"Dee Randall" > wrote in message
...
> The Como Bread beginning p. 102, and the Como Bread of the Past, beginning
> on page 103, the Pan di Terni, p. 114, Bread of Puglia p. 122, do not
rise.
> There might be others, but these are the ones I recall now.
>
>
>
> I have left the Como Bread 102 even to rise 3 days and it finally did
rise,
> but tasted pretty awful-flat.
>

Hmmm.

Let's review the Pane di Como on page 102. I last made it on 7-17-03 and
marked it as Excellent.

Starter:
1 teaspoon dry yeast or 1/3 cake fresh yeast. I used the dry yeast.
1 scant teaspoon malt syrup. I used diastatic malt from the home brew shop.
1/3 cup warm water.
2/3 cup milk, room temp.
1 cup (135 grams) all-purpose flour.

Stir stuff together, add milk and flour and beat till smooth. Let stand at
least 4 hours or over night.

My notes to he

This starter is VERY wet:
224 grams water/milk, 135 grams flour => 160% hydration.

**** Comment: The milk may mitigate the hydration somewhat, but not enough
to alter the general effect.
**** I use tap water all the time. We use city water and have a water
softener in the apartment complex's domestic water lines.

Dough:

2 cups water
6 1/4 cups (860 grams) all purpose flour
1 tablespoon salt
cornmeal

Make a dough with the starter and the rest of the stuff.

This is 35 ounces of flour and 24 ounces of liquid, which is 68% hydration,
give or take. This is a wet dough. The malt syrup will add a bit, probably
enough to offset the solids in the milk. This is probably putting too fine
a point on the process.

First rise: 1 1/2 hours or until doubled.

Shaping and second rise: Shape and rise 1 hour, until fully doubled.

Bake 400F for 1 hour.

Discussion:

This amount of dough would normally have at least a packet of yeast, 2 1/4
teaspoons. I remember that I had some question whether the initial starter
would have enough food supply for the yeast to develop overnight and then
carry the whole load itself with just the one teaspoon, but it did. This
may be due to the malt syrup.

As I remember it, I knocked the dough down and gave it another short rise,
20 minutes, after the first rise. I also gave the dough a rest between
scaling and shaping, probably another 20 minutes, although my notes don't
mention either of these. This procedure is my standard practice in most
breads.

Questions for Dee:

Did the starter work properly, i.e., did it bubble and rise and collapse as
it should?

Check your yeast: Put the yeast, a half cup of water, a teaspoon of sugar
and a half cup of flour in a bowl, mix them up and let it sit in a warm
place for an hour. This should just about blow the lid off a plastic bowl.
As an example, I'm testing a couple of batches of starter -- 5 ounces flour,
3 1/4 ounces water, 1 teaspoon yeast -- one with all-purpose and one with
bread flour. The batches have been sitting for twenty minutes and the first
one (the bread flour one) just blew the lid off.

Your comment that the thing was like a cracker leads me to think that the
yeast isn't active or that you killed it somehow.

How warm is the kitchen and the rising place? It's unlikely, but you may
have risen the dough in a place that was so warm that you killed the yeast.
I doubt this, since you can make other breads work.

My notes on the other two, the Terni and the Pugliese, indicate that I
didn't do much differently from the recipe and that the breads turned out
well. I made the Pugliese on 7-31-01, and have written in the Pugliese from
BBA as a comparison, along with a description of the modifications I made to
use the stretch-and-fold technique, which involves two 1/2 hour rest periods
during stretch-and-fold. In the Pugliese, although the dimples are supposed
to keep the bread from rising too much in the oven, my bread went crazy.

Sorry to take up so much time with such a long-winded answer, but I'm
intrigued that something that's worked for me so many times isn't working fo
r you. If these recipes were something new or experimental, I could
understand it, but these are traditional breads. There must be something
going on that we're not noticing.

Barry