Cheese A Day: Our daily bread

Cheese Makers Forum FAQ Equipment part 1 Equipment part 2 History

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Our daily bread

Since I've been thinking about and writing about fermentation, I thought I would post some pics of a loaf of Rosemary Garlic bread that is currently fermenting (rising :D). The recipe is simple enough, just a variation on a standard french bread dough recipe, but with a few twists.

1000 grams white flour
620 grams water (20 grams more than standard french bread)
25 grams kosher salt (five grams more than standard french bread)
10 grams instant yeast
25 grams coarsely chopped rosemary
4 large garlic cloves, savagely crushed and duly minced
25 grams lavender cider vinegar (I made this last year, it is delishus)
20 grams oil

This isn't s post on the specifics of baking bread, so I will assume the reader understands kneading, rising, proofing, and the like. The main variation with this recipe is the use of a small amount of vinegar to acidify the dough, a bit of oil to tenderize the crust and crumb, and a tad bit more water (though not by much).

Even though wetter doughs are a bit more difficult to work with, in the end the crumb that you can get if you do it right is well worth it. For those who have made No Knead bread, the primary reason why there are such big, beautiful holes in that style of loaf if because of the water content of the dough--as well as letting the load autolyse and ferment at lower temperatures. The only part of the process that I don't like is moving around a 500F dutch oven. That's why I use a technique I first read about in Reinhardts BBA (Bread Bakers Apprentice), using a hot pan in the oven plus spraying the oven walls with water to generate the steam that the dutch oven would produce.

I'll post updates as they occur, but here are some additional photos.

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Creative Commons License

Cheese A Day by Jeremy Pickett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at cheeseaday.blogspot.com.

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