I'z a baker

[elfs]

Bread, before and after baking.

Omaha is out of town this week, but I decided to go to her coven meeting anyway. Three other families in the coven have kids, so we let them get together when we have the chance, and I like to hang out in the socialization part before they get down to whatever it is that they do at covens.

I decided to make bread, since I have that lovely new book, and I completely and utterly screwed up. I decided to try a preferment recipe using a biga, which is simply a mixture of flour, yeast, and water which is allowed to rise for a few hours and then mixed in with the dough later, to give it more flavor. At 10:30am I started making the biga. I'm pretty sure I put in too much yeast but, far worse, is what I did next.

The recipe called for 425 grams of water. I took out a bowl and put it onto my scale, and began pouring water from a four-quart measuring cup into the bowl. When I had 425 grams, I put the bowl and the measuring cup aside, and then went through the process of making the flour and yeast mix. And then I grabbed the measuring cup and poured it into the mixing bowl. I have no idea how much water was left in the measuring cup.

But I put together the biga and hand-mixed it and it felt okay, as bready things go, so I shrugged and decided to let it ferment. The whole assemblage time took about 15 minutes.

At 12:30, I took the biga out and subdivided it into little balls, then assembled about a kilo of flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar and olive oil, then added the biga balls, and hand-mixed and kneaded the whole mess for about nine minutes. Again, I screwed up: too much salt, and I poured it right on top of the yeast, effectively killing some of them. Poor yeasties. When I was done, I had two kilos of dough, which I then let rise. That took about 15 minutes.

At 3:00, I took the fully raised dough out of my bowl (I'm still missing my couche, dammit, and I want it!), gently cut it into quarters, formed each quarter into a boule, and put two down onto pre-torn sheets of parchment. Again, about 15 minutes. That's two boules in the left-hand photo, above; the other two were in the oven already.

At 3:50, I started pre-heating the oven. I pre-heat a baking oven for 40 minutes, because that's how long it takes to get the baking stone so hot it'll stay hot when I put the bread on. I also put a cast iron skillet on the top shelf.

At 4:30, I slid two boules into the oven. I filled the cast-iron skillet with a cup of near-boiling water from the kettle, and then twice in about two minutes sprayed the walls of the oven with a garden sprayer.

At 4:50, I slid them out and put in the next two. At 5:10, they were all done. As you can see, they all came out wonderfully. The crumb was a little more moist than I would have liked, and my oven was too hot so the crust was thinner, but nobody at coven complained; heck, they made the whole five pounds of it vanish. Whatever I did "wrong" was unnoticeable.

I suppose my overconfident "bread is easy" is unwarranted; this bread is difficult. It took an hour and fifteen minutes of my time, broken up by three periods of between 90 and 150 minutes each; it doesn't take much effort to bake bread, but you effectively can't leave the house for timely errands.

As to the coven itself, I stayed for the whole thing. More to come.