Elf Sternberg

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.

For this week's bread experiment I made bagels. But I played with the recipie a bit. Instead of just plain sugar to feed the yeast, I put in really, really black molasses instead, and I boiled them with some baking soda, a trick I learned when making home-made soft pretzels.

They are fookin' amazing. The molasses touch is wonderful, they're a deep brown color, and the baking soda really helped make the outer crust soft and tender.

( The recipie. )

Notes: Kneading is not "about ten minutes," although that's what all the recipies say. Kneading is about making the dough elastic and homogenous, and that takes, well, as long as it takes. Although I started a timer, I stopped around nine minutes-- any more kneading and I knew the dough would have just toughened up and dried out more. It really is a matter of practice, and after baking a dozen different things I think I've got some sense of what properly kneaded dough looks like. I've also gotten used to working with sticky doughs and have learned not to be paranoid about having it stuck to my hands. It all works out in the end.

I've also learned that the "until doubled" is a much better gauge than "for an hour and a half." Bread should be trusted: after a set period of time, say an hour with these modern "instant" yeasts, start checking every fifteen minutes. If it looks big enough, it probably is. Go head and go on to the next step.

On the other tentacle, never trust "instant" yeast. Always activate it in a bowl with hot water beforehand, adding the sweetener (but no other dry ingredients) if the recipe calls for sweetener.

Much of the instructions in modern cookbooks and baking manuals is aimed at people who have never made bread even once in their lives. Once you figure it out, though, many of the steps they advise can be modified or ignored (and trusting the yeast, as many of them do, is just plain wrong).