/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>4242335
About 1/4", so a little over 6mm.

>>4242358
You can make a lot of delicious bread in a grill, if set up properly. You can also steam breads, and they often turn out beautifully. Steamed brioche is a personal favorite.

>>4242221
I don't know what you were going for with that bread, so please don't be offended, but that looks like a very delicious focaccia to me. The crumb structure is dead on to what I think an idea focaccia is.

>>4242247
Do it.

>>4242249
Nice slash pattern.

>>4241796
I'm going to be honest with you. Cuts are a bitch. I'd say only 80% of my cuts actually work out. The other 20% collapse or end up not releasing enough tension during the oven spring so that the loaf cracks in some way.

Kneading before you bake is probably your biggest mistake. You want to let the seed air bubbles form during the proofing process. Keep things simple at first: knead the dough to windowpane, bulk ferment it, shape it (making sure to get lots of good surface tension in the dough), proof it until 1.5x-1.75x in size, then slash it and bake it with steam. If you want to have the cut "bloom", then you need to slash at a shallow angle to the surface of the loaf, and about 1/4" deep. If you want the cut to just open up (like my loaf at the beginning of this thread did), then you want to do a cut that is perpendicular to the surface of the loaf. Too many slashes and there won't be enough oven spring to go around to open them all up. Too few slashes and it won't be enough to relieve the stress caused by oven spring and the loaf will either be dense or will crack.

Hope that helps.

>>4241766
I use a KitchenAid for small batches, and a Hobart A200 for big batches.

In general, I mix once, bulk ferment (or bulk retard then bulk ferment), preshape, bench rest, shape, proof, slash, bake, eat.

Stretching and pulling is great for high hydration doughs. When I do knead by hand, the stretch and fold method is my method of choice. Often I'll do multiple stretch & fold and rests. I bulk retard in the fridge regularly.

No sugar in my dough. I tend to like 80% bread flour, 20% whole wheat/whole grain in my breads. That 20% can be rye, spelt, kamut, etc. I am a big rye fan, but the others are also great.

I turn the loaf 180 degrees halfway through the bake for even coloration on the loaf.

The flour lines are from the bannetons in which I proof my bread.

Thanks for the kind words. Post some photos of your bread!

>>4241733
There are a few tricks to getting a good oven spring.

1. Make sure to work enough gluten into the dough. Gluten supports a rapid oven spring and stabilizes it.
2. Make sure not to use any fat in your dough recipe. Fat is more surface active than protein, and will move to the interface of air/dough more rapidly. Unfortunately, fat cannot form intermolecular bonds, so you don't get any volume stabilization.
3. A more highly hydrated dough will rise more than a drier dough due to increased steam production.
4. Don't over or underproof your dough. Underproofing won't allow sufficient seed air bubble formation. Without seed bubbles, there is no cavity into which steam and gasses can be injected, thereby reducing dough expansion. Overproofing will weaken the structure of your dough and increase the likelihood of collapse during baking.

>>4241686
I use a baking stone in the lowest rack position of my oven. Underneath it I place a cast iron pan. I heat my oven to 550F (+ convection) with stone and pan in it, and let it sit at temp for about 30 minutes to an hour to allow everything to get ripping hot.

When I'm ready to bake, I put the dough on the stone, and put about 2 cups of boiling water in the cast iron pan. I close the oven quickly, and drop the temp to 475F (+ convection) after 2 minutes. Then I just make sure to bake the loaves long enough to reach that dark golden brown.

These all look great to me, guys.

I love fresh pita, but I can never seem to make it right. If I get the oven hot enough to puff the dough up so there's a nice pocket in the middle, then it ends up being too hard and I lose the softness of good pita. Oh well, something to strive for, I suppose.

Anybody bake anything good recently?

Here's some super boring white bread that I baked tonight. I tried a new flour, and it sucked.

>>4207932
Hard to say for sure. From the photo, it looks like he has really poor crumb development. Looks almost like biscuit/scone crumb than bread crumb. He may have used low-gluten flour, too much fat, or just not worked it enough during the mix.

It also looks like there are pock marks in the crumb where he probably stuck his fingers. Good bread crumb should be springy. His looks very underdone. The light color on the crust (what's visible of it) seems to agree with this.

>>4207656
>http://vimeo.com/5084694#at=0
Great video. I've never seen it before.

>>4207680
In theory, they should both probably be S. cerevisiae, so they should both function similarly. With that said, I'm sure there are big differences between strains. Only way to find out is to give it a shot! Use some of your spent grain and beer yeast, and see how it goes.

>>4207118
I guess some neckbeards feel like WOW and jerking it to gfur just isn't enough social interaction...

>>4207356
That would be my best guess. I have a few friends who brew with the spent grains, but I haven't considered using the trub. Take some of it, and make a 100% hydration flour/water base, then mix them together. See what happens. Chances are you'll just end up making a sourdough, but it might be interesting.

>>4207370
Indeed.

>>4207040
Very cool! What sort of leavening did you use? What did you use the bread for when it's done? I really need to branch out into alternative breads. I get stuck in a rut of simple flour, water, salt, yeast + basic mix-ins, and it gets boring after a while.

>>4207042
You know, if you're going to samefag the shit out of every thread, you should probably expand your vocabulary so it appears at least mildly realistic.

Anyway, I'll be the first to admit that I have a ton of shit to learn about bread baking. I don't work in the industry anymore, so whether my pizza is shitty or not has no real bearing on the world around me.

>>4207030
Negotiate your terms with my wife.

>>4207035
Wha? I'm so confused. If I was a fradulent fake, wouldn't I be the real deal?

Sometimes I bake with sourdough, sometimes I don't. This bread was made with active dry yeast. I have two different sourdough cultures. One I keep alive in my fridge that was made here in Los Angeles, and the other is dried and awaiting reconstitution, should I need it, that was made while living in Oregon.

I don't know what you mean by "real sourdough takes a week," and I'm not sure you do, either. Are you talking about the culturing process? If so, it takes quite a bit longer than a week. If you're talking about the rest of the bake process, well, that's entirely dependent on what the process is, isn't it? Do you have enough starter on hand? Is it already active? How much do you want to put into your formulation? How wet is the dough? What's the ambient temperature? Are you planning on doing a bulk retard? Are you going to autolyse the dough for any period of time?

Anyway, it's a dumb question. You should feel stupid.

>>4206672
Bread takes patience, to be sure. That's part of why I bake so much. I can fit it around my crazy schedule.

>>4206838
>>4206844
Those looks great. The crust on the no-knead looks delicious, and crumb is top notch. What went into your rice bread?

>>4206871
If only I gave a fuck, right?

>>4206886
I can't speak for him, but I didn't post anything after >>4206068.

Bulk retarded dough takes a long time to get back into the game, as far as yeast activity goes.

Next time, let it come out of the fridge and come up to full temp. Then shape it into a boule and let it rest on a bed of flour or an oiled surface. Cover it with surface wrap, and just let it chill the fuck out until it has proofed considerably (1.5-2x in size). Then stretch it out. You'll get all the flavor of cold fermentation with all of the volume of a normal dough.

>>4115036
No, I meant exactly what I said. Go ahead, give it a try at home. Take a cake flour, an AP flour, and a bread flour, and create doughs that are equivalently hydrated. The primary difference between the three flours is their protein content. Mix them for the same amount of time, then try to stretch them. It will quickly become clear that the bread flour resists stretching to a greater degree than either of the other two.

Your statement regarding tearing is also accurate. However, this can be attributed to the same elasticity conferred by gluten development that resists stretching.

Classy use of asterisks, by the way.

>>4114993
No it won't. Bread flour is higher protein. Higher protein means higher gluten development, which means the dough will resist stretching to a greater degree than dough that is made with a lower-protein flour. Bread flour, however, will produce a pizza with a more delicate, airy crust, because the gluten network can stabilize a more significant oven spring without collapsing.

>>4114971

If it's not stretching, you need to let it rest longer. Give it time for the gluten to relax, and it will more easily stretch out for you. Sometimes you even need to give it a mid-stretch rest if you want to make it thinner and bigger.

>>4106415
Thanks, bud. I'm not too worried about it. I don't get too worked up about pizza. So long as a few people enjoy what I do, I'll keep doing it. When people get fed up with the bread threads, then I'll stop making them. No skin off my nose either way.

>>4106199
>>4106200
Thanks, guys.

>>4106206
I try to be humble, but I guess I'm doing it wrong. I'll try to do better in the future. Not trying to come across as god's gift to anything, since that's not at all my intended approach

>>4106186
I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't think anyone gives me credit, though. I'm just some anonymous dude on a forum full of neckbeards, cranking away on yeasted baked goods.

And I think you have it backwards: I repeat the same shapes over and over, but with different formulations. Had you said that, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you: my shaping and slashing leave a lot to be desired. Truthfully, I've yet to make the same bread twice and post it on here. Every single one I've made has been different in some way. Sometimes it's just a slight hydration alteration, sometimes it's a different mix-in, but I primarily bake to experiment, so I change things up all the time.

Cheers for feedback, though. I always appreciate it! And considering I was a college dropout when I started baking bread, you're dead on there!

>>4106148
I start with a really wet, fully proofed dough. Then I stretch it out by hand, so that it has a paper thin center and a nice fat lip. Finally, I avoid adding toppings on that lip, so that it isn't limited in expansion.

>>4104603
>>4104607
Sorry I ducked out for a while there. You can definitely use a sourdough starter for your pizza. I just prefer the strong leavening power (and consistency) of commercial yeast in my pizzas, so that's what I use.

>>4104561
As I understand it, a barm is just a sourdough starter. I could be very, very wrong, though.

>>4104580
Most baguettes are not this wet. It's just a fun experiment when you have the patience to handle dough that can be a real pain in the ass.

Yes, shaping is key.