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Post by slowcoach on Dec 6, 2018 5:54:01 GMT 2
So much to do, so little time.
Sometimes, when I have the time, I worry as to how I am ever going to get all the thing that need doing done, and what I can do about it.
I realized the solution, I must bake bread.
Well that takes care of those spare moments. Too busy to worry now.
I started about a month ago, and practice makes edible.
It's bread, but not as you know it.
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Post by sophie on Dec 6, 2018 7:06:06 GMT 2
Mmmm... fresh bread. Hopefully fragrant and chewy.
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Post by OnlyMark on Dec 6, 2018 9:47:52 GMT 2
I often bake bread. I find it enjoyable. The first is banana bread, the rest is normal bread. A bit blurry as taken with my phone and Whatsapped to my daughters in Germany because they love when I bake stuff but I'm teasing them because they can't have any -
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Post by Baz Faz on Dec 6, 2018 20:36:15 GMT 2
I used to bake bread but I have got lazy. One recipe I really liked came from Elizabeth David's book on bread - potato bread. It was particularly good fried.
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Post by slowcoach on Apr 2, 2019 15:34:21 GMT 2
A quick update:
Well a hurdle has been passed: that of persistence. I have been making a loaf a day, or two every other day, ever since. So that would be over one hundred.
If it's worth doing well, it's worth doing, so that is where it's at.
It is an odd sort of bread, with much in common with cake.
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Post by auntieannie on Apr 2, 2019 22:37:02 GMT 2
a bit like irish soda bread, slow?
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Post by Netsuke on Apr 8, 2019 1:57:44 GMT 2
I used to make damper and the taste! There was never any left over.
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Post by auntieannie on Apr 8, 2019 9:08:50 GMT 2
Yes, I hear fresh baked bread, and its smell, is very addictive. Maybe a way to eat your way to better health, slow?
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Post by wikki on Nov 11, 2019 5:29:10 GMT 2
i am learning how to do sour dough bread. I have my starter, and now it is just practice. my work is a bit interfering with it.... but oh well, tnght is a bread night.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 18, 2019 13:19:40 GMT 2
i am learning how to do sour dough bread. I have my starter, and now it is just practice. my work is a bit interfering with it.... but oh well, tnght is a bread night.
I am trying to find the time to do this too, I have produced sourdough once before. Happy Eating!
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 18, 2019 13:24:30 GMT 2
Sadly, I have just had a major bread failure. It went down amongst the general malaise that seems want to beset ne.
This is all getting a bit too much.
I simply must try again today, meanwhile I must eat as much of the wreckage as I can rescue. I am both fed up and not fed up.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 20, 2019 21:32:58 GMT 2
Hopefully I will have the bread making production line back on the right lines by tomorrow or the day after. It takes that long because it is slow bread.
In the meanwhile, as a stop gap I made a batch of faster bread. I sometimes wonder whether all the effort that goes into my slow bread is worthwhile. Well it is.
I made a batch, sped up by the simple change of increasing the amount of yeast by a factor of about 10, thereby speeding the fermentation. This increased amount of yeast is still modest, representing about 7gms of fresh yeast equivalent per kilogram of flour, i.e. 0.7% as a baker's percentage. The packet of yeast recommends a figure that equates to 5%. I normal go for something closer to 0.05-0.1%.
The resulting bread was crude, raw tasting, uneven, altogether substandard. Which was not welcome at the time but rewarding regarding validating the effort that the slow dough demands.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 21, 2019 4:59:33 GMT 2
I seem to have regained success at last. I will sample this latest offering in the morning.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 21, 2019 11:24:34 GMT 2
One of the reasons things went wrong was my trying a simplification to the process. There were steps whose origin were lost in the mists of time, so I rolled them up into a single step where there had been three.
Well I found out the one of steps had to do with reducing the yeast's initial lag phase, without this discrete step the whole process took several additional hours and I ran into time trouble and it was a disaster. So today's batch is the first to successfully demonstrate the new process.
The result is very promising; a euphemism for its needing improvement into too many areas to list.
Promising enough to stick with it and address these issues.
But to begin: I will, in stages, slow it right down, by reducing the yeast percentage, and find out what is at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
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Post by OnlyMark on Nov 21, 2019 12:48:39 GMT 2
"yeast's initial lag phase"
You'll have to tell me what that is.............
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Post by Baz Faz on Nov 21, 2019 13:24:23 GMT 2
"yeast's initial lag phase" You'll have to tell me what that is............. It's the time Slow spent in prison.
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Post by OnlyMark on Nov 21, 2019 13:25:19 GMT 2
Ahh... I see. The plot thickens.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 21, 2019 13:30:11 GMT 2
"yeast's initial lag phase" You'll have to tell me what that is.............
If you use a lot of yeast it is not apparent, it is too short to notice.
When yeast undergoes an environmental change it can enter a lag phase during which it is very active but not dividing. It stays in that phase until it has changed the environment in a way that triggers a transition to the log phase, which is marked by exponential growth in the yeast population. It is the log phase that produces the yeast population that produces all the CO2 that inflates the dough.
I have read that the trigger for the transition is the presence of a certain level of alcohol in the dough.
If you alter the yeast percentage in the initial dough mix you alter the amount of time required to modify the environment. I had reduced the yeast percentage by about a half thereby doubling the duration of the lag phase, which already a few hours long added a few more hours to the process.
During the lag phase, the yeast feeds on the dough building up its reserves of various nutrients and getting itself in good condition before entering the log phase.
Well so they say and I have no reason to believe otherwise.
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Post by Baz Faz on Nov 21, 2019 13:38:18 GMT 2
the presence of a certain level of alcohol in the dough.
Does the alcohol explain why in certain Muslim countries they eat unleavened bread?
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Post by OnlyMark on Nov 21, 2019 19:19:39 GMT 2
You learn something new every day.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 22, 2019 8:17:01 GMT 2
Yes, I hear fresh baked bread, and its smell, is very addictive. Maybe a way to eat your way to better health, slow?
I am a weird old cove.
I don't like freshly made bread, which I regard as nearly made bread, as the process isn't complete.
To my taste my bread is better the next day and probably at its peak after 48 hours.
Almost invariably I eat it just as it is once sliced, and also just sliced with salt.
There was a period over the summer when my appetites only extended to black coffee and my bread, it is indeed a lifesaver.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 23, 2019 8:37:22 GMT 2
I need to get ahead of the game and thereby have some surplus I can trial for freezing preservation possibilities so I don't remain forever just one failure away from going without.
If I find that a freeze/thaw cycle improves the bread I will go nuts.
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Post by shrjeff on Nov 23, 2019 11:17:02 GMT 2
The American Test Kitchen (ATK) has found that breads go stale fastest in the fridge, then out and last longest in the freezer. as their name implies, they do tests to arrive at empirical data; and it was counterintuitive to find that staying out the bread lasts longer than in the fridge...
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Post by wikki on Nov 24, 2019 2:16:49 GMT 2
If you wanna freeze bread, you take the fresh backed bread out of the oven and straight into the freezer. When you wanna eat it, you put it back in to the oven for a bit. That's what our baker at work said.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 24, 2019 14:08:11 GMT 2
The American Test Kitchen (ATK) has found that breads go stale fastest in the fridge, then out and last longest in the freezer. as their name implies, they do tests to arrive at empirical data; and it was counterintuitive to find that staying out the bread lasts longer than in the fridge...
May thanks,
went to ATK watched the video, picked out the word "Retrogradation", took it to Wikipedia and it states the critical band to avoid is [-8C,8C].
It also supports wikki 's advice to insofar as transiting that band as quickly as possible, but if I was caught putting hot bread into the freezer my wife might kill me.
FWIW we have a no frost freezer and bread has to be in airtight packaging or it, like other baked flour based products, dehydrates and turns to a paste or dust.
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 25, 2019 10:47:18 GMT 2
Having had two more failures in a row, and facing a third it turned out not such a disaster.
The simplification doesn't work; the complexity was there for reasons unknown, reasons forgotten.
My world commonly resembles Gormenghast.
Anyway an existential crisis in the symbiosis of slow and slow's bread is postponed for another day, complexity will be restored.
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Post by wikki on Nov 26, 2019 0:37:53 GMT 2
it is not just the yeast that you have to think of or? I am only working with sourdough but that is also "just yeast".... not sure about the lag phase. maybe that's what is called Autolyse for sourdough, but this is more about the flour "faling" appart. The time you let the dough sit for Autolyse is from 30min to an hour ( I don't see it rise in that time). then you work it, let is sit for 1hr, stretch and fold ,let is sit for an hour. and so on ( all in all 4 time or so. In this phase you will see it rise) then you shape it and let it sit for its final Prove ( up to 4 hrs in warm enviroment or over night in a cold corner, shoudl doubble its size)
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 26, 2019 6:24:15 GMT 2
I will have to look it up but I think the sour part of sour dough comes from lactobacillus bacteria similar to that found in yoghurt, that and the wild yeasts do make for good bread. Baker's yeast which is really a variant of brewer's yeast is not a good match for wheat flour as it prefers the maltose of malted barley. I have attempted to culture it but it is outcompeted by the types of wild yeasts and bacteria that make for sourdough.
Most people might not see it as a big issue, but to me the replenish and discard method of making a sourdough starter is food waste and it would give me a problem.
I don't have enough experience of sourdough to comment further, but I think that it is universally true that slow bread making, whether with commercial yeast or sourdough produces flavour and texture that cannot be gained with quick bread. If you have the time and the patience it is a joy to make such bread.
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Post by shrjeff on Nov 26, 2019 7:25:43 GMT 2
coming from the san francisco region, sourdough is part of our culture... and making a sourdough culture is relatively easy... we used to keep a starter going for years and never heard of a discard method... we'd keep the starter in the fridge and use it to make pancakes (bread was just too much effort)... just take it out the day before, add water and flour to it to create a sponge, and the next morning put a cup back into the fridge to keep the starter for the future... and use the now sourdough flavored sponge for the batter... why would anyone want to discard it and have to start developing a new starter?
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Post by slowcoach on Nov 26, 2019 8:58:20 GMT 2
It is the starter that is the problem, the way they would have it is to make a batter or whatever , wait for some action and feed (replenish) it. Keep doing that until the activity is suitably high, which can take many days. To keep the amount down to a sensible volume, as you replenish you discard down to the same volume. Anyway that sort of method has numerous web pages devoted to it.
Not everyone makes it often enough to keep the dough rolling, as it were.
The only way I have ever made it is much like your everlasting starter except starting with a commercial yeast, after a few cycles the baker's yeast is usurped by the more vigorous wild yeasts and bacteria. All the dough is used to make loaves which segue from commercial to sourdough, none is wasted but it can make for a weirdo in between loaf at some point.
I hope that makes sense, I have not and would not use that method so I can only go by what I have read.
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