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Guys. Guys. Bread is fun. I love baking it. My mom has noticed this so when I went over to visit her today she gave me a baking stone and a couple of cookbooks that she had from when she used to bake a lot more. I was excited about all of it but especially the book called Bread Baking. It was published in 1975 and has amazing recipes and illustrations. Check these out.          
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Oct 18, 2013 01:24
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 18:59 |
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That definitely looks like a book from the 70s.
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Oct 18, 2013 02:18
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Is the book published on Christmas Island?
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Oct 18, 2013 05:53
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Marv Albert posted:Is the book published on Christmas Island? This picture rings a bell, but something's missing...
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Oct 18, 2013 06:30
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geetee posted:This picture rings a bell, but something's missing...
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Oct 18, 2013 06:41
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geetee posted:This picture rings a bell, but something's missing... I thought it was sensible that the baker removed their jewelry before handling the dough.
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Oct 18, 2013 15:13
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 I call it "Breadse"
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Oct 18, 2013 17:12
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NightConqueror posted:
Doughse
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Oct 18, 2013 18:16
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How do I make pita with a good pocket in it? I think I might be making it too thin before I cook it? Any suggestions or secrets?
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Oct 18, 2013 19:00
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FishBulb posted:How do I make pita with a good pocket in it? I think I might be making it too thin before I cook it? Any suggestions or secrets? I do this recipe 50/50 WW/AP, with 1 tsp sodium citrate instead of dough improver:  They come out of the oven looking like beach balls.
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Oct 18, 2013 20:04
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I don't have sodium citrate  That's almost exactly the recipie I used minus the dough improver/citrate so I guess I'll just try again. FishBulb fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Oct 18, 2013 |
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Oct 18, 2013 22:24
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I've used this with pretty stellar results: http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-homemade-pita-bread-90844 They puff up like magic! Use a stone.
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Oct 19, 2013 00:45
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I make these pita. If they don't puff up it's because I rolled them too thick or too thin.
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Oct 19, 2013 03:36
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Anybody have a no-knead recipe that they use often? I've done Lahey's a couple times and I'm always underwhelmed at the taste. The crust is excellent and crackling, the crumb is well developed, but it doesn't taste like much. My sourdough starter is midway through growing so I'll probably mess with that later on.
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Oct 20, 2013 00:48
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Party Plane Jones posted:Anybody have a no-knead recipe that they use often? I've done Lahey's a couple times and I'm always underwhelmed at the taste. The crust is excellent and crackling, the crumb is well developed, but it doesn't taste like much. My sourdough starter is midway through growing so I'll probably mess with that later on. Use sourdough no-knead. Same technique but about 1/4 cup starter instead of yeast.
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Oct 20, 2013 09:17
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Party Plane Jones posted:Anybody have a no-knead recipe that they use often? I've done Lahey's a couple times and I'm always underwhelmed at the taste. The crust is excellent and crackling, the crumb is well developed, but it doesn't taste like much. My sourdough starter is midway through growing so I'll probably mess with that later on. Before you jump ship to a different recipe, check to make sure you're using enough salt. Measure it by weight, especially if you're using a courser salt like kosher or sea salt.
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Oct 20, 2013 16:28
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TychoCelchuuu posted:That definitely looks like a book from the 70s. I wonder if it taste what it looks like.
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Oct 20, 2013 18:00
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I tried again making the sweet potato bread that I showed in my first post in the thread. This time I knew more what I was doing so I kneaded it more (which I'm pretty sure I didn't do enough of the first time) and let it rise longer. I also know to lower the temp of my oven a bit since it was consistently burning loaves until I started doing that. I added more sugar and used pumpkin pie spice in it and holy crap this stuff is amazing. Anyhow, here's kind of a lovely picture of the bread: Excuse the canyon in the top. I didn't need to cut it since the loaf doesn't rise a ton in the oven. I also made a four-strand eggless challah. I was going to try a few more egg-free challah recipes but everyone loves this one so much that I haven't bothered. 
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Oct 20, 2013 18:03
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Party Plane Jones posted:Anybody have a no-knead recipe that they use often? I've done Lahey's a couple times and I'm always underwhelmed at the taste. The crust is excellent and crackling, the crumb is well developed, but it doesn't taste like much. My sourdough starter is midway through growing so I'll probably mess with that later on. The Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a day "mother" recipe and techniques are a great place to start. The ratio approach also works great to create your own bread recipes, or when you want to scale up or scale down an established recipe. You can use ratio when you want to create multi-grain bread (like rye or part whole wheat), but be aware different kinds of flours absorb liquid differently, so you may need to vary the hydration. You need a scale to use ratios effectively, but then again, you should really use a scale if you're going to be doing any baking. If you look at no-knead recipes, you'll see that they tend towards 5 parts flour to 4 parts liquid. I think that 1:.025 is a good general ratio for salt - IE 40 ounces of flour to 1 ounce of salt for perfectly seasoned bread. Yeast is highly variable in that you'll get the same thing in the end, but generally adding more gets you a faster rise. A 1/4 ounce envelope will leaven around 20 ounces of flour in 2-3 hours so you can stash the dough in the refrigerator for later. Or, as little as 1 or 2 grams of yeast will leaven that same amount of flour more slowly, as the yeast multiply, so that you can let the dough ferment at room temperature for a day prior to baking. That slow ferment at room temperature is also a good way to get a sourdough tang to your bread. Marv Albert fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Oct 22, 2013 |
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Oct 22, 2013 06:25
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I think I see how doughse was slipped in there. 
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Oct 22, 2013 18:58
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Today I tried making two different kinds of bread. The first one (a savoury chocolate bread) called for 6 cups of flour and 1 3/4 cups of water plus oil, salt, sugar and cocoa. When I tried to mix that together it was dry as hell and there was no way it was going to come together into a 'soft dough' with a wooden spoon as the recipe claimed. I cautiously added more water while trying knead it into a recognizably dough-like form. It ended up this stiff, hard ball that would barely knead at all. I eventually left it to rise and it did a bit but nothing much. Adding more water and kneading more has kind of helped but I'm not sure I'm going to try baking it at all. The other bread was a no-knead using more yeast and only a few hours in the bowl. It also used 6 cups of flour but nearly twice the amount of water than the chocolate bread. Even it stayed much drier than a no-knead usually does and had little weird hard crusty bits in it after it had sat for the allotted amount of time. I tried kneading it together a bit more and letting it rise a little more again but even then it had weird bits. I baked it and I'll cut into it soon and see what it looks like inside. What is going on here? The only thing I can think of is that I had the living room window open and forgot about it so it was colder than usual in here today. It was around eight degrees celsius outside but the lady downstairs controls the heat and it gets too warm at times so I opened things up in the morning.
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Oct 24, 2013 00:16
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TenKindsOfCrazy posted:Today I tried making two different kinds of bread. The first one (a savoury chocolate bread) called for 6 cups of flour and 1 3/4 cups of water plus oil, salt, sugar and cocoa. When I tried to mix that together it was dry as hell and there was no way it was going to come together into a 'soft dough' with a wooden spoon as the recipe claimed. I cautiously added more water while trying knead it into a recognizably dough-like form. It ended up this stiff, hard ball that would barely knead at all. I eventually left it to rise and it did a bit but nothing much. Adding more water and kneading more has kind of helped but I'm not sure I'm going to try baking it at all. Are you using the same flour as usual? I can't think whet else would account for such dry dough. Add more water! The hard bits on top I sometimes get if I don't properly cover the dough with oiled film. It dries out and forms little hard scabs.
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Oct 24, 2013 10:48
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It sounds like, in the first recipe at least, it was way too dry. Online recipes are often lovely. If you had just used that amount of flour and water it would have been a 36% hydration dough (actually slightly less because the calculator I'm using accounts for at least 10g of a wet starter). The "average" sandwich loaf is around 60-65% hydration, so yours is already way below average. Add a bunch of cocoa and other dry ingredients and the only result possible is a brick. Even your second recipe is too dry. Try using about 600g of water in your first recipe. With just flour that's a 75% hydration but it should even out with the addition of the cocoa and sugar (I think). http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/22944/dough-hydration-calculator
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Oct 24, 2013 14:22
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Thanks, therattle and The Doctor. I used my usual AP flour but I agree that both recipes had not nearly enough hydration. Both were dismal failures; especially the chocolate one that baked into ugly bricks. Thanks for the hydration calculator! I'm going to try the chocolate one again tomorrow.
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Oct 24, 2013 14:37
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Are you measuring by volume or weight? Volume is awful and is affected by a number of variables. Invest in good bread and buy yourself a cheap electronic scale.
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Oct 24, 2013 15:41
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Thanks for posting that calculator! I have my first sourdough starter brewing up, and that will definitely come in handy when I bake the first loaf.
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Oct 24, 2013 16:08
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Yeah it's a great little tool. I never cared about hydration when I first started baking but getting into really nice breads it's totally needed. Volume does suck also but if you're really stuck using it you can just convert the ingredients to grams online and get a pretty decent approximation.
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Oct 24, 2013 16:11
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Hydration and weight are very useful, but so is intuition. Trust yours more! It felt dry, and it was.
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Oct 24, 2013 17:55
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The Doctor posted:Yeah it's a great little tool. I never cared about hydration when I first started baking but getting into really nice breads it's totally needed. I probably dont understand, but how is 'converting ingredients to grams' compatible with using volume as an approximate in general, and in comparison to using the empirical system in specific?
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Oct 24, 2013 18:56
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therattle posted:Hydration and weight are very useful, but so is intuition. Trust yours more! It felt dry, and it was. Baking is more about following recipes than most other cooking tends to be, but it's still an art, not a science. If something doesn't feel right when you follow a recipe, it probably isn't.
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Oct 24, 2013 19:18
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IDateBois posted:I probably dont understand, but how is 'converting ingredients to grams' compatible with using volume as an approximate in general, and in comparison to using the empirical system in specific? google "how many grams is a cup of water". Most common baking ingredients have conversions online.
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Oct 24, 2013 19:26
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The Doctor posted:google "how many grams is a cup of water". Most common baking ingredients have conversions online. I find these conversions poor at best since it's dependent on your brand and type. Also note that these conversions for flour assume that you're sifting the flour prior to scoop and leveling. A scale costs $25 and is a one time expense that will save you a lot of headache, I just don't see why you wouldn't just get one if you were finding that baking recipes just aren't working for you for whatever reason. It should be the first troubleshooting step.
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Oct 24, 2013 19:39
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I use a scale, but I know what it's like to legitimately not be able to afford the expense. Conversions are fine for the average baker until a scale can be acquired. e: Also, if you're making a totally average sandwich loaf and you can't get it to work out, scales are not the problem, the recipe or the person following it is the problem. When someone complains that a recipe has failed them, the problem is never or extemely rarely "I should have weighed it" until you start getting into serious recipes with features reliant on accuracy. The problem is almost always: terrible recipe, substituted/forgotten ingredients, inadequate proofing, cold oven, cold rise, etc. All other things being equal, in a simple recipe, volume/weight is inconsequential. This isn't to argue that measuring by weight is not vastly superior to any other method, because it is, once you actually need to care about it. The Doctor fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Oct 24, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 19:49
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The lack of kitchen scales in the US is just seriously weird. An analogue kitchen scale can be bought for ~$4 in any supermarket in the UK. Its just simply something which every kitchen has, in nearly every country apart from the US.
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Oct 24, 2013 20:03
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The Doctor posted:e: Also, if you're making a totally average sandwich loaf and you can't get it to work out, scales are not the problem, the recipe or the person following it is the problem. When someone complains that a recipe has failed them, the problem is never or extemely rarely "I should have weighed it" until you start getting into serious recipes with features reliant on accuracy. The problem is almost always: terrible recipe, substituted/forgotten ingredients, inadequate proofing, cold oven, cold rise, etc. All other things being equal, in a simple recipe, volume/weight is inconsequential. This has not been my experience, but it might just be because my whole wheat flour is exceptionally weird.
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Oct 24, 2013 20:05
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Measuring water in volume I can understand, but flour by volume is just weird. There are so many variables influencing the amount of flour you pack into a given container it seems like guessing at best. I'll have to mirror the sentiment that its hard to understand why you would not have a scale in your kitchen. Also, if you're converting cups to grams to not work with volume in the first place I still don't see how that works. You're still working with volumes, but now you're adding an estimate of its weight.
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Oct 24, 2013 21:45
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Measuring flour by volume is significantly less accurate, and it gets compounded since there's inaccuracy on your end and inaccuracy from whoever's writing the formula you're using, but it still shouldn't gently caress your recipe up beyond recognition like it did for TenKindsOfCrazy. I'd expect either there was a typo in the recipe, or there was a cup of milk or something in there that got forgotten. Maybe the cocoa in the recipe was supposed to be a brewed cup of hot cocoa instead of cocoa powder, or there was an extra cup of water in the instructions for blooming active dry yeast. Something like that. But get a scale if you can. Even a 5% margin of error makes a big difference to your final hydration %, and you don't have to deal with crap like scooping out 12 half cups since your 1 cup measure is in the wash.
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Oct 24, 2013 23:54
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For what it's worth here's the recipe I tried: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-bread/
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Oct 25, 2013 02:01
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TenKindsOfCrazy posted:For what it's worth here's the recipe I tried: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-bread/ That tiny, little bit of sugar with all that chocolate and flour almost seems like it would be worthless as a flavor modifier.
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Oct 25, 2013 02:17
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Drifter posted:That tiny, little bit of sugar with all that chocolate and flour almost seems like it would be worthless as a flavor modifier. It's not supposed to be sweet but you're right. I wonder if it was supposed to read 3 cups of flour, not six, and it got overlooked. There are people in the comments saying the recipe worked for them. Anyhow, it was a poo poo recipe and I'm not going to try this one again. I may just make up my own based on my favourite white bread recipe.
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Oct 25, 2013 02:22
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