Getting Back To Bread

I’ve recently begun baking bread again. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I’d learned with my hiatus of about one year. I thought I’d made some records, but I can’t find much in my files. This document will serve as a record of trials, errors, and grand successes. If anyone decides to read it, I’ll appreciate your tips and try to answer your questions.

I’ve traditionally kept my barm/mother starter at 100% hydration in the blue plastic pitcher. Today I’m trying a firm starter to run a side-by-side with the spongy barm. I’ll build identical doughs from the two pieces and see what differences are detectable in the final result. Although it now occurs to me that I added salt and sugar to the firm piece I made this morning, so it won’t really be good as a starter for the long term. Why don’t we want salt in the mother? What does the salt do, exactly?

The hydration calculations always cause me consternation when I’m building from anything other than a 100% (50-50) starter. I have a hard time figuring out the total flour weight, and only that can tell me how much water to add to achieve a given hydration percentage. I get mad at myself for not being able to do the algebra in my head (or on paper, for that matter). So I’ve resolved this morning to build a little Excel sheet that will run the calcs for me. It’s also interesting to note that when I think about the proportions of ingredients in terms of “natural frequencies” (ie. Out of 167 grams of dough, 100 is flour and 67 is water) ala Gerd Gigerenzer, it’s much easier to understand than when I try to construct an algebraic phrase.

I’ve had trouble getting an attractive exterior crust on my finished loaves. As was the case last year, I get a narrow band between the bottom of the boule, where it rests on the stone, and the upper curvature that is perfectly done—beautiful blistering, browning, and a caramelized sheen. I hypothesized that what lacked on the top curvature was the intense radiant heat from the nearby stone. I added a top stone on the rack above to correct for this, but I still got an unappealing whitish, pasty finished crust. I faintly remembered the baker from the Bread Store telling me last year that my problem was not enough steam. More steam! So next I tried using the evap tray on the oven floor with a dose of boiling water at the start of baking, plus misting the oven walls (I tried misting the stone, and it cracked!), and directly misting the proofed, slashed loaf just before putting on the hearth. This was a substantial improvement, but I still didn’t get caramelization. My new hypothesis is that the heat was too low to achieve caramelization, thus no sheen.

Several things to try: preparing the loaf as above, and additionally removing it after two minutes to remist the loaf directly, then reinserting it in the oven. I’m also curious to see if the caramelization could be achieved at the end of baking, rather than at the beginning. This is suggested to me by several pieces of evidence: first, the cook’s illustrated method for roasting beef is longer time with lower temperature, then a final kick at the end to high temperature to caramelize the crust; second, if I hit the loaf with high heat right off, isn’t it going to crust over and prevent much further oven spring?; more heat, more quickly will kill the yeast earlier in the baking process; and one other reason that I forget. Aha! Now I remember. Reinhart states that results from breads baked in La Cloche are outstanding. His method with La Cloche calls for proofing the bread on the bottom plate of the unit, spritzing the loaf and the interior of the unit, then placing the whole assembly, at room temp, into a preheated oven. That means that the oven heat reaches the bread slowly as the bake proceeds and that the caramelization occurs later in the bake.

I want a Cloche! Where’s my Cloche??