Blargh – random ramblings

Last week Duncan was asking me where to buy a good baking stone and commercial food-grade containers so he could get started making some breads out of “Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day”. This reminded me that I had the same book and really hadn’t tried any of the recipes in the book. While we do have Superior Products locally, I by far prefer going to Hockenbergs to browse the isles upon isles of food related paraphernalia.

I’ve had quite a few baking stones over the last 7 or so years I’ve been here. Most of them have cracked way too quickly. The last one I got about 4 years ago from Hockenbergs, and it’s still going strong despite the abuse I put it through. It’s been in the 550F degree oven for hours and the 600F+ grill without cracking. That’s with water, pizza sauce, and more getting dropped on it in my quest to make great pizza and bread. It’s thick and sturdy, which you would expect of a pricier baking stone. I also have a fairly large stock of various sized food-grade containers. I found one that fit perfect for the first recipe in the book – a 5 quart square lidded bucket.

The recipe is straight forward, but I instantly questioned the amount of salt and yeast when I saw the recipe. While I like my breads less saltier, and usually err on the side of caution this recipe called for a full 1 1/2 tbsp of salt.

• 3 cups of warm water
• 1 1/2 tbsp kosher salt
• 1 1/2 tbsp dried yeast
• 6 1/2 cups of unsifted flour

I decided to go with the amount of salt anyway, to see where the recipe would go. The recipe just calls for mixing the ingredients together and letting it sit for 2 hours before putting it in the fridge for 2-14 days. Much like Bittman’s No-Knead bread that has been blogged to death. I’ve tried that recipe a few times before, but never really cared for the texture of the final bread even though the taste was good. I let the dough rise for the length the recipe called for and put it in the fridge until I was ready to make a loaf a few days later. Upon mixing it together I thought it was very dry, but at least that subsided after the initial rise.

The day of baking I removed half of the dough and let it come to room temperature, before shaping it and turning the oven on to 450F. I put a pan in the oven and put some warm water in it to generate steam in order to get a good oven spring.

It was pretty well done after about 30 minutes. To my surprise the oven spring was very good for the bread. I haven’t had this good of an oven spring since I was experimenting with some sour dough breads a few years back. As you can see from the picture to the right the interior is very nice and airy.

Besides having way too much salt, this bread was very tasty. Crunchy and chewy exterior with soft light interior. The other thing that impressed me was the piece of bread that was left over the next day was still as soft as the day before. Exterior was still chewy and the interior was not dry at all.

As I’m writing this I’m eating the bread that came out of the second half of the bread. After 4 days in the fridge the bread is pretty sour without being sour dough. I actually prefered the flavor of it after just 2 days in the fridge. Without cleaning the cointainer I’ve started a new batch already, where I cut the salt down to 1 tbsp. Hopefully this will turn out much more like I want, and I’ll make sure to bake all of it after two days instead.