A scheduling tool for bread baking • Hacker News Board

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#81

Post by sampo » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

rand_r wrote: post #76

sampo wrote: post #72

I have found that a minimal version of no-knead bread is already good: 700ml flour, 350ml water, 1 to 1.5 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp instant yeast. Mix in bowl, cover, let stand for 12-16 hours. Put dutch oven in oven, heat to 250C. Take out the hot dutch oven, sprinkle some bran or flour or cornmeal on the bottom, scrape dough from the bowl into the dutch oven, sprinkle some bran on top. Bake 30min with lid, remove lid, bake…

Does the bread rise while it's baking in the oven? I've tried to do this no-knead recipe and the bread came out pretty flat.

The dough bubbles and more than doubles in volume in the bowl when the yeast is slowly working. If you wait too little, it hasn't risen yet. If you wait too long, it will rise and then start to flatten back. You can see this from the sides of the bowl, that the dough has reached a higher level earlier, and started to contract, but left some marks up to the maximum where it was. I guess the timing depends on how much yeast you added exactly, and the temperature in your kitchen. You don't need to get it perfectly right, but it you wait way too little or way too long I guess the bread comes out dense.

You just scrape the risen dough from the bowl into the dutch oven with minimal disturbance, so you don't disturb the air bubbles too much. And your oven and the dutch oven need to be hot at this point, so the dough goes right into a hot oven, the heat expands the air bubbles and gives you some oven spring.

Other recipes make you sprinkle flour on a working surface, fold and shape the dough into a loaf, and then leave it, giving the shaped loaf a second rise.

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#82

Post by wiredfool » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #23

axaxs wrote: post #21

Thanks for this. I'm extremely blessed to have a wife that enjoys making bread, and makes the best sourdough I've ever tasted. It's mostly in her head but from the notes I've pieced together it seems close to the weekday sourdough. Bread is so easy to make and so delicious if you have patience, I really hope this leads to more people making bread. Store bought tastes like paper in comparison. Protip to any future bre…

I've been wondering about that. The last time I baked bread was 10+ years ago. At the time, I got professional results with just a pizza stone and a spray bottle of water. The water replaced the steam oven and did a great job of gelatinizing the crust. Unfortunately I don't think I can get a dutch oven during the lockdown.

A pasta pot with a metal oven safe lid is 90% as good.

Shaping isn't quite as good, and the side crust is less browned, but overall it's night and day better than on a tray/stone.

(Doing it now, cause my dutch oven isn't here, and the pasta pot is.)

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#83

Post by wiredfool » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #52

Few appreciate what has gone wrong with regular store bought bread. Regular store bought bread is created with the Chorleywood process, whereby substandard wheat and carbon dioxide can be mashed together to make some dough that can be baked into something that resembles bread. These loaves of bread-style-wheat things are not made with just the basic ingredients needed for bread. There are the E numbers for preservati…

Your rant would be better if you didn't misunderstand the need for sugar.

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#84

Post by Theodores » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

wiredfool wrote: post #83

Theodores wrote: post #52

Few appreciate what has gone wrong with regular store bought bread. Regular store bought bread is created with the Chorleywood process, whereby substandard wheat and carbon dioxide can be mashed together to make some dough that can be baked into something that resembles bread. These loaves of bread-style-wheat things are not made with just the basic ingredients needed for bread. There are the E numbers for preservati…

Your rant would be better if you didn't misunderstand the need for sugar.

Look, in my opinion the rejection of store bought bread made with the Chorleywood process to go for sourdough or anything else trendy is not entirely rational, there is much to recommend bread baked the conventional way with a machine. It means you ain't spending your time scheduling your life around some silly baking affectation but you get your bread.

That is a fair comment that needs a few words to understand. I appreciate that to those that can only write one liners this could appear as a 'rant'. But it is not.

However, I do now have a reason to rant, to rant about those that write things such as your comment without explaining in full why the need is there for sugar in bread.

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#85

Post by melenaos » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

juanbyrge wrote: post #25

I have been baking sourdough for 2+ years and I don't think people should take the timing too seriously. Yes it's good to loosely follow a schedule but if you don't the bread will still turn out fine. I don't think I've ever followed the exact same schedule twice. A few times I flat out forgot about the dough and shaped it hours after I was supposed to, and it still came out amazing. Sourdough is very forgiving. The…

I am just trying to create my first loaf using sourdough so I have no experience on this (I will bake tomorrow) and I have read a book that says that the more you leave the dough the taster it becomes.

The normal recipe is to leave 24 hours the dough in fridge and it says that you can leave it for 48 or even 96 hours :)

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#86

Post by quicklime » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

ChristianBundy wrote: post #69

quicklime wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grams have become kind of standard for baking, even in the US. I think this is due to the use of "baker's percentages", which specify the weight (not volume) of all ingredients in terms of a percentage of the weight of flour used. So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor. It's a lot easier to do this using grams uniformly, than some mix of lbs, oz, cups, tsp, etc. The system…

> So for example, "3% salt" just means 3 grams of water for every 100 grams of floor. I think maybe there's a typo here with "salt" vs "water"? I've had a hard time with these percentages. 3% salt means 3 grams of salt for every 97 grams of flour, but that doesn't seem to be how it's used in baking. Same with water: 100% hydration is half water, half flour, because they're talking in ratios rather than actual percent…

Yes, you're right! It should say "water" instead of "salt"...and it's too late to edit now.

I too have a hard time with the percentages - it's a ratio against the weight of the flour, not a proportion of the entire dry mass. I guess that's why they call them "baker's percentages", as opposed to "the common understanding of percentages" :)

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#87

Post by joshuaduffy » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

nimrody wrote: post #73

atomi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I think it's also important to remember that you're cultivating a living organism. It's an art, and you should adjust your schedule based on what the dough is doing.

That's the most difficult part for me. We need more than a schedule - we need instructions how to modify the schedule and perhaps ingredients based on what we get. The "Quarantine bread" receipt was wonderful last week. This week, for some reason it turns out terrible (dough very sticky, bread burnt on the outside, etc.) No idea what went wrong and what I should have done to fix this.

Water temperature is best around body temperature, any higher or lower and you'll have issues as you described.

Leaving it for ten minutes/waiting for the flour to hydrate then mixing again can help out when the temperature is off.

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#88

Post by dthul » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

Are the amounts on the website broken or am I slightly dense? The "Overnight Weekend Bread" recipe (http://www.breadscheduler.com/#/recipe/5bac85f720211052e0b70...) instructs you to create 500g-550g of levain (the amounts in the overview and the step-by-step instructions don't quite match for me). Then, in the "Mix Dough" step it tells you to use 108g of the levain. What happens to the rest? Are you supposed to throw it out or keep it as your sourdough starter?

Also, the "Autolyse" step tells you to use 402g of white flour while the overview specifies 804g. (Judging by the hydration they must certainly mean 402g).

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#89

Post by MegaDeKay » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #49

Or you could also learn how to make mixed 4/3 rye/wheat sourdough with a natural starter, which requires no scheduling at all. Just mix it in the morning and put it in the oven some time in the late afternoon/evening. I've been doing it for years and it's the only kind of bread that I can make on a regular basis. It's something you can actually do daily, not an additional hobby. Ingredients: * 400g full-grain rye flo…

Nice! A couple questions for you...

- to clarify, is the "wheat flour" whole wheat or white? If the latter, all-purpose or high protein "bread" flour?

- do you think it makes much of a difference if the levain is rye based? My understanding is that if the amount of levain is small relative to the overall amount of flour in a rye-based bread like this, it doesn't much matter fermentation-wise.

I've read that rye flour in North America isn't as good a quality as that in Europe. This makes me sad. I grind my own rye berries, but it would be nice if I had the opportunity some time to try your stuff.

And let me go out on a limb with one more question. Many years ago, our grocery store in a town with a heritage in eastern Europe sold a loaf of bread called "heavy rye bread". It was made of a fine flour, was quite dark, and was super tough to chew. I have never had a bread like it since and I have looked hard. It wasn't sourdough like a Borodinski bread, nor was it coarse like Scandanavian rye breads. Perhaps you might know of this bread?

Re: A scheduling tool for bread baking

#90

Post by tjomk » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

sampo wrote: post #72

I have found that a minimal version of no-knead bread is already good: 700ml flour, 350ml water, 1 to 1.5 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp instant yeast. Mix in bowl, cover, let stand for 12-16 hours. Put dutch oven in oven, heat to 250C. Take out the hot dutch oven, sprinkle some bran or flour or cornmeal on the bottom, scrape dough from the bowl into the dutch oven, sprinkle some bran on top. Bake 30min with lid, remove lid, bake…

What are people want to avoid kneading so much? Most of the recipes are for no-knead bread. I find this process very relaxing and prefer this over a session of meditation.