To all those wonderful bakers out there:
Let me first say how much I have enjoyed and learned in the past year that
I have been lurking on the sidelines from you great bakers from all over
the world. I have refrained from giving you all my two cents on many
occasions but this time I cannot resist from giving you my time-saving and
clean-up saving methods developed from years of experience. I am
responding to Alexandra Mahoney's call for help regarding kneading with wet
doughs. After making bread for decades, I am a big fan of the wet doughs
and have Dan Leader's Bread Alone" and Suzanne Dunaway's "No Need to Knead"
books to thank for it. I make a big focaccia that looks professional and
rivals what is sold in the bakery cafe at the CIA (for those of you not in
the know, it is the Culinary Institute of America - our country's best
culinary school) in Hyde Park, NY. (Wow, I am tooting my own horn!) And I
must share my simple method with you.
I first taught myself how to make bread in the 70's from reading cook books
- the usual white dough stuff. Have continued all these years, including
over ten years using my DAK bread machine, one of the first to hit this
country in the late 80's from Japan. Made literally hundreds of loaves of
French-Italian type breads using the manual cycle and a cheap $4 Ecko (sp?)
non-stick double bread pan (that finally gave out and started sticking
after years of use). Now I am back to hand mixing and my method is as follows:
I mix up a sourdough starter (out of Bread Alone) with yeast and water, add
some salt and a couple of cups of flour in one of those large (not the
biggest) cheap stainless steel bowls that are everywhere (it is light and
spins around easily on the counter, key components of my method), mixing
with a wooden spoon. Then when the going gets a little heavy, I switch
from spoon to one of those plastic kidney-shaped scrapers (think I got it
in Lechters (sp?) for $1 with a hole in it. Then gradually add the rest of
the flour, scraping the outside of the dough against the side of the bowl
with the curved scraper, spinning the bowl as necessary with my left
hand, to keep the sides of the bowl clean and the dough worked; scrape,
spin and flop the dough on top of itself. Remember this is a wet dough and
I add only enough flour to give it some stability. When I am finished and
the dough is very wet (my hands are clean, clean, maybe a little dough on
my right thumb (this recipe is NOT for someone who loves getting into the
dough) ) I pour perhaps a tablespoon of oil on top, then scrape and spin
again to get the oil around the dough, messily flip it over with the
scraper, put a lid or saran on the ss bowl, put in the refrig. Leave in
for a day or two; then with the handy scraper, tilt bowl and scrape out the
dough (it is wet and spongy) onto parchment.
The whole put-together dough and mixing method takes about 15 minutes, very
streamlined; no counter clean-up and no messy hands and the focaccia comes
out beautifully! I created this bowl method out of necessity; I have a
tile-topped counter (not good for anything except looking at - never
again), definitely not for any kind of dough preparation. All I end up
cleaning is the bowl! One can use this method with any type of dough,
requiring a little kneading. When I do a regular dough, I use the scraper
as long as possible, then switch using my right hand to knead, and spin the
bowl with the left. And the bowl is very easy to clean because it is
continually scraped!
One more note: on a period show lately dating from the 1800's, I saw a
"downstairs" cook kneading dough in a wooden shallow large box, similar to
what we would know as a tray. Isn't that cleaver, if one is tight with
space and has a tile-topped counter!?
If anyone wants the exact recipe, I would be glad to post it. Hope all
this chatter helps one or more of you out there. Thank you all for the
tips and recipes and good humor; keep it
coming...............................baking
carol