2019-07-30 - Respect the Fermentation
We've fallen into a frenzy of baking, and it's been a sheer delight! For a few years, the only time I've baked was for a class, and that was more a matter of helping others rather than refining my techniques. And, honestly, my breads were starting to show it. Now that I'm settling into retirement, we're starting to do things we've wanted to do and just couldn't when we were doing the 8 to 5 thing.
A lot of this has been inspired by our recent discussions of farmers markets and bread clubs. Is it worth it, to us, to go down that rabbit hole? And what do people want to buy? More has been inspired by our discussions of our long stalled cookbook project.
As a result, for the past few weeks I've been baking twice a week. I've been baking to adjust our recipes from when we were living in the mountains, and the breads are showing what can happen when they are given a bit of love. We're giving away the breads for now, which gets us feedback on the breads and makes us feel better because we aren't throwing food away. This has also been a great way to finally meet the neighbors!
We're also visiting farmers markets in the area to see what other people are selling and what they are charging for their breads. We found two cottage food bakers selling bread. And, we're still thinking.
The first thing we see, and we've seen from our own renaissance of baking, is you have to respect fermentation to make good bread. One baker told us she was up at 4:30 to start making her breads. And, honestly, while she is a very sweet lady, the breads weren't all that good. You may remember our time line from earlier newsletters about our farmers market experiences was around 24 hours, not 3 or 4. And that didn't include prep time for the starters and preferments.
What do we mean by, "respect the fermentation"? It takes time for yeast or sourdough to raise and flavor a bread. If you rush things, you don't get full flavor development. And your crumb structure isn't what it should be. If you rush bread by using more yeast, the bread has a strong yeast flavor. and not much else happening. The extreme example of this is grocery store white bread. Some people like that, but I'm not a fan, and if you're here you probably aren't a fan of supermarket white bread either.
I like to experiment - or even play - with a recipe, so for the same recipe I'll try loafing the dough shortly after mixing, giving the dough a good first rise and then loafing it, and then trying two rises and then loafing the dough. I'll try it with sourdough, with poolish, with a biga and even straight yeast. There are differences between the breads. The time it takes for dough to reach a flavor peak is the time it takes. Once I try the loaves, I have an idea of what I want to do. It isn't always necessary to do two rises, but it often helps. Once I know how what the dough wants, I can plan for bread production. It is worth mentioning the usual rule of thumb is that each rise takes about half the time of the preceding one. So, if the first rise is 4 hours, the second would be around 2, and the final rise would be around 1 hour. That is, of course, a rule of thumb and your mileage may vary.
If a bread takes too long, there are a few options. One is to not produce the bread commercially. An old saying has it that, "time is money", and we'll talk about that some more later in this email.
Of course, the time that a dough rises isn't time you need to be there watching the dough. It can handle rising on its own. However, the dough is taking up containers in the first rise, and it is taking up bread forms or sheet pans for its final rise. In full production, we often used the same bread pans and sheet pans several times in a bake day. When the bread was risen, it went into the oven and the brotform was filled with another loaf to let it rise. If something has to rise a long time, it could mean you don't have enough gear, or space, to do other things you want to do.
Another thing you can do is see what you can do to encourage the dough to move, or rise, more quickly. Is it really necessary to give the dough two rises before loafing it? That's an easy change. Can you raise the dough temperature to get it to rise more quickly? If you go too far down that road, you can get off tastes in your bread, so caution is advised. Can you use a bit more riser to get it to rise more quickly? More riser is, as suggested before, a double edged sword. Too much riser can rob the dough, and bread, of flavor.
We have a sourdough whole wheat bread we've been making for quite some time. I hadn't really looked at its formula in years. When we started baking this bread recently, I examined it and saw that it uses about 80% sourdough starter which is a staggering amount. We're cutting that back to a more normal 20%. In general, the more starter the faster the rise and the milder the sourdough flavor. We want more sourdough flavor, so we're going to see what happens when we cut the starter back to 1/4 of what it had been. You'll hear more about this experiment in future newsletters.
Our cinnamon raisin sourdough bread uses a good bit of starter because we want a very mild sourdough flavor profile. Also, cinnamon slows the rise so we need a lot of starter.
Yes, ingredients can slow your rise. So, if your rise is taking too long, there may be ingredients that can be done away with, or handled differently. Have you ever wondered why most cinnamon raisin breads have the cinnamon swirled into the dough, jelly roll style? Yeah, it IS attractive, it makes the cinnamon more obvious and gives your customer a delightful burst of cinnamon flavor. But, that's not the whole story. It turns out that cinnamon will slow your riser - a lot. By rolling your dough and putting the cinnamon mixture on the dough and rolling it jelly roll style, the amount of dough in contact with the cinnamon is reduced and your rise isn't as impacted. There are other ingredients that can impact your rise. Jalapeño peppers and garlic are two of them. To boost flavors and reduce rise impact, we roast these ingredients before putting them into the dough.
A long, slow rise really helps build bread flavor, which is what bakers call, "respecting the fermentation". Even for flavored breads, like the cinnamon raisin or garlic breads, I want a fully flavored bread. If the cinnamon and raisin, or the garlic, were missing would I still want to eat this bread? My preference is, yes. Even a flavored bread should be build on a base of good bread.
That doesn't mean that every bread needs to be a curl your toes sour San Francisco style sourdough bread. The flavor needs to be appropriate for the total bread. A number of our flavored breads are based on a poolish, and a few are straight yeasted breads with no "fancy bakers tricks".
If you're a wine lover a great book to read is "Cork Dork: A Wine-Fuelled Journey into the Art of Sommeliers and the Science of Taste" by Bianca Bosker. Ms. Bosker kinda got sucked into the wine scene because she was wondering how much of wine snobbery was real and how much was just nonsense. She engages in a discussion of what is a good wine with one of her mentors. He said it was simple, "when I taste the wine, do I want to drink some more of it." It bypasses all the considerations of grape type, fermentation, aging, vintage year and gets right down to the basics. Is this good enough that I want to drink more of it? And, that's where I am with bread. It's great that the bread is sourdough, was made with heirloom grain, with flour freshly ground just before use, and that it took 48 hours to make, but in the end the question is, does the bread make me want to eat more of it?
In the Avery household we're in the process of undoing years of overeating and under-exercising, so we are watching what we eat. And that means, for us, that bread has to justify its place in our diet. When we go to our favorite local barbecue joint, we'll eat the meat and skip the mass-market white bread they serve it on. Actually, they've learned to not even ask if we want the mass-market white bread because they know we don't. But the nice bread at the nice French restaurant, yeah, we want that. And a bit more of the olive oil to dip it in, please.
Wrestling this back on topic, respecting the fermentation means allowing time for an appropriate fermentation. Having a number of tools in your tool belt helps. We talk about the slow fermentation techniques in our book, "Mastering Flavorful Breads."
Until next time, may your dough always rise, may it always respect you as much as you respect it,
Mike