On Apr 19, 8:03 pm, "graham" wrote:
"Mike Avery" wrote in message

news:mailman.1.1177003230.9428.rec.food.sourdough@ mail.otherwhen.com... atty wrote:

Poolish and biga are two techniques that are still commonly used. When
you use these techniques, the long rise times give keeping qualities very
comparable to sourdough. With bread, the longer it takes to make, the
longer it will last.

The tastes are different between a yeasted dough and a sourdough. In
general, the taste of the wheat comes through more with a yeasted dough,
where with a sourdough based bread the sourdough taste tends to overwhelm
the taste of the flour. Is one "better" than the other? Not really.
It's just a matter of preference. I have a number of customers who feel
that sourdough is overwhelming and love the taste of one of my poolish
based French style breads.


I have to plead guilty to using 'poolish' to refer to sourdough
culture kept or used at sponge type hydration similar to proper use of
the term 'poolish'. So what is best term to refer to sourdough kept as
sponge? If the the French use the term 'levian' in this so context it
seems eminently confusable with 'sourdough' in general for them.

I entirely get Mike's point about not everybody wanting sourdough
flavour, but surely a slowed down commercial yeast method, such as
'old' or 'rotten' dough is letting some lacto bacilli in on the act,
for which there would not normally be time in commercial straight
dough methods, so it can be said the distinction begins to blur?

I would also question whether one can blankly say more time=better
keeping, even in the case of comparing different sourdough cultures,
as different processes and different lacto bacilli present may create
differing pH and acidity and other bi-products contributing to keeping
qualities.

Been re-reading Daniel Wing 'Bread builders' Chapter 3, 'Leavens and
Yeasts' and whilst obviously its mostly on methods of creating,
storing and using leavens, there are also numerous points mentioned
about the differences between 'wild' yeasts and between various 'lacto
bacilli' present in different sourdough cultures. One sentence maybe
worth quoting

"The main reason many bakers are not jealous of of their leavens is
that the use and maintenance of a leaven is as important as its
microbiology in determining the characteristics of the bread made from
it."

To me the important word here is the first 'as' - I guess this is all
quite analogous to the 'nature or nurture' debate for human species -
and will similarly carry on swinging backwards and forwards for years
to come

yours
atty

atty wrote:
I have to plead guilty to using 'poolish' to refer to sourdough
culture kept or used at sponge type hydration similar to proper use of
the term 'poolish'. So what is best term to refer to sourdough kept as
sponge? If the the French use the term 'levian' in this so context it
seems eminently confusable with 'sourdough' in general for them.

In the USA relatively few bakers are professionally trained, at least
compared to France. As a result, French bakers have a very precise
vocabulary that describes different sorts of starters, the conditions of
the starters, and the way the starters are used. Better yet, the
precise vocabulary is shared, so when one French baker says "poolish" to
another French baker, they both know what they are talking about.

The general lack of precision in the usage in the USA seems to carry
over into this newsgroup, perhaps because most of us are hobbyists,
perhaps because few of us have formal training in baking.

Still, I'd call it a sourdough sponge.
I entirely get Mike's point about not everybody wanting sourdough
flavour, but surely a slowed down commercial yeast method, such as
'old' or 'rotten' dough is letting some lacto bacilli in on the act,
for which there would not normally be time in commercial straight
dough methods, so it can be said the distinction begins to blur?

Yes, no, maybe.. well, it all depends. Poolish and biga are made with
large quantities of flour and water and very small quantities of bakers
yeast. A biga is a much stiffer dough than a poolish. Biga is, if
memory serves, usually around 55% hydration, poolish around 100%. In
order to make 20 loaves of bread, I typically use about 2 grams of yeast
in the poolish and another 2 in the final dough. Whether you are making
a poolish or a biga, it is usually allowed to ferment about 12 hours.
With a poolish you want it to reach a peak and then just start to collapse.

With poolish and biga, all of the starter is used to make the bread, so
none is held back, and there is little to no chance of lactobacillus
bacteria contamination.

Old dough or rotten dough is another matter. It is possible that
lactobacillus bacteria could get in. Whether that happens in practice
is another question.

I would also question whether one can blankly say more time=better
keeping, even in the case of comparing different sourdough cultures,
as different processes and different lacto bacilli present may create
differing pH and acidity and other bi-products contributing to keeping
qualities.

It wasn't blankly. It's a bakers adage of long standing. When I was
running a bakery, we did some informal product life tests. We took
loaves of bread from production and put them on a shelf. We'd poke the
bread to see if it was still reasonably fresh and look for mold.

Our sourdoughs typically lasted 21 days or so before showing mold. Our
poolish bread were not quite so long lived, lasting 17 to 19 days.
Straight doughs don't last that long. At the local farmers market,
we've had little old ladies of all ages and genders wave umbrellas in
our faces and demand to know what we are putting in our breads.

"Time" is our usual answer.

Mike


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part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
wordsmith

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Hi Mike

I think I read on your website where you decided to dump your SF
culture, and just keep two. If so do you still have two and for what
purposes and under what 'regimes'

yours
atty

atty wrote:
I think I read on your website where you decided to dump your SF
culture, and just keep two. If so do you still have two and for what
purposes and under what 'regimes'

I'm down to two that I use. I have a bottle of Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail
starter and one I started myself using Professor Calvel's technique.

I also have another couple that I started when looking at starter
starting techniques. They are going away pretty soon.

Most of my baking falls into two broad categories at this time. Test
bakes to develop and stabilize recipes. And commercial bakes for my
bread club, my health food store customers, and the local farmers markets.

As a result, consistency is probably more important to me than to
hobbyist bakers. If it takes 4 hours or 12 hours for a bread to rise
doesn't matter all that much to a home baker. Since I have customers
who want bread at a certain time, and since I am renting a kitchen that
the owners need to use for their main money making enterprise (being a
steak house and restaurant), I have to be out of the kitchen by 5:30 AM.

The methods that I am discussing below are not what I talk about in my
web page. The web page is aimed at beginners, and the techniques on the
web page are better suited to beginners than what I am about to
discuss. I may put these methods on the web page before long, but I
want do so in a way that won't confuse beginners..... If you talk to 20
bakers, you'll find they use 20 different approaches to handling their
starters. I don't get emotional about how I handle starters, and I
understand that some folks wouldn't like how I handle my starters. Some
professional bakers with good credentials insist that refrigerating a
starter destroys it, and the ONLY thing to do is destroy it and start
over. I haven't shared that experience, but I do sometimes wonder if I
am missing out on something. My starter handling has evolved over a
period of years, and I use it because it produces a reliable starter and
because I haven't noticed the starter declining, which I had noted with
other starter maintenance regimens.

So.... here's how I maintain my starters....

I keep about a pint of starter at about 60% hydration in a quart jar in
my refrigerator. About 5 days before the next bake, I take a small
amount of the starter out of the jar and double it every 12 hours
through feeding. My last feeding is about 10 hours before the bake, and
in that feeding I triple the starter. How much starter I begin with,
and how much I end up with, depends on how much I'll be baking.
However, in general I start with a few grams of starter and end up with
about 8 to 10 kilograms (16 to 20 pounds).

The repeated feedings over the 5 day period insure that the starter is
vibrantly healthy and very active when I am ready to use it. My storage
starter is at about 60% hydration because this lasts longer in storage
than a starter at 100% hydration. When I feed starters for use, I move
to 100% hydration. However, I don't worry about the difference in the
hydration levels. The 1 to 20 grams of 60% hydration starter I start
out with are for all practical purposes at 100% in a few feedings.

When the amount of storage starter gets low, or after about 6 months, or
if I don't like the smell of the storage starter, I feed it up to
restore it's vitality. I've included a table as to how much I feed it.
All feedings are in grams.... I have no idea if the formatting of the
table will survive being run through a newsgroup.
Day
Feeding
Starter amount
Water
Flour
Total weight
1
1
2
1
2
5
1
2
5 (from previous total)
3
4
12
2
1
12
7
11
30
2
2
30
18
30
78
3
1
78
47
78
203
3
2
203
122
203
528
4
1
300 (discard, or use, excess starter)
180
300
780
4
2
300 (repeat day 4's feeding cycle as needed)
180
300
780


I start the feeding cycle at any point where I have enough starter to
fill the starter amount requirement. If I have 90 grams of starter left
over, I'll start at the day 3, feeding 1 point, using 78 grams. I
continue the feedings until the starter is very active and will at least
double in size between feedings. This is a very thick starter at about
60% hydration. It is usually easier to knead it than to stir it.

Once the starter is active enough, I give the starter a last feeding and
immediately fill a clean quart jar about 1/2 full and put it into the
refrigerator. Some of Dr. Sugihara's figures indicate that starter that
is freshly fed suffers less when frozen than a mature starter. While I
have found no studies that indicate this carries over to refrigerated
starters, my own observations suggest that the starter maintains its
vitality better if put into the refrigerator right after being fed than
if I wait until the starter has risen after a feeding before
refrigerating it. The starter will normally double in size after being
refrigerated.

Enjoy,
Mike

--
Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com
part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
wordsmith

A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day:
TV is chewing gum for the eyes. -- Frank Lloyd Wright

On Apr 21, 5:02 pm, Mike Avery wrote:
atty wrote:
I think I read on your website where you decided to dump your SF
culture, and just keep two. If so do you still have two and for what
purposes and under what 'regimes'

I'm down to two that I use. I have a bottle of Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail
starter and one I started myself using Professor Calvel's technique.

I also have another couple that I started when looking at starter
starting techniques. They are going away pretty soon.

thanks for sharing all the info. What I am not really clear is why you
keep two starters? Is it just a security back up or are they for
different purposes? As far as I can tell you keep them both on the
same regime?

When the amount of storage starter gets low, or after about 6 months, or
if I don't like the smell of the storage starter, I feed it up to
restore it's vitality. I've included a table as to how much I feed it.

The other thing I am not clear about is why you keep actual starter
without refreshing it regularly over such a long period, why not
refresh it as you withdraw portions for use?

Personally I have stored starter in fridge at 110% hydration for
several years now. I find the extra 10% compared to most makes for
easier mixing and faster reaction when required. I refresh starter by
however much required to get the whole starter lively again to begin
with for each use. Last year I was essentially using a method of
building up a sponge from starter, also at 110% hydration, and where
final dough flour added was approximately 280% of the flour in the
sponge (a poolish method except not commercial yeast I guess?). This
sponge would rise from early evening till when final dough mixed the
next morning, in other words usually a full drop - followed by
approximately 6 hours main rise of final dough.

Over the winter when I bake at home as opposed to my outdoor wood
fired oven I have changed methods. Overall the purpose has been to
develop method that will enable me to produce around 12 kilos of dough
to make up 2 loads for my wood-fired oven this summer (I have
committed to supplying bread to a few friends at least once a week).
My sponge method would have required too much sponge slopping around
for capacity of my kitchen and my fridge to make up this quantity.
Also I was persuaded by various sources that retarding at least a
portion of my dough could be good. So method over this winter was to
save back a portion of dough from previous bake (before adding salt)
and to retard this till subsequent bake, on average 4 days, where in
final mix flour at between 350% to 400% of this starter dough would be
added. This was kind of convenient since it meant only one mix and
therefore wash up for each bake.

Problem with this method was that rising time could be quite
unpredictable and also Charles has persuaded me that the missing
ingredient in my current attempts to getting a really predictable open
crumb is vigour of initial starter ... so now I am going for
refreshing my sponge starter and then making new intermediate dough
for each bake. So far I haven't duplicated my open Ischia loaf #1 but
I think this has more to do with changes in overall hydration to cope
with warm outdoor temperatures at my oven + a kind of spontaneous
reduction in final proof times that I should have realised will cramp
crumb structure.

Mike, you write about the problems of timing to get out the kitchen
you use at time required. Don't know how many other people here use a
wood-fired oven? However many, we can assure you wood-fired ovens have
their own very special requirements in terms of choreographing dough
development etc. In my own case my oven is a mile and half with
bicycle and trailer from home (where dough is mixed), oven is up a
path on a hill, water but no power. Oven usually takes 3 hours to get
up to baking temperature, after which half hour with embers spread out
and then three quarters of an hour with fire out of oven and door
shut, before bread can be inserted. Conclusion is dough must be at
right stage of development when I leave my house to be ready for the
oven 4 and half hours later (allowing for the journey to the oven) and
taking into account the ambient temperature of the day, since I have
no proofer or retarder at my oven.

Currently I am baking two loads in oven http://www.myplot.org/oven
without refiring - haven't quite fixed the right oven wall temperature
to spread the embers so some hiccups ... first load rather scorched
yesterday. Wood fired oven has the additional restriction that opening
the oven door to have a peak is much more serious than opening the
door on an oven where you can control its temperature at any moment.

yours
andy forbes

atty wrote:
On Apr 21, 5:02 pm, Mike Avery wrote:

atty wrote:

I think I read on your website where you decided to dump your SF
culture, and just keep two. If so do you still have two and for what
purposes and under what 'regimes'

I'm down to two that I use. I have a bottle of Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail
starter and one I started myself using Professor Calvel's technique.

I also have another couple that I started when looking at starter
starting techniques. They are going away pretty soon.


thanks for sharing all the info. What I am not really clear is why you
keep two starters? Is it just a security back up or are they for
different purposes? As far as I can tell you keep them both on the
same regime?

I use the one I created/started with Professor Calvel's techniques the
most. I prefer it to the excellent Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail starter for
my own work. I keep the Carl's 1847 around so that I can use a starter
that is readily available to anyone.

When the amount of storage starter gets low, or after about 6 months, or
if I don't like the smell of the storage starter, I feed it up to
restore it's vitality. I've included a table as to how much I feed it.


The other thing I am not clear about is why you keep actual starter
without refreshing it regularly over such a long period, why not
refresh it as you withdraw portions for use?

The big reason I don't refresh it more often is because I don't need
to. Refreshing the main starter for no reason is a waste of time and
flour. By using a lower hydration, the starter works more slowly.
Under refrigeration, I don't see any hootch for about 3 months. When I
kept the storage starter at 100% hydration, I'd see hootch forming under
refrigeration in a matter of weeks.

Personally I have stored starter in fridge at 110% hydration for
several years now. I find the extra 10% compared to most makes for
easier mixing and faster reaction when required.
The faster reaction is the reason I don't use higher hydration levels.
Things happen too quickly.
Problem with this method was that rising time could be quite
unpredictable and also Charles has persuaded me that the missing
ingredient in my current attempts to getting a really predictable open
crumb is vigour of initial starter ..
Having gotten lots of emails from sourdough beginners and from sourdough
dropouts, I am convinced that many, if not most, hobbyist's starters are
on the edge of death. The ideal is to feed daily and bake daily.
However, that is impractical for most of us.

so now I am going for
refreshing my sponge starter and then making new intermediate dough
for each bake. So far I haven't duplicated my open Ischia loaf #1 but
I think this has more to do with changes in overall hydration to cope
with warm outdoor temperatures at my oven + a kind of spontaneous
reduction in final proof times that I should have realised will cramp
crumb structure.

There are lots of variables to cope with in any kitchen.
Mike, you write about the problems of timing to get out the kitchen
you use at time required. Don't know how many other people here use a
wood-fired oven?
I keep reading the books on brick and cobb ovens and want to build one.
However, my wife has concerns about the impact on our home's decor and
landscaping. Maybe someday. Still, I am familiar with the timing
restraints.
However many, we can assure you wood-fired ovens have
their own very special requirements in terms of choreographing dough
development etc. In my own case my oven is a mile and half with
bicycle and trailer from home (where dough is mixed), oven is up a
path on a hill, water but no power. Oven usually takes 3 hours to get
up to baking temperature, after which half hour with embers spread out
and then three quarters of an hour with fire out of oven and door
shut, before bread can be inserted. Conclusion is dough must be at
right stage of development when I leave my house to be ready for the
oven 4 and half hours later (allowing for the journey to the oven) and
taking into account the ambient temperature of the day, since I have
no proofer or retarder at my oven.


My own little cross to bear is the workspace in my rented kitchen is
downstairs, with 13 steps upstairs. When I show up, I have to carry all
the ingredients downstairs. I do bulk ferments in bus tubs that can
hold 21 or 22 1.5lb loaves. I try to carry the tubs upstairs about the
time the steak house closes and do my scaling and loafing upstairs.
That way, there is one trip up the stairs for 21 loaves. Instead of 4 -
I can carry 6 formed loaves at a time. With good management, I lost
track of the trips up and down the stairs somewhere around 50 trips. It
is becoming less painful. But I am worried about this summer. I'll go
from baking 1 night a week to baking 3 nights a week - one for my
existing customers and two for local farmers markets. I expect I'll
drop some weight, and that my legs will become very well developed.

Currently I am baking two loads in oven http://www.myplot.org/oven
without refiring - haven't quite fixed the right oven wall temperature
to spread the embers so some hiccups ... first load rather scorched
yesterday.
Also, a cobb oven doesn't have the thermal mass and inertia of a brick
oven. As a result, you don't get as many batches of bread out of a cobb
oven as a brick oven. If you are after production baking, a brick oven
has been known to get 5 to 7 batches on a single firing. A cobb oven
doesn't go that far. However, if you aren't doing production, it's
harder to justify the increased cost of a brick oven.

Good luck,
Mike

--
Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com
part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
wordsmith

A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day:
"You need only listen to paid political advertisements or the miserable
travesties of political argument announced as "Debates" to agree with
Orwell that democracy lives or dies with the clarity and integrity of its
speech. It is no accident that from the very beginnings of Western
culture, the learning and practice of rhetoric were at the core of its
pedagogy, and every high school debate team carries with it the
presumption of the moral significance of eloquence. It is not simply the
ornament of democracy. It is its basic working tool, the agency of
explanation, persuasion and trust between politicians and the people."
--Simon Schama

Mike Avery wrote:


I'm down to two that I use. I have a bottle of Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail
starter and one I started myself using Professor Calvel's technique.


What is the Professor Calvel's technique?
Could give recpie with numbers in graims?

Good luck,
Mike

Joe Umstead

ps

deepest sympathies for your tramping up and down stairs problems, at
least when you get up to my oven you are rewarded with a great view
over towards Greenwich ( the home of GMT)

at the bottom of your stairs is actually a typical chef's oven or a
pizza deck oven or a baker's deck oven or what?

laters
andy f

atty wrote:
ps

deepest sympathies for your tramping up and down stairs problems, at
least when you get up to my oven you are rewarded with a great view
over towards Greenwich ( the home of GMT)

When I deliver, I am rewarded with views of some of the prettiest
mountains in the Rocky Mountains. In summer, Bald Eagles nest here, and
watching them fish is a beautiful sight.
at the bottom of your stairs is actually a typical chef's oven or a
pizza deck oven or a baker's deck oven or what?

At the top of the stairs is a double-decker convection oven that I have
little use for. We are working out an armed truce. I'd love to have a
deck oven or a tube oven.

Mike

Hi Mike,

I use the one I created/started with Professor Calvel's techniques the
most. I prefer it to the excellent Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail starter for
my own work. I keep the Carl's 1847 around so that I can use a starter
that is readily available to anyone.


Ha, I was sort of trying to illicit from you some kind overall
statement or opinion on the 'nature versus nurture' for differences
between sourdough cultures - not quite there yet.

Also, a cobb oven doesn't have the thermal mass and inertia of a brick
oven. As a result, you don't get as many batches of bread out of a cobb
oven as a brick oven. If you are after production baking, a brick oven
has been known to get 5 to 7 batches on a single firing. A cobb oven
doesn't go that far. However, if you aren't doing production, it's
harder to justify the increased cost of a brick oven.


I don't see any reason why a cob (adobe) oven inherently has less
thermal mass than a brick oven, after all its basically the same
material as brick. It all depends on the thickness of the oven wall
(id addition to the material of the wall). The oven in Baker and
Spice's original premises which was to a once popular Victorian London
design, to be used with wood or coal (but in B&S case converted to use
big gas flame thrower thing) reportedly had 22 courses of brick as
well as in any case being embedded in the ground under the pavement of
the street in front of the shop. To make repairs to the lining it had
to be let out for a fortnight and even then the brickie could only
manage to stay inside for 10 minutes at a time - whilst being hosed
down.

In my own case my cob oven's wall's 3 layers are in total around 14
inches. I probably could manage more than 2 loads with little if any
re-firing, most especially if I were to bake on consecutive days.
Measured the wall temperature 5 inches from the inner surface
yesterday, 27 hours after fire taken out and it was 50°C with ambient
temperature of 18°C. If I had started baking again at this moment it
would have saved me around and hour and a quarter firing time. In
actual fact 14 inches is probably unnecessarily thick if you are only
going to bake one load at a time with more than a day in between
bakes - you are simply storing heat that one bake will have no time to
use - of course in an ideal world you then put your roast in, then
your slow stew, then your fruit to dry etc.

laters
andy f

Good luck,
Mike

atty wrote:


...Whether this disproves my conjecture re. different cultures being
suitable for different styles of bread I think is still open - I guess
I will have to try and retrace my steps ...


Here is a link to a thread on Dan Lepard's Forum where the object of
discussion is a method to produce a rustic loaf. It starts as a yeast
method using a very large inoculation of Biga with rather ordinary
results from the picture. Later down the thread somebody starts the
Biga with sourdough and gets impressive results - judging from the picture.

In the nature verses nurture discussions, I am still with nurture.
There does seem to be more than one path to Nirvana. Although, so far,
the methods all seem to have in common some way to relax the elasticity
(tension) in the dough while retaining enough gluten strength to hold
the gas and enough vigor to blow up the holes in the dough. The method
discussed in the referenced thread gets there with a small inoculation
and a long fermentation of a significant portion of the dough.

You may very well find that one strain of sourdough is better than
another in some aspect or another. However, the advantage will probably
be additive to the process rather than the key.

Link follows:

http://www.danlepard.com/forum/viewt...=asc&star t=0

Good luck to you ,

Charles

On Apr 26, 9:28 am, Charles Perry wrote:

In the nature verses nurture discussions, I am still with nurture.

The method
discussed in the referenced thread gets there with a small inoculation
and a long fermentation of a significant portion of the dough.


I'm with nuture too.

For big hole bread, I find sponges, or fooling around with any liquid
steps or intermediate builds, just wastes gas. You can watch your
rusticity (literally) bubbling away.

If the game plan is to preserve gas, a straight dough technique, with
minimal starter, works better. I run my bulk ferment very cool and
very slow so the gas will dissolve into the dough structure.

The nuture part involves very light, very MINIMAL handling once the
dough is ripe.

Will

On Apr 26, 3:28 pm, Charles Perry wrote:
atty wrote:

...Whether this disproves my conjecture re. different cultures being
suitable for different styles of bread I think is still open - I guess
I will have to try and retrace my steps ...

Here is a link to a thread on Dan Lepard's Forum where the object of
discussion is a method to produce a rustic loaf. It starts as a yeast
method using a very large inoculation of Biga with rather ordinary
results from the picture. Later down the thread somebody starts the
Biga with sourdough and gets impressive results - judging from the picture.


the second pic looks remarkably like the ciabatta an anglo/italian
baker friend of mine, 'Gino El Terrible', produced - which I used to
reckon the best seen in London. His was a rotten dough type method
(with commercial yeast) - he never really showed me the details, he
claimed he added some olive oil - though he did have tendency to pull
my leg as he was very bemused that anybody should be interested in
watching him bake at unearthly hours.

Particularly nice gloss on the crumb wall which I normally associate
with retarding?

Still no bubbles big enough to fit a sleeping baker or drive a VW
through as with previously quoted example http://www.prettycolors.com/bread_culture/iggys.htm

In the nature verses nurture discussions, I am still with nurture.
There does seem to be more than one path to Nirvana. Although, so far,
the methods all seem to have in common some way to relax the elasticity
(tension) in the dough while retaining enough gluten strength to hold
the gas and enough vigor to blow up the holes in the dough. The method
discussed in the referenced thread gets there with a small inoculation
and a long fermentation of a significant portion of the dough.

I found the other day when mixing a 4 kilo batch of firm starter that
the addition of a comparatively small portion of previous firm starter
that had gone really collapsed and gooey (for the sake of avoiding
waste and maybe adding flavour) - as well as including fresh sponge
starter - had the effect that this new batch over-mixed very quickly,
where otherwise I wouldn't have expected it to over mix at all within
reason. In other words even a small percentage of a dough where the
gluten structure has collapsed added to a fresh dough can drastically
reduce the elasticity, increase the extensibility of that fresh dough.
Seems a hard method to get really predictable results from though.
Indeed my mate Gino's ciabatta varied significantly from week to week
(he only made it once a week) - on a good week I would buy the entire
batch and freeze what I couldn't eat fresh.

You may very well find that one strain of sourdough is better than
another in some aspect or another. However, the advantage will probably
be additive to the process rather than the key.


I think that would also be my position currently

not having much luck re-tracing my steps back to my Ischia #1 loaf yet
but hopefully this is due to reducing hydration and other things
thrown up by getting into the swing and working out logistics of 2
loads in my wood-fired oven. Once that settles into a routine ...

laters
andy f

Link follows:

http://www.danlepard.com/forum/viewt...tdays=0&postor...

Good luck to you ,

Charles

The nuture part involves very light, very MINIMAL handling once the
dough is ripe.

I guess there are two logical explanations for formation of 'super
bubbles' in rustic style loaf. One is that there are some clumps or
colonies of yeast occurring that produce considerably more C02 than
others and the dough is just the right extensibility to react to this
by producing some super bubbles, the other explanation is that the
dough is such that some clumps of bubbles merge to form super bubbles
(cf. studies that prove that there must be seed bubble introduced
during mixing for any bubble to form at all). Maybe the truth lies
somewhere in between these two?

In the days when I did a knock down followed by a final make up I used
to notice the knock down easily produced like eruptive super bubbles,
which were then lost on final make up - which is why I dropped the
knock down stage. Like Will says, minimal handling.

yours
andy f

Will

On Apr 27, 7:22 am, atty wrote:

I guess there are two logical explanations for formation of 'super
bubbles' in rustic style loaf. One is that there are some clumps or
colonies of yeast occurring that produce considerably more C02 than
others....

Nah.... too much critter theory...

... the other explanation is that the
dough is such that some clumps of bubbles merge to form super bubbles
(cf. studies that prove that there must be seed bubble introduced
during mixing for any bubble to form at all).

I think a good bit of the fermentation gas dissolves into the dough
itself and then gluten forms around it as the dough matures. When the
dough warms during final proof (and during the early part of the bake)
these gas molecules expand and press against the gluten molecules.
This serves to laminate the gluten molecules into sheets around the
"bubbles".

This speaks to why long cool ferments and wet dough work. The gluten
develops via hydrolysis at the same time the gas is being created by
the fermentation. They are an associated complex.

You can also insert air pockets into dough by stretching it into a
disk (you cannot roll it or press it) and then dimpling the surface
with your fingers or a waffling tool. Then you gently roll it or fold
it to capture the air/dimples before rounding it.

Personally, I'm not big on dimpling the dough. I do find
however...stretching and folding helps a great deal. Perhaps it
initiates the "seed" bubbles you mention.

Will