Yeast Calculation

In calculating the yeast quantities in previous postings, I overlooked the switch from fresh yeast to instant dried yeast when going from production batches to home batches. As Hamelman notes on page 57, 1/3 as much instant yeast is needed. Thanks to Paul Yumarama for pointing this out!

Pretzels

This recipe was clearly a measure of my devotion to this project. First, I not a big fan of pretzels. I don't dislike them, but I wouldn't go out of my way to eat one. Next, the whole lye soak was a royal pain. I had to track down and order food grade lye. I used "High Grade Sodium Hydroxide Lye Micro Beads" from Essential Depot (via Amazon.com). These were $5 plus another $12 shipping. Add to that gloves and safety glasses to the total cost.

The dough was beautify, smooth and silky. Shaping wasn't a problem, but I found it much easier and quicker to twist them on the counter rather than trying to spin them. This seem a natural extension of rolling them out.

Dipping was another problem. I first tried a stainless pot with a pasta insert. Unfortunately, the pretzels stuck to the insert. I ended up using a slotted spoon doing the pretzels one at a time. Annoying, but with a dozen pretzels this isn't to bad. (Certainly, not a bakeshop techinque.) Next, I baked the pretzels on a baking stone only to discover that they bonded to the stone and had to be scraped off.

Actually, I made three sets of pretzels as can be seen from the picture. (Yes, I forgot to slash the prezels.) The one to the left is the lye soaked pretzel. For the one in the middle, I used a technique from Reinhart's lastest book. I soaked the pretzels in a solution of 8 tsp of baking soda and 2 cups of warm water. The pretzels on the right weren't soaked but had an egg glaze.

The lye soaked prezels were somewhat unevenly colored, but were much darker. The egg glaze, as you can see, gave the least color. I really didn't expect any real difference in flavor, just appearance. Although the difference was slight, there was a noticable difference. For fresh pretzels, I prefered the lye soaked pretzels. For day old pretzels (not nearly as good), I liked these least.

As pretzel go, these were quite good. But I'll stick to bagels or bialys.

Roasted Potato Breads

For this challenge, I made the original Potato Bread recipe and both of the variations, Rosemary Herb Bread and Roasted Garlic Bread. For the roast potatoes, I peeled russet potatoes, sliced them about 1 inch thick, tossed them in olive oil, salted and peppered them, and then baked them at 425 degrees until knife tender, about 30 minutes. I broke the potatoes into pieces, but did not mash them. The finshed dough had obvious chunks of potatoes in them, but these chunks were absent in the finished bread. For all three breads, I made fendu-style loaves. For all the loaves, I found Hamelman's recommendations of 40 minutes to be too long. Around thirty minutes seemed adequate.

For the Herb bread, I used closer to two grams of rosemary (per loaf) rather than three. This was sufficient. For the garlic bread, I used nine grams of roasted garlic, about three cloves. For these last two loaves, I upped the whole-wheat content slightly (to about 30%) to good effect.

These were all excellent, somewhat rustic breads. Shelf life was a bit on the short side, but okay.

Challah

ALERT: The yeast calculation in this post is incorrect in tha tit doesn't account for the switch to instant dried yeast. See later post on yeast.

I've only made one pass through this recipe, so I'll update this entry once I've had a chance to go back and make the bread again. But I wanted to get a few things down while they were still fresh in my mind.

First, it appears the home recipe is off on the amount of yeast by a factor of three. The recipe calls for 3% yeast, and the numbers for US and Metric are consistent with this percentage. The home recipe uses 32 ounces of flour but only calls for 0.32 ounces of yeast (1%). In making the bread I used three times this amount and got a reasonable rise time. Again, this is a very rich dough, which is typically hard on yeast so the amount is not unusual.

The dough is quite stiff. I made the full recipe which was okay but a bit of a strain for my aging KitchenAid mixer. Since I've made Challah many times before, I elected to play with some of the braiding techniques in Chapter 9. I made the Six-point Star using the Method I for the six-strand braid and I made the Winston Knot.

I was a little annoyed by the lack of measurements for some of the braids (including the Winston Knot) and wish Hamelman had included recommend weights and lengths with each recipe. Still, the braiding went well. On the star, I made the rosette a bit too large and had a couple of star points that wanted to pull apart. And, with the Winston Knot, I didn't get the nice square knot shown in the drawing in the book. Nonetheless, I still got a reasonable looking bread.

The bread had a nice flavor but was a bit on the dry side. At the Artisian Bread Festival in Asheville last year, Reinhart mentioned that he had eliminate the egg-whites from his Challah because they have a drying effect. (And his latest Challah is the best I've had.) Next time around, I'll try this.

More to come...

Soft Butter Rolls

I made this recipe three times. The first time around, I made the rolls, little cloverleaf rolls, and the braids. The second time I made the hamburger rolls. The last time around, I made the cinnamon-raisin bread.

All three batches had a very nice flavor. At 1.33-ounces, I found the rolls a little on the small side but acceptable. It was noted on the Mellow Baker's site that the yeast measurements in the recipe are too low. If fact, they are off by a factor of 10. Although warned the measurements were off, I didn't correct adequately. Enriched breads need a lot of added yeast, and I didn't add enough so I got very slow rise-times. The bread will still work without the correction, but be patient.

For the hamburger rolls, I increased the size. Hamelman specifies 2.25-ounce pieces. Looking in other books, I found Reinhart uses 3.0-ounce pieces and Hitz uses 3.2 to 3.4-ounce pieces. I went with the larger sizes and was happy I did.

Finally, I made the cinnamon-raisin bread, again using too little yeast. Again, the flavor was great but the rise was poor and the rise-times were extended. Hamelman doesn't give measurements for the cinnamon sugar or the amount of raisins to use. I used about 3/4 cups of raisins, 2 Tbs butter, and 2 Tbs cinnamon-sugar per loaf. This seemed to work well. Overall, these were good loaves, but I'll stick to Reinharts spectacularly good loaves in the future.

Cheese Bread

Hamelman's recipe for Cheese Bread produces a lovely, crackly, soft white cheese bread with loads of flavor. This is definitely a keeper.

The first time through I followed the recipe for boules, pretty much, as it was written. I did make one change. In forming the loaf, I first mixed in the grated cheese in the mixer as directed. But then I flatten the dough, placed the cubes on top and rolled the dough up. My goal was to get an even distribution of the chunks and to avoid having exposed cheese. This approach worked quite well. I am very pleased with Hamelman's recipe.

Still, I wanted to see just how versatile (or forgiving) the recipe is. So when I went back to make the recipe a second time, I altered the the recipe is several ways.

First, I decided that to see if the recipe would work with as a transitional loaf so I replaced some of the bread flour (32%) with whole-wheat flour. Next, while I used parmesan as the grated cheese, I used Jarleberg for the chunks, cut roughly 1 inch by 1 inch by 1/4 inch. I folded in the chucks as before. Finally, I made a loaf-bread with the recipe. Since I was baking the bread in a dark (Chicago Metallic) pan, I reduced the temperature. I found the bread did very nicely with 15 minutes at 435 degrees followed by 20 minutes at 400 degrees. As you can see from the picture, if a piece of cheese pokes through, this give a ugly blister, but rolling the dough largely avoids this problem.

Overall, I like the altered recipe even better. I thought the combination of cheeses less biting, I liked the whole-wheat, and, for me at least, loaf bread is generally more useful than boules.

Another great bread!

Rye with Walnuts

Yet another rye. This one took two tries, but I was able to produce something that was worth eating—not a favorite, not something I'm likely to make again anytime soon, but something that I didn't try once and immediately discard. That the second loaf, the first quickly went into the trash.

After the first loaf, I was ready to give on on this one. But it seems that is always the case with Hamelman's ryes, at least for me. Yet other folks don't seem to be having these problems, so I felt it was time to go back and try again looking more closely at what I was doing.

In the course of making this bread, I made several changes the second time around. First, I've found the ryes recipes to produce very sticky doughs that wanted to puddle in the bottom of the mixer bowl rather than be kneaded. I've tried to deal with this before, but this time I was very careful. I repeatedly stopped the mixer, massed the dough together, and dusted it with flour to give it a dryer, less sticky exterior. As I kneaded the dough, I stood over the mixer and very lightly dusted the sides of the bowl with flour to insure the dough was not sticking to the bowl. Once the dough had kneaded the full amount of time, I took it out and gave it another couple of quick folds.

The next major changes were the fermentation times. In most of Hamelman's recipes, times have been very accurate. While the conditions in my kitchen weren't changing, when making this rye, I found the times totally unreliable. I had to extend both the bulk and final fermentations, particularly the latter going totally by the feel of the dough.

Admittedly, these are changes that I should have been doing all along. But I haven't needed them with the other recipes, so I was disinclined to try them with the rye recipes. Next time I'll know better.

The second loaf, made with these changes was reasonable. It was still a bit heavy and the rye flavor, despite the walnuts, was still too strong for my taste. But toasted, it worked well with peanut butter or cheese. I'm still not a big fan of rye, but this was a step in the right direction.