Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2007 08:07:04 GMT -------------- BEGIN bread-bakers.v107.n034 -------------- 001 - - bread machine crusts 002 - Mike Avery Subject: bread machine crusts Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 07:13:07 -0600 There were two posts in this week's digest asking about bread machine crusts. The first asked for a crust for rye bread. My response to that is that I make all my rye bread in the ABM using the dough setting, take it out, form it into a ball or loaf,, let raise and then cook in a normal oven. Gives you the best crust and it looks good. As per the person who says their friend gets a hard crust. I purchased a new abm, it gave a thick hard crust on every loaf, took it back and got a different model. solved problem. There are really not to many ways to change the crust that comes out of an ABM except to switch models. Even different models in the same manufactures line will produce different crusts. Here is the recipe I use for making rye bread. Sandwich Rye Bread I have made many loafs of Rye bread and never one that I liked. King Arthur flour www.kingarthurflour.com has came out with 4 or 5 new products for making rye bread. So I figured I would try again. I took a recipe out of their catalog and changed it slightly to coincide with what I had on hand. The bread came out truly wonderful. It is good as a stand alone and made fantastic ham sandwiches. The KA in the ingredients stands for King Arthur. You must purchase these two ingredients from them. 2 1/4 tsp. Yeast 3 cups Bread Flour 1 cup KA Rye Blend Flour 2 Tbls KA Rye bread Improver 1 Tbls Gluten 2 Tbls Molasses 1 1/4 cups water water 2 Tbs Dried minced Onion 1 Tbls whole caraway seeds 2 teas Salt 2 Tbls Olive Oil Place all the ingredients in the pan of your bread machine in the order listed by the manufacture. Program for basic bread and press start. Check the dough after a few minutes and make sure it is firm and slightly sticky. If not add flour or water to fix the problem. --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n034.2 --------------- From: Mike Avery Subject: Re: I Need Some Instructions Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:16:01 -0700 "Jack Allen" wrote: >I know nothing of bread baking. But I would like to make a crusty >rye sourdough in my ABM. Can someone please advise me? You are asking for 3 impossible things. The red queen only had to believe in impossible things, you are trying to do them. Sadly, sourdough and bread machines are not a good match. Baker's yeast is very consistent. Sourdough is not. The bread machine expects that a certain number of hours after you press the start button, it will be time to bake bread. The bread machine can't tell if your bread has risen, if it is sitting like a rock at the bottom of the bread pan, if it has risen and collapsed, or if it has over risen and overflowed the bread pan and filled the outer container. All it knows is that it is 4 hours and 35 minutes have elapsed, With yeast, you can get consistency. With sourdough, it is not easy to get consistency. Some people add yeast to sourdough to try to increase the consistency of the sourdough process. The downside to this is that it doesn't give the sourdough enough time to develop its flavor. Yeast greatly dilutes the effect of sourdough. Rye is another matter altogether. If you make a bread with all-purpose or bread flour, when the bread has risen to a peak you have about an hour of tolerance. Time when you can hold the bread before you bake it. Breads with a lot of rye in them have about 6 minutes of tolerance. Rye has very poor gluten in it, and as a result when it hits a peak, it starts declining pretty quickly. This is, yet again, a poor match for a bread machine. Finally, bread machines have trouble with crisp crusts. The dough is encased in a pan, and the pan holds in moisture. And the moisture causes crusts to degrade. If you get the bread out of the pan very quickly, you can get a decent crust. If you hold the bread in the pan, you are in trouble. The best approach here would be to use the bread machine as a mixer. Put the ingredients in the bread machine, let it mix the dough, and then pull the dough out of the bread pan, form a loaf, and then let the loaf rise and bake it. Doughs with lots of rye in them are often best handled with a single rise. There are many great resources online with regards to sourdough, so you might look around a bit. Hope this helps, 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: Tomato paste: what you use to fix broken tomatoes. --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n034.3 --------------- From: "Joe and Rena Quinton" Subject: sourdough Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2007 09:48:50 -0500 All for bread I want to thank "tarheel bob" for his commonsense take on our perennial topic - sourdough bread and more particularly sourdough starter. Yes we can make the most exquisite starter in the world but because of the nature of the beast it will change slowly to the conditions that prevail in its neighborhood. It is indestructible (within limits), mine froze and came back strong. I guess the thing to remember it is a natural phenomenon and it works just fine. Mainline Joe --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n034.4 --------------- From: "Lorraine Hartley" Subject: Re: crusty bread in abm Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 12:53:07 -0500 To Jack Allen - It's not possible to make CRUSTY anything in a bread machine. The crust on bread is formed by a combination of high temperature and an infusion of steam at the beginning of the bake. To do this, use your bread machine (if you must) to knead the dough and then bake the loaf in an oven, preferably on a pre-heated baking stone (which will absorb the heat) and under which a heavy (as in cast iron) pan has been placed. When you place the dough onto the baking stone, pour boiling water (wear a LONG oven mitt) into the heavy pan and quickly close the oven door. Better yet, place clean rocks inside the heavy pan while the oven is preheating. Good luck! --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n034.5 --------------- From: Joe Tilman Subject: Re: Bread Machine Crust Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 10:44:16 -0800 (PST) >My daughter-in-law is having a problem with her newest bread >machine, the Zo. She says the bread is great, but the crust is too >hard, and changing the crust setting is not helping. Does anyone >have an idea to help her? I'm still a traditional bread baker and >am not familiar with the machines. There are several possibilities. The easiest is to use the machine only as a kneader and bake in the oven...though that sort of defeats the reason for having a nice machine such as the Zo. Next is trying different bread settings: sweet and sandwich settings will bake at lower temps than the basic settings. She can also (I am assuming she has a v20 or x20) program her own cycle. Or just set a timer to go off 5 to 10 minutes before the machine says it is done, and pull the loaf out early. Of course, storing the loaf in plastic softens the crust, but doesn't help straight out of the machine. Lastly, there are recipe ingredient variations that will result in softer crusts. I don't know how the list owners will feel about this [Editor's note: it's ok with us to mention them], but there is a Yahoo group dedicated to bread machine users: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bread-machine/ Joe T "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." -Douglas Adams --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n034.6 --------------- From: FMTZ@aol.com Subject: Re: gummy no-knead and new NYTimes no-knead recipe Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 16:04:50 EST >I have baked the New York No-Knead bread recipe several times, but >most recently I tried King Arthur's Bread site's "adjusted" >version. Both mix, rise, brown, and taste as expected which is very good. > >But the problem I have with both recipes is that even though the >crust is nice and crispy, the inside bread is sort of gummy. Dear Jeanette: We had the same problem even when the bread was baked for a full 50-60 minutes - 30 minutes in the pot, 15 minutes in the pot with the lid off and 10-15 minutes out of the pot on a baking stone. THEN we decided to shut off the oven, put the door ajar and let the bread cool slowly as the oven cooled. Voila - nice crusty bread, big holes, no moistness or gumminess inside. I believe that what happens is that the crust forms fairly fast in the sealed pot - so fast that the moisture in the interior doesn't have a chance to escape or dissipate sufficiently. We might try, the next time, to take the lid off after 15 minutes of baking. By then, the benefits of the contained moisture should have been achieved. Experiment a little with a slightly lower temperature too and with the amount of water you use. You don't have to be slavish about the formula. Finally, have you seen the 'new' approach to artisanal bread? It makes four loaves of bread in five minutes each with no kneading and excellent results. I've tried it, it works well and the baking part is easier - no pot required. I make 3 loaves where the recipe calls for 4 loaves since I like a slightly larger loaf. There is a real benefit to letting the dough stay in the fridge for a few days. The recipe is below - here is the link: This is not quite the same bread as the first "no knead" but it is definitely an excellent alternative! Good baking and Happy Holidays to all!!! Frank New York Times November 21, 2007 Recipe: Simple Crusty Bread Adapted from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007) Time: About 45 minutes plus about 3 hours resting and rising 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt 6 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour, more for dusting dough Cornmeal 1. In a large bowl or plastic container, mix yeast and salt into 3 cups lukewarm water (about 100 F). Stir in flour, mixing until there are no dry patches. Dough will be quite loose. Cover, but not with an airtight lid. Let dough rise at room temperature 2 hours (or up to 5 hours). 2. Bake at this point or refrigerate, covered, for as long as two weeks. When ready to bake, sprinkle a little flour on dough and cut off a grapefruit-size piece with serrated knife. Turn dough in hands to lightly stretch surface, creating a rounded top and a lumpy bottom. Put dough on pizza peel sprinkled with cornmeal; let rest 40 minutes. Repeat with remaining dough or refrigerate it. 3. Place broiler pan on bottom of oven. Place baking stone on middle rack and turn oven to 450 F; heat stone at that temperature for 20 minutes. 4. Dust dough with flour, slash top with serrated or very sharp knife three times. Slide onto stone. Pour one cup hot water into broiler pan and shut oven quickly to trap steam. Bake until well browned, about 30 minutes. Cool completely. Yield: 4 loaves. Variation: If not using stone, stretch rounded dough into oval and place in a greased, nonstick loaf pan. Let rest 40 minutes if fresh, an extra hour if refrigerated. Heat oven to 450 F for 5 minutes. Place pan on middle rack. --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n034.7 --------------- From: "Allen Cohn" Subject: Re: The Changing Taste of Sourdough Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 06:37:13 -0800 Bob, Are/were you feeding all these starters with the same flour? Perhaps it's not the same air that's making them all start to taste the same, but rather the same flour. The literature I've read says that all flour has some microorganisms attached...so perhaps in time the organisms in your flour come to outnumber whatever different strains used to be in your world tour of starters. Allen SHB San Francisco --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n034.8 --------------- From: Margaret Cope Subject: NO KNEAD Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:39:00 -0500 First let me say how glad I was to receive this newsletter again and hope that all is well with our hosts. I also find the "gummy" problem as described by the Jacobs and have solved it somewhat by doing a little extra at the end with the convection part of my oven. Toasting lightly also relieves this problem. No Knead makes wonderful blue cheese and walnut bread! I tried the "Simple Crusty Bread" from the NYTimes of November 21. It works just fine...but the flavor of the bread baking it on the first day has much to be desired. Baking it after 3 - 4 days in the refrigerator improves it greatly. I also baked it in my old French bread forms and they make very nice baguettes. In fact making a ham and Swiss sandwich with it reminded me of street food in Provence! Next I will experiment with some additives. Happy Holidays..and baking to all. --------------- END bread-bakers.v107.n034 --------------- Copyright (c) 1996-2007 Regina Dwork and Jeffrey Dwork All Rights Reserved