tray.

3. bake for 30-40 min until done. 

i saw in the other thread someone put chains in a cast iron pan. is this necessary?

should i use my guru to maintain temp?

 

thanks.

Edited February 23, 2022 by David Chang

[Syzygies]

11 hours ago, David Chang said:

2. after an hour of heating up, place loaf on top of stone. add about 500g of ice in the drip tray.

3. bake for 30-40 min until done. 

i saw in the other thread someone put chains in a cast iron pan. is this necessary?

should i use my guru to maintain temp?

Hi David,

People have been baking bread since time immoral, and there's no right way. As a student of making bread, I've learned the most from people who are self-taught, such as Chad Robertson. Start out with hints from others, then become self-taught! Advice is most useful when one is stuck. Otherwise, the truths can be discovered by experiment, if they're more than cultural habits.

Commercial bread ovens use substantial steam in the early minutes of baking; the ovens are designed to deliver this steam. It takes a great deal of energy to convert water to steam, and this energy is delivered back to the one cold object in the oven via condensation: The bread. This is obvious if one imagines how it would feel to stick your arm in at this point; wetting the crust is secondary.

In the Bouchon Bakery cookbook, Thomas Keller popularized the idea of creating ample steam in a home oven. Many people are terrible at scale, and were content with a few grams of water from a plant spritzer, so Keller's advice was met in worldwide cooking forums with one of the more amusing and ignorant monkey chatterfests in recent memory. I was more concerned that the rocks he proposed would blow up, so I stuck to his suggestion of a stainless steel chain, along with a heavy aluminum scrap disk from eBay. (Betty Crocker learned to sell cake mixes by letting consumers add an egg; finding this disk on eBay was my egg.) Eventually I ditched the chains and moved the disk from rusty cast iron to an aluminum cake pan.

Skipping the math, steel and aluminum hold far less heat energy by weight than water, and most of the energy in steam is from the transition to steam itself. Put together, each 100g of steam requires much more heated metal to deliver. How much steam does one need? 500g is enough to displace the air inside a KK several times over, probably reaching diminishing returns. Does one even need to displace the air once, or will a mixture of part steam find the bread? This is an empirical question. Commercial ovens are worried about not delivering too much steam; we're worried about delivering enough.

What does your drip pan weigh? What do you estimate the volume of your KK to be? I could redo the math here. But start with less ice! Peek after the steam subsides; if your ice didn't all melt you used too much for your weight of drip pan, risking a now-cold pan bringing down your baking temperature.

Baking bread in a Dutch oven is very popular, and works on somewhat different principles, but is also effective. We just don't like round loaves, but I discovered The Challenger Bread Pan, which supports making shorter batards. One can add a few ice cubes, all that is needed for such a small volume, and have it both ways. Bread bakes first covered then uncovered, diminishing the effects of the fire. We bake bread in the KK summers in part to avoid heating the house (we "sail" the house by changing the air overnight, rather than using A/C), so the KK is still useful here.

One can use a guru to control a KK at bread temperatures. While they make probes with wiring that can withstand the heat, it's easier to just push the probe through the thermometer hole in the dome, controlling how far it goes in with an alligator clip. I tend to do this as a default, as before equilibrium in any cook I'd rather key off the dome temp.

However, this is situational, you'll hear a chorus exclaiming this isn't necessary. Stabilizing a KK at bread temperatures is easy and requires a minuscule amount of intervention. Do you have this attention, or are you off in the kitchen making seven other dishes, or walking the dog while the bread proofs? Your call, try it both ways so you have a choice.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Syzygies

[Syzygies]

I've been exploring a new theory for handling wetter artisanal doughs, in our case with a majority of freshly ground flour: Rethink how and when one adds water, for maximum advantage.

The whole grain flour needs to hydrate, white bread flour less so. It's easier to knead a conventionally less wet dough. Even after sieving, whole grain flour has bran that cuts through gluten like shards of glass.

Putting this together, I hydrate the whole grain flour, setting aside some white bread flour for kneading on the board. I aim for a dough hydration that's easy to conventionally knead on a board, reserving the rest of the water for later kneading in a bowl.

I love the "turn and fold" knead in a bowl, as described by Chad Robertson, but freshly ground flour is a challenge few people face, and I find this kneading by itself insufficient. The "no-knead" crowd isn't lazy; they're just not using my flour. I need all the gluten formation I can manage.

I like to bench knead by rolling out a long rope of dough with my hands, folding it over on itself, making it longer, folding it over, ... This creates a definite grain to the gluten, like the grain in wood. Recall that half of all woodworkers are oblivious to all the issues and opportunities presented by wood grain (ever see an end grain cutting board with a side grain border?). Here, my approach minimizes the damage to the gluten by shards of bran. In my experience, a stand mixer instead maximizes this damage.

I then fold in the remaining water in the bulk rest bowl, and return regularly with wet hands to fold some more. There are limits to how much water one can comfortably add at this stage, so one wants as wet as possible a dough for the bench kneading step. Just not too wet to support conventional kneading, stretching and folding over ropes of dough. One can't do this with sticky glue, so the usual advice for wetter artisanal doughs involves a different kneading technique I don't enjoy. This modification avoids that, and develops better gluten.

Forming the loaves, it is important to work with the gluten to help the loaf hold together. Gently press out a rectangle, then roll to form a batard held together by its gluten structure.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Syzygies

[C6Bill]

I like to keep things simple, if you already know how to make a basic sourdough then using a Dutch over]n, as mentioned above, keeps it really simple. 435 degrees, 30 minutes covered 20 minutes uncovered. Adjust from there,

 

 

[Syzygies]

Those loaves are beautiful.

I tried keeping it simple with freshly ground flour, which is healthier and tastes better. They came out like Colorado cow patties. I had to claim I was making Moroccan bread.

You identify the psychological crux of cooking. On one hand, most technique is unneeded embellishment that one wants to see through, and strip away. On the other hand, a typical day for most of us involves less manual dexterity output than five minutes of practice for a concert pianist. Some time ago I learned not to fear complexity in cooking, and my cooking got better.

I remember cooking for a beach house, with people nursing drinks across the counter. They wondered how I could work for an hour like that. I wondered how they could stay still like that.

The art isn't in minimizing effort, it's in not wasting effort.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Syzygies

[C6Bill]

My issue with baking bread is eating it. If i bake it i want to eat it and then i get fat lol

And I use a BK Dutch Oven, they are lighter weight and don't need to be preheated like a cast iron Dutch Oven.

BK Dutch Oven

 

Oh, i like spending other people's money for a change lol