Flat bread

Sometimes we just love stealing some dough from the batch we prepared for our weekly bread baking, turn it into a flat round, throw a few toppings on top of it – here: tomato sauce, artichokes, radicchio, cheese – and bake it on the hot stone. In this case we ended up with a whole-wheat-sourdough-crust pizza, and it was pretty awesome indeed! The bread turned out okay, too.

For the dough:

Starter
100 g water
100 g whole wheat flour
tsp of sourdough culture

Soaker
200 g water
100 g whole wheat flour
100 g cracked rye

Final dough
Starter and Soaker
360 g water
550 g flour (whole wheat and all purpose – 50/50)
18 g salt

Quick and Dirty

I was in a bit of a dilemma not long ago. I had to bake something as a treat for my colleagues at work, but didn't really have the time to babysit a loaf for a couple of days (which is how long one of our loaves usually takes from mixing to baked loaf).

We all know that when one is in a bit of a tight spot, one can always rely on IKEA to have an answer for everything and a solution for all our problems. Let me explain: There is a multigrain bread mix (the aptly named Brödmix Flerkorn) that every IKEA store carries in their Food Market section; you just have to add water to it, wait for about 45 minutes, then bake it for one hour, et voilà! you end up with a fresh loaf of awesome Swedish bread.

Well, more or less ...

I've tried this mix once in the past and, while I haven't been too excited about the results, I would agree that it is a lot better than almost any bread commercially available in North America.

Somehow though, for the purpose of my baking this treat for work, the IKEA bread mix came to mind. Maybe the fact that I drive past an IKEA store on my way to work every day has something to do with it. In any event, I decided to give it another try, but I also wanted to improve on it a little bit. The mix itself, as indicated on the tetra-pack box, contains wheat flour, wheat flakes, rye flakes, coarse rye flour, sunflower kernels, flax seed, malt, and a few other yummy things that are good for you. I decided to add some (actually it ended up being lots of) dried fruit into the mix to make a nice, dark fruit loaf, that would go really well with some nice butter.

I figured I would need to add a bit more water than the 600 ml the original instructions call for, as well as a little amount of white flour, to help keep it all together. This is what I came up with:

1 IKEA bread mix (700 g)
100 g white flour
700 g water
570 g dried fruit (I just happened to have in the house):

200 g raisins
230 g chopped dates
140 g currants

I mixed everything just to incorporation, poured it in an oiled pan (it's a very liquidy affair), let it rise for about 45 minutes, and baked it at 400F for an hour and a half.

A few notes on baking and storing/consuming:

1. Lately we have discovered that if you bake in a pan it's a good idea to cover your pan with another (identical) pan and bake it that way half way through. It makes for really nice crust, because the top pan preserves all the moisture inside during the crucial first part of the baking process. Furthermore, the top part of the loaf stays moist and elastic during the oven spring stage to a degree where one doesn't need to score the loaf at all.
2. With this type of loaves, very heavy, rich in rye flour, and short fermentation/proofing times, it's possible to place the loaf into a cold oven and then crank the oven up to the desired temperature. This makes for a period of "forced" proofing just before the actual baking begins.
3. I have baked this loaf on a Sunday and cut into it the next Friday. This has allowed for proper aging. With this kind of heavy, rich loaves it is very beneficial to the overall flavour profile.

And a final note to all the IKEA bigwigs: If you're sitting in a corporate boardroom right now wondering how come the IKEA multigrain bread mix sales have taken such a sharp upturn, this is where you should send your cheques.

Enjoy.

Panettone

After trying my hand at baking Stollen earlier this season, I found myself hooked on baking traditional holiday breads, and 'Tis, the Season justifies pretty much anything...

Second Set: Panettone. The baking of this sweet Italian bread is extra thrilling and exciting, because the original recipe calls for a natural starter (or wild yeast). It is quite the process, producing the loaves, and it requires time; lots of it. You'll pretty much have to dedicate two whole days to this, but it's definitely worth it. As is usually the case with baking, you will have plenty of time to go about your daily business, and only once in a while you will need to take short breaks and come back to play with your beautiful dough.

The recipe I followed I got off of the Wild Yeast blog; and I am very grateful to Susan for sharing this superb formula and the detailed steps involved in the process. I made quite a few people happy by sharing some of my special bread. So, thank you, Susan! I found her post very helpful, and the pictures she took of her loaves and her crumb made me even more eager to attempt it myself. I had been trying for a while now to find a recipe that incorporated a sourdough starter, but found that probably as many as 90 percent of the recipes out there are using commercial yeast exclusively.

I would have loved my Panettones to have risen about an extra inch or so, and at first, when I took them out of the hot oven, I was almost a little bit disappointed with their oven spring. And to make matters worse, I managed to drop one while I was hanging them upside down to let them cool overnight. But the delicate and heavenly smell made it all better... Well, and all was forgiven and forgotten the next morning, when I cut into one of the loaves: The structure of the crumb was very beautiful, they smelled incredible and where melting in my mouth. The three loaves of Panettone I got out of this bake were probably the most rewarding thing I have ever baked so far. 

I wouldn't be able to describe the process better than Susan already did in her post, so I won't give you the formula, but rather will include the link to her page, as well as to her more recent (revised) Panettone notes. These were published just after I had baked my very first batch, last weekend, but since I am planning on baking a second batch this coming weekend (just in time for Christmas), I am very excited to improve my results by following Susan's notes.

Oh, and by the way, while I am writing this post, I'm sitting in my kitchen candying some fresh orange and lemon peel, that will go straight into my Panettone. Mmmmm... I'm already looking forward to next year's Christmas.

Submitted to YeastSpotting.

In Preparation for Christmas

We just had the first serious snowfall of the season; it came down last night. Add that to all the Christmas preparations I was making during the past days, and it really felt like the first day of Advent today.

On my day off, Friday, I finally managed to bake the stollen I was so looking forward to for the past few weeks. The marzipan having been already made beforehand, was sitting in the fridge, just waiting to be used. I had found a recipe for candied orange peel on a dear friends amazing blog (in German only). Just knowing that I would have to work with the marzipan and the candied orange peel made baking the Christmassy loaf so much more exciting!

Stollen is a traditional German fruit cake or holiday bread made with lots and lots of dried and candied fruit, almonds and spices, often containing marzipan, and covered with a thick layer of icing sugar, reminding one of a snow covered landscape. It is a bread only eaten during the Christmas season, but baked a few weeks ahead of time, so that it can properly age, stored in a cool, dark place. This is probably one of the main aspects of the stollen tradition. Strictly speaking, I might be already a little late baking it, but, to my mind, two to three weeks are still plenty of time for it to age and to develop all its unique flavours.

In my baking I am a big fan of long and slow fermentation. That is why I decided to use a poolish when baking my stollen (prepared 12 to 16 hours ahead), instead of the more traditional yeast sponge, which only gets to ferment for a couple of hours. For the rest of the recipe I did some research, and ended up developing my own, combining information from a few different sources. The dough turned out super nice, pretty soft and sticky with all that butter and marzipan in it. When I was ready to shape it, I managed to achieve a beautiful stollen loaf, but I was pretty sure that it wouldn't hold its shape during the bake. And sadly, I was right. In my opinion it turned out somewhat too flat; but anyway, it's still very, very beautiful!

While the dough was proofing and later, as the loaf was baking, I had enough time on my hands to clean up the mess in my kitchen, make an Advent wreath from some fir branches I had bought at the market, and to fold a few paper snow flakes. And today, after taking a two-day break from the whole stollen business, I had tons of fun covering my stollen with plenty of icing sugar and giving it a similar look to the lanscape outside my window after a snowy winter's night.

Usually you are not allowed to cut into the stollen as early as I did, since it really needs to be allowed to age for a few weeks, as I already mentioned above. Well, I made an exception because I am sending half of it overseas, to Florin, one of the biggest stollen fans in Canada!

For one large Christmas Stollen

Poolish (allow to ferment at room temperature for about 12 to 16 hours )

125 gr bread flour
125 gr water
1 gr yeast

Final dough

275 gr bread flour
125 gr milk
5 gr yeast
1 tbs honey
poolish
150 gr marzipan paste, grated
200 gr butter
1 organic lemon
1/2 vanilla bean
5 gr salt

Nuts and fruit mixture 

500 gr raisins/currants mixture, soaked over night in either rum or apple juice
55 gr almond slices, soaked for about 10 min in hot water
110 gr candied lemon and orange peel

Option for the filling

extra 100 gr marzipan paste

For the finish

250 gr butter, melted
refined sugar
icing sugar

Put all your flour in a large mixing bowl and form a little well in the middle. Add the yeast into the well, then add the lukewarm milk and the honey. Stir in some of the flour, put the mixing bowl aside, cover with a tea towel and let it sit for about half an hour. Now add the poolish, the grated marzipan paste, 200 gr from the soft butter, the grated zest from one organic lemon and the vanilla. Mix all your ingredients until well incorporated, then do a 30 minutes autolyse. Now add the salt and do the kneading until the dough is properly developed. Don't despair, it will be pretty wet and sticky, and all the fat will make it even harder on you. After the dough is developed, gently incorporate the nuts and fruit mixture (carefully drained to avoid adding too much extra liquid to the dough). If you don't like working with extra wet dough, go ahead and add a little extra flour. Give the dough about two hours to proof until it almost doubles in size. Shape the stollen on a lightly floured work surface and in the process add another 100 grams of marzipan paste shaped into a strip, down the middle of your stollen loaf. Preheat the oven to 390 F, bake at that temperature for the first 15  minutes, then drop it to 350 F and bake it for another hour. To avoid it turning too dark, cover with aluminium foil for the final 30 minutes.

After taking the stollen out of the hot oven, brush it immediately with about 250 grams of melted butter, then toss with plenty of refined sugar. Let the loaf cool down over night properly before dusting it with a thick layer of icing sugar. Wrap in aluminum foil and store it in a cool, dark place for at least two weeks before cutting into it.

For YeastSpotting!

Vinschger Paarln

Vinschgauer or Vinschger Paarln are palm-sized, round flat breads that mostly come in pairs that can be torn apart. It's a specialty from South Tyrol, a bread mostly made with rye flour and spices, such as fennel seeds, caraway, and bird clover (birdsfoot fenugreek). I should add that bird clover is a bread spice typical of that region, and very hard to come by. If you can't get any, just leave it out; the fennel seeds and the fenugreek should add enough distinctive flavour to this bread.

Baking Vinschger Paarln was something I was planning for quite a while, since I really love their very particular taste. Finding a source for birdsfoot fenugreek was a little bit of a challenge, but in the end I was able to locate some in one of the many organic grocery shops, here in Wiesbaden, Germany. I am curious to see where I will find my source in Vancouver, once I'm back.

Anyway, today was the day, and I was eager to try out my adapted version from a formula I had found on the official info South Tyrolean website. Rather than using only commercial yeast, as the recipe suggested, I wanted to bake sourdough-based Vinschgauer. They turned out pretty nice, with a soft and moist crumb, lots of flavour, from all the spices, and due to the high amount of rye flour, they stayed fresh for a few days. That is also why the Vinschgerl are traditionally considered good companions on longer hikes. A perfect pairing for this kind of bread would be some aromatic mountain cheeses from the Alps, or plain butter.

For four pairs of Vinschgauer

200 gr ripe rye sourdough culture
250 gr rye flour
140 gr bread flour
450 gr water
10 gr yeast
10 gr salt
5 gr fennel seeds
3 gr caraway
2–3 gr bird clover/birdsfoot fenugreek

Grind the fennel seeds, caraway, and the birdsfoot fenugreek using a mortar and pestle, then mix all your ingredients, except for the salt, in a large mixing bowl. Let rest for about 30 minutes for the autolyse. Now add the salt and start kneading. You won't see much dough development, since there isn't a lot of gluten present in the rye flour. The dough will feel like a pasty mass. Let it rest for about 45 minutes at room temperature, then divide into eight equal pieces of dough (at about 130 grams each). Shape the pieces into rounds. Since the dough is super wet and sticky, flour your hands with plenty of rye flour and dust your work surface generously. Transfer the rounds as pairs on a baking tray with parchment paper, let them proof at room temperature for another 60 minutes or until you can see their floured skin showing a web of fine cracks. That is a sign that they are ready for baking. Bake them in a preheated oven at 450 Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes.

Submitted to Yeastspotting. 

Baking at the Emporium

After a little bit of a break over the summer, I held my first workshop of the (rainy) season a couple of weeks ago at the Homesteader's Emporium on East Hastings in Vancouver. I say "I held", because Lisa, who is my helper and my inspiration when it comes to our "academic" endeavours, is for the time being (and for a little while longer) still in Germany. Alas, such are the crosses we all have to bear!

Rick and I had been talking about a bread baking class at his place for quite a while, and on November 4, we finally were able to fit one in our oh-so-busy schedules. The workshop went extremely well, we all had some very good interactions, we learned a thing or two, and, above all, we had lots of fun. In fact, what struck me (and what I so easily tend to forget sometimes), is how much fun these workshops always are for us. If there is something I miss from my bakery days, it's the interactions I had with my customers: the chats, the discussions, and even the heated debates that would sometimes ensue. I (and we) get some of that back when we teach our workshops, and it is heartwarming to see how much people enjoy taking these classes, and afterwards sending us photos of their loaves, staying in touch, reading this blog, etc.

We are going to try to stay active on that front throughout this fall and winter, and hopefully into the late spring. In the next little while, we are looking forward to a series of four beginners workshops at UBC Farm (on November 21, December 13, January 23, and February 20), with three more to follow in the spring, when we plan to do at least one advanced workshop.

I would like to finish by thanking Shannon, Nicole, and Elton for sending me photos of their baked loaves (Can you believe those beauties?) and allowing me to share them with everyone. A special thank you also goes to Erin, who has had some very kind words about my workshop on her own blog (Erin at Large). I really like the part where she calls me "unfussy".

And finally, a very special tip of the hat to Rick Havlak the owner of the Homesteader's Emporium. I met Rick last year, when he was still in the process of opening his shop. He was on a quest to take as many homesteading workshops as he could in as short a time as humanly possible. At least that was my impression of him. In the meantime, he has opened his place at 649 East Hastings Street, and he's become an expert in many of the activities that he is selling supplies and materials for. He has also become a magnet for the community he lives in, and people sometimes drive across town to buy his wares. Give his place a try, if you live in Vancouver, for anything from baking tools, to cheese-making supplies, to advice and know-how on bee- and chicken-keeping.

Soak It To Me

There's a new technique sweeping the nation, and I'm surprised that it took us this long to talk about it on our blog. And no, I'm not talking about No-Knead Bread.

The technique I'm referring to involves the use of "soakers" (and their cousins the "mashes") as part of bread doughs, to dramatically improve flavour. We have used soakers in some of the formulas on this blog, but we never really explained what they are. Very simply put, the method consists in soaking part of a formula's flour in water "over-night" (or more generally put, for 12 to 24 hours) before mixing the dough. The percentage of flour to be soaked can vary quite significantly, but for reasons of maintaining some dough strength, I personally never soak more than 30% of my flour.

When we mix our dough, and all "components" come together and all the dry ingredients get hydrated, there are a few processes that start taking place concurrently. The two most important of these are:

1. The yeast organisms are awakened and start looking for food. Their food of choice are simple sugars (or monosacharrides), mainly fructose and glucose. Initially, the amount of simple sugars in the developing dough are quite small (assuming sugar is not one of the ingredients).
2. The enzymes present (mostly) in the flour, start working their magic on the carbohydrates (mostly starches) that make up the largest part of the flour. These carbohydrates are very large molecules of complex sugars, and through their action, the enzymes start to break them down into much simpler molecules (or simple sugars). The resulting simple sugars will end up serving as food for the yeast; will contribute to flavour; and will help give the crust it's characteristic golden-brown colour (through caramelization that occurs during baking).

By pre-soaking some of the flour, we give the enzymes a head start, allowing them to initiate the production of simple sugars well in advance of the actual dough preparation. This ensures that there will be plenty of simple sugars to go around as food for the yeast, as flavour producers, and for caramelization.

Similarly, by using boiling water to scold grains or whole grain flours, one ends up with "mashes" that have very high enzyme activity, and thus contribute a lot of natural sweetness to the dough. The process, of course, is a little more elaborate than that, and I'm not going to go into all the details, but it is covered and very well explained in a book by Peter Reinhart called Whole Grain Breads.

There is a little experiment that we would encourage everyone to do. Next time you will bake your favourite/staple/classic loaf, try soaking some of your flour beforehand and observe how that changes the results. Not only should it improve the flavour, but you might also notice differences in the way the dough handles, in the volume of your loaf, in the colour of your crust, etc.

But let us change gears here for a moment and get into how it all came about.

If this seems like an overly long and rambling post: You ain't seen nothing yet. But bear with us, the story is going to get better.

The credit for bringing the soaking method into the mainstream of artisan baking goes to Peter Reinhart, who has encountered the use of a similar technique in France, and then spent a couple of years trying to understand and to explain (in a very well written book) the science involved in this process.

The story of how he ran into this technique (as told by Reinhart in his ground-braking The Bread Baker's Apprentice) is quite interesting. Reinhart had won the James Beard National Bread Competition in 1995, and the first prize was supposed to consist in a five-day stage with the Parisian baker of his choice. In 1996 when he went to France to collect on his prize, he decided instead to try to spend a day each with five different bakers; clearly a much better proposition. Luckily, it all worked out. And that is how he got to meet Philippe Gosselin (among other titans) and learned how to make pain à l'ancienne. According to Reinhart, learning that technique (in fact, a delayed-fermentation method) was the single most important bread thing that happened to him on that trip.

Reinhart was fascinated by this method and by the superior flavour it produced when applied to any formula, but in particular to whole grain breads. He dedicated a lot of time and effort to studying it, and decided to write a new book to popularize both whole grain based baking and the new techniques he was so fascinated with. By the late summer of 2005 he had a manuscript that was pretty much ready to be sent to the publishers.

And here is where I entered the stage ...

Yes, that's true: Here is where I entered the stage. But, alas, I was not a protagonist in this story, only a mere observer. But what a show it was!

In early September of 2005 the first Camp Bread took place in San Francisco, at the headquarters of the San Francisco Baking Institute (or SFBI, as we, the people in the know, like to call it). It was an event the likes of which we hadn't seen before. It was organized by the Bread Bakers Guild of America (BBGA), it took a tremendous effort to piece together, but it was spectacular in every respect and ran smoother than everybody could have imagined. Camp Bread had been envisioned as a three-day event where artisan bakers from all over America would gather to meet, commune, party, and learn from each other.

We all descended on San Francisco on September 10. All two hundred and sixteen of us. I was one of only six Canadians present at this event. The first evening we assembled at Boudin's Bakery Museum for a grand tour, drinks, food, and a good time. The atmosphere was electric: we got to meet old friends, new people, and got a glimpse of some of the legendary figures we knew only from photographs and videos, or who's books adorn every serious baker's shelves. As for myself, I got to have a little chat with Peter Reinhart on the subject of Orthodox Christianity! After the party, we all went to our sleeping quarters, eager for an early morning start to what was already shaping up to be an unforgettable event.

There were a tremendous number of classes and workshops for everybody; so many in fact, that they were overlapping, and people had a hard time choosing which ones to take.Would you take Didier Rosada's Techniques in Sourdough Production or Jeffrey Hamelman's Techniques in Rye and German Bread Production? And if you were going for Rosada, you were sure to also miss out on Peter Reinhart's Cold Fermentation class. We are talking tough choices here. I opted for the power duo: Hamelman (with Jory Downer as a TA!) and Reinhart.

So, to get back to our original story, here we were, a bunch of wide-eyed kids listening to the master's every word. Reinhart was explaining the technique of cold fermentation and how the dough is mixed the night before using very cold water (ice water really) and then right away refrigerated, to ensure enzyme activity, on one hand, but no yeast activity, on the other. Then, the next morning, the dough comes out of the cooler and, when it reaches room temperature, the yeast comes back to life and the whole baking process is set in motion.

At that point, one of the attendees, one Allen Cohn, who I later came to appreciate as an extremely knowledgeable and passionate home baker, and a very active guild member, put up his hand to ask the question that would change baking forever. He was wondering, why we needed to add the yeast, if we were only looking for enzyme activity, but not leavening. Why not just add the yeast to the dough the next morning, remix, and continue from there. In fact, he added, why even bother with refrigeration; does refrigeration benefit enzyme activity in any way? Other than Peter Reinhart himself, I don't think anyone in the room realized the enormous impact these questions would have on Reinhart's understanding of the method and on bread baking in general. He ended up having to revise and, in effect, to rewrite the entire manuscript upon his return from Camp Bread, a process that pushed back the publishing of his book by almost two years.

As for me, I had tons of fun in San Francisco: I took some pretty awesome classes and workshops, I made some new friends, and even got to know a little bit of San Francisco, a city that is one of my favourites. Camp Bread came and went; we all had a blast and we took home some good stories, new knowledge (to be tested in our bakeries ASAP), and fond memories. There were some very inspiring moments (Jeffrey Hamelman's "We are lucky to be bakers" speech as he accepted the 2005 Golden Baguette Award comes to mind) and some sad ones as well (as when we all took a moment to remember Professor Raymond Calvel, who had just passed away a couple of days before in Paris). In the end, the one thing that will always stay with me after all this is: "Boy, are we lucky to be bakers."

Hands-on!

After quite a long summer break, on Sunday, November 4th between 2:00 and 5:00 pm, Florin is holding his next workshop. Hurray! It will be hosted by Rick Havlak's Homesteader's Emporium at his amazing store down at 649 East Hastings Street.

The workshop will be a three hours journey into the world of artisan bread, where you can learn the basics of baking: pre-ferments and soakers, mixing your dough, kneading and other techniques that will help you develop not just the dough, but also your baking skills. Finally, the shaping and baking of proofed loaves will be explained. You will be able to ask all those baking questions that have haunted you for ages.

Since artisan baking is quite a lengthy process, everybody will produce their own dough at the workshop, then take it home and bake it later on in their home oven. You should end up with the irresistible smell of freshly baked bread in your own kitchen and one or two beautiful loaves of bread, that you'll be able to share with family and friends. But be warned: This is the type of bread that doesn't last long!

To find out more details (what to bring along, cost, etc.) or to book your spot visit Rick's site.

We're also looking forward to a series of four workshops at UBC Farm this season. More details to follow soon.

Focaccia

I am still without a sourdough culture, but I'm back at the baking business anyway. For today, I decided to try my hand at a focaccia (I had meant to share a paticular recipe here with you since forever). Making focaccia is what got me into baking in the first place. Florin developed a recipe for me to practise my baking skills, when he still owned his bakery in Vancouver, and I used to work for him (Not as a baker, by the way!). When my first couple of loaves came out of the oven, it was just before closing time. Bending all rules, we didn't wait for them to cool down, but cut into these beautiful, golden, flat rounds right away. The aroma in the bakery was heavenly. We shared the yummy deliciousness with some late customers who had dropped by the shop, and it was all gone in no time. Ever since that evening, the focaccia became famous, and I was hooked on baking.

What I love about focaccia is that it brings the whole Mediterranean atmosphere (and Italy itself) into your kitchen and your heart; and on top of that, it never gets tiring, since it can be so versatile: You can either add all sorts of yummy things to the dough or decide on a topping. Olives, sun dried or fresh tomatoes, herbs, onions, or simply sea salt flakes always make for great taste. Also it is the perfect sandwich loaf, either fresh or grilled. 

For today’s bake I didn't have the original recipe handy, so I was trying really hard to reproduce it from memory. In the end, it turned out that my memory isn't the greatest (Florin gave me the formula in the meantime and it's definitely different from what I did), but the focaccia came out fairly nice anyway. I will bake and share the original recipe at a later date with you, but for today this is what we have:

Poolish

(prepared 12 hours in advance and left at room temperature)

300 gr all purpose flour
300 gr water
2 gr yeast

Final dough

600 gr all purpose flour
330 gr water
30 gr olive oil
5 gr yeast
poolish
18 gr salt

Mix all your ingredients with the exception of the salt and do a 20 minute autolyse. Add the salt and knead to fully develop the dough. Bulk ferment for one hour, then stretch and fold the dough and give it another hour to ferment. Now preheat the oven to 470 F. Oil a baking tray or pan and transfer the dough out of the bowl. Stretch the dough very gently, using all ten fingertips to form the focaccia, add your toppings of choice. Cover with plastic and let proof for another 20 to 30 minutes, then bake for 25 minutes or till done.

Submitting this to Yeastspotting.

Seedy Crackers

There are times in our busy lives when there isn't any time to pursue all the little things we are so passionate about; when everything is constantly changing around us; when we have to adjust and focus on all the new happenings around us. But then, eventually, we find that new rhythm and we manage to get back to all those precious things we had to go without for a little while.

Well, here's hoping that I will manage to get back into a rhythm. These days, my life tends to be very distracting; and that's great, but really truly: I miss baking a lot, and taking pictures of my (or Florin's) loaves, and sharing all the fun here, on this blog. So, here's a promise to you guys, as well as to myself: I shall make time for all of that again, very soon.

Finally, I decided that today is the day I when I would get back to baking, albeit without having any sourdough culture at hand. I managed to let my starters (smuggled across borders, from Canada to Germany) die. Luckily, my dad did dry some of these cultures and saved them for his own use. So, I hope to bring them back to life someday. However, I felt it was the perfect day to bake some crispy crackers, with a ton of seeds in them. And this is how it's done:
 
Basic Ingredients

160 gr bread flour (38%)
200 gr durum semolina flour (47.6%)
60 gr quinoa flour (14%)
12 gr salt (2.8%)
150 gr water (36%)
40 gr olive oil (9.5%)

The Seeds (use any seeds or nuts of your choice)

50 gr flax seeds (11.9%)
40 gr sesame seeds (9.5%)
40 gr poppy seeds (9.5%)

Soak the flax seeds in the 150 grams of water overnight, or at least a few hours before you plan to bake the crackers. Toast the sesame seeds and then combine all the dry ingredients. Now add the soaked flax seeds and the olive oil. Kneading the dough should feel pretty tough, since there is not a lot of liquid involved. It is important to work the dough until it is pliable and smooth, rather than crumbly and dry. If you find that you need to add some extra water, do so, but keep in mind that you are aiming for a very stiff dough. Once you are done, cover the dough with saran wrap and let it rest for at least 30 minutes at room temperature.

Roll out thinly, using a rolling pin. The thinner you roll out the dough, the crisper your crackers will be. Cut into any shape, brush with water and sprinkle with seeds. Bake the crackers at 400 F for about 10 minutes. They should start to brown when they are ready. Enjoy with any of your favourite dips!

Submitted to Yeastspotting.

Crazy about pizza

Perfect crust. Tomatoes and bocconcini. Fresh herbs. In other words: Pizza. Yum!

As lovers of bread it is only natural that we are also continuously trying to find the perfect pizza pie. Certainly the main criteria here should be the crust, even though we have some pretty high expectations of the toppings as well. Apparently it is not that easy to find the pizza we are all dreaming of, and sometimes the journey can be a little bit frustrating and disappointing.

This time around, in searching for the perfect pizza we found that it is a little bit easier to be successful in the Rhine-Main area of Germany, than it is in Vancouver. At least we were getting closer.

Of course, two passionate bakers wouldn't be too passionate, if they could resist the urge of playing with a formula for pizza dough themselves. And play we did. Since Florin came over to Germany to visit for a little while, and make friends with my dad and my dad's wood-burning oven, we took advantage of the opportunity and baked some pretty decent pizza of our own. We are still in the process of developing our favourite, favourite pizza crust, but in the meantime we are fairly happy with our results.

For the crust, the total formula is:

1136 gr flour (100%)
772 gr water (68%)
15.5 gr yeast (1.4%)
20 gr salt (1.8%)
57 gr olive oil  (5%)

We used 00 flour in this case, but at home we usually go with all-purpose.

Prepare a biga 12 hours in advance and let it sit at room temperature. The formula for the biga is:

229 gr flour (100%)
137 gr water (60%)
0.5 gr yeast (0.2%)

To put it all together, use the following final dough formula:

907 gr flour (100%)
635 gr water (70%)
20 gr salt (2.2%)
15 gr yeast (1.6%)
57 gr olive oil (6.3%)
366 gr biga (40%)

Mix all your ingredients with the exception of the salt and do a 20 minute autolyse. Add the salt and knead to fully develop the dough. Bulk ferment for one hour, then stretch and fold and ferment for another hour. Divide the dough into 200 gr pieces and shape into rounds. Refrigerate the pre-shaped dough covered on a baking tray for at least 6 and up to 24 hours. Take the pizza dough out of the refrigerator an hour or two before you plan to bake the pizza, to let it come to room temperature. Now preheat your oven on the highest setting, so that the baking stone gets enough time to really heat up. (The wood-burning oven was really, really hot, and the pizza had to cook only for a couple of minutes.) Stretch the dough to form the crust, add your toppings of choice and bake till done. Buon appetito.

What is your favourite pizza story? Who makes the best pie in your neck of the woods? Do you know of any good pizza blogs? Let us know.

Submitting this to Yeastspotting. 

Baker's math

To paraphrase a famous political commentator: "I got into baking bread because I was told there would be no math. Boy, was I misled."

I'm joking, of course. I happen to think math is beautiful and that using math in baking enables us to achieve high quality, consistent results time and again. One of the best tools we have for writing and/or communicating recipes and formulas is what is generally known as "baker's math" or "baker's percentages."

Before I start glossing about baker's math, here's Rule no.1: Baker's math only works when measuring ingredients "by weight," rather than "by volume." Serious bakers generally prefer measuring by weight, because this method is a lot more accurate than measuring by volume. After all, everybody has a different way of measuring a cup of flour. Not to mention that not all cups are created equal.

So, there's an extra incentive for measuring by weight: you get to use baker's math! And by using it, you can better communicate with other fellow bakers half a world away. A 68% hydration baguette should be the same no matter where one happens to be in the world.

Baker's math expresses each ingredient in a formula as a percentage of that ingredient's mass to the total flour mass. Which means, the total amount of flour in the formula will be expressed as 100%, while all the other ingredients will represent fractions (or percentages) of the total amount of flour. A simple example should make it even easier to understand. Here's a very basic baguette formula: 1000 g all-purpose flour, 680 g water, 5 g instant yeast, 20 g salt. Using baker's math, this formula would look something like:

Basic Baguette Dough

1000 g all-purpose flour (100%)
680 g water (68%)
5 g instant yeast (0.5%)
20 g salt (2%)

Please note that with a formula written in this way, one can easily scale a batch up or down to suit one's needs. One can start by deciding what amount of dough/number of loaves one wants to produce, and easily figure out the amounts of all the ingredients necessary; or one can do the opposite, determine how much flour one has available and from there figure out the amounts for all other ingredients and how much dough will result in the end. The possibilities and variations are endless, and quite fun to play with. In other words, here we have a method of writing our bread formulas that is simple, intuitive, and elegant.

Or is it?

It can all get a little bit more complicated and even confusing at times when the formulas are more complex, particularly when we start using pre-ferments, soakers, and mashes. In fact, I have seen the same formula written in three different ways; all of them correct!

Let's take the above formula as an example and assume we are planning to produce it by pre-fermenting and soaking part of our flour. Let's say we'll do a 6-hour sponge, a 12-hour poolish, and a 12- to 24-hour soaker as part of our final dough. We might have something that looks like this:

Sponge (6 hours at room temperature):

150 g all-purpose flour (100%)
93 g water (62%)
1 g instant yeast (0.66%)

Poolish (12 hours at room temperature):

200 g all-purpose flour (100%)
200 g water (100%)
1 g instant yeast (0.5%)

Soaker (12–24 hours at room temperature):

150 g all-purpose flour (100%)
105 g water (70%)

As we assemble everything into our final dough, the formula will look like this:

Final Dough:

500 g all-purpose flour (100%)
282 g water (56.4%)
3 g instant yeast (0.6%)
20 g salt (4%)
244 g sponge (48.8%)
401 g poolish (80%)
255 g soaker (51%)

All of a sudden, this type of formula isn't that straight forward and easy to read, nor is it as simple as before to scale your batches up or down. No matter; this is still a valid way to communicate formulas and a very useful tool indeed for any baker.

And what is the point of all this little exercise, you might wonder.

The point of it is that in the past we've had "consistency issues" in the way we've written our recipes, not just on this blog, but also when developing new formulas for ourselves, or for our workshops. So this was something that was nagging us and didn't let us sleep at night. I'm not sure if this whole rant is completely intelligible, but if you have questions, don't hesitate to give us a shout.

And to end this: I've always found it very useful to have a recipe expressed both in "Total Formula" form, as well as in "Final Dough" form. Something similar to the example bellow: