Calculating Dough Temperature

When I started out in the bakery business the doughs that took the longest to ferment got mixed first, and, counter intuitively, they were all ready for make up at the same time. I hate being disorganized. It means ruined bread and chaotic scurrying about trying to get the loaves retarded before the doughs get old.

So I sat me down and concentrated on the problem, figuring that mixing the doughs from the shortest to the longest fermentation times was the answer, except for the doughs that took extreme amounts of time, say, three or more hours to ferment. They needed to be mixed first. The system works very well for the most part, but I needed to be certain of my ferment times, and the only way to guarantee a ferment time is to guarantee the dough temperature, and that requires a little calculation.

Once the optimum dough temperature is determined, 73f for sourdough say, the formula is simple. The finished dough temp is an average of it's ingredients, the air temperature, and the added heat of friction from kneading. (On most mixers the friction heat is one degree per minute of kneading.)

OK. We take 73 (the desired final temp of my sourdough) and subtract the mixer friction (13 minutes= 13 degrees). The result is 60. So, all of the main ingredients plus the air temp must have a combined average of 60 degrees. It is now a matter of determining how many components we are averaging, and in the case of my sourdough there are four: air, flour, starter and water, each with an arbitrary value of 60 (the desired average temp). We multiply 4 ingredients by 60 degrees and the result is 240.

Obviously, the ingredients will not all be the same temperature. I refrigerate my sour starter before using it. If the flour was just pulled from the stockroom and dumped in the bin it will not have the same temp as the air. And really, there is only one ingredient that can have it's temperature changed at will: water. All of this comes down to very simple arithmetic:

240

-Air temp

-Flour temp

-Starter temp

=Water temp

That would be, realistically:

240

-72f (air temp)

-69f (flour temp)

-40f (starter temp)

=59f (water temp)

I then mix the water to the proper temperature as it comes from the spigot using an instant-read thermometer as a gauge. The ferment time is 3 hrs. 30 min.

The desired temperature of my Italian bread is 80f. It gets mixed 16 minutes. 80 minus 16 is 64. The three main temperature considerations are air, flour and water. 64 (the average desired temp) times 3 (the number of factors) is 192. A realistic calculation would be:

192

-70f (air temp)

-69f (flour temp)

= 53f (water temp)

The ferment time is 2 hrs.

This works every time. Just remember that we are averaging main components only; minority ingredients such as salt or yeast are not included. You will need to experiment to find the optimum temperatures of your doughs, but this system will allow you yo do it with ease.

Sometimes a baguette

is just a baguette.
I enjoy baking. It's challenging and rewarding, but it isn't cooking. The palette available to me as a chef was well over a thousand ingredients, from the elegant and sublime to the pedestrian. I always prided myself in being able to make something extraordinary from ordinary fare; the price of an ingredient never had any bearing on whether or not I used it. So it didn't matter whether I used foie gras simply to thicken a sauce, or if I used fresh herbs from the garden in summer squash Provencal.
Baking, on the other hand, is essentially flour, water, yeast, and salt. Oh, sure, it might get dairy, or some produce, or require days of fermentation or very delicate manipulation, but it isn't tuna threaded with pickled ginger on a bed of leeks stir-fried in walnut oil with salt-cured lime, celeriac and butter emulsion and sauteed bitter greens.
Cutting up mirepoix and gathering herbs for a pot of stock is infinitely more rewarding to me than making a good croissant.
Oh, well, I guess it's too late to do anything about it now.

The Rocky Road

New Year's Day was bright and blue, the air clear and unseasonably warm. We had decided to open at 10 a.m. on that holiday so our regular customers could get some bread and dessert and a New York Times to go with them. Breezes moved softly in the daylight as I pulled open the screen door, key poised to turn in the lock.

My eye suddenly lit upon the shattered pane of glass smashed into the building. The first thing I checked was the cash box. Hell, we only leave a few coins in it... nothing disturbed, nothing missing, not even a brownie.

The steamer was up to pressure and I was docking a full bench of boules when the police arrived. I was starting the day's bake, by God, and a forced entry wasn't going to change the slightest thing in my schedule. I felt remarkably sanguine about the matter, but, then, dark specters began bubbling up from my subconscious, flitting out of view from the corner of my eye in a singularly sinister, disconcerting experience.

The cop found bloody fingerprints on pieces of glass, and blood inside the building, which meant the guy had punched his way in with a bare fist. Now let me tell you something: if ever there was a readily available implement in rural Pennsylvania, it is a stone. As a matter of fact, there is an old farm nearby with a professionally painted sign out front that reads:

FRESH EGGS

FREE ROCKS

But this guy used his bare hand, which told me that he was high, or desperate, or livid, or some volatile cocktail of the three.

After the photo shoot and evidence bagging the detective asked, "How much was the damage, a hundred and fifty?"

"No" I said, "Two fifty."

He seemed incredulous.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars?" he asked.

"No, no. Two dollars and fifty cents," I explained. "I'll fix the thing myself. It won't take an hour."

It took two hours. I broke the first piece of replacement glass.

The cop came back a week later to inform me of the perfect fingerprint he'd found on one of the glass shards. It would take about six weeks to process the bloody thing at a lab.

I went to speak with Chris, a shopkeeper in my neighborhood who'd had an attempted break-in. We quickly decided kids were responsible for this, and just as quickly decided which kids. I remembered them, two squirts from around the corner on Oak Lane who had come into my shop late one afternoon, when no one else was around, trying to strong-arm me for cookies. I thought they were fooling and gave them each a chocolate chip, joking with them, whereupon the older one began to mock me.

"You're an asshole" I announced, "get out."

Falling silent, I stared into their eyes until they became extremely uncomfortable and left.

I had a sense that there would be more trouble with those two pitheads.

On another day, I was talking with the maintenance guy from a local resort about the situation, and he informed me that the two boys in question, at the tender ages of eleven and thirteen, were under investigation by our regional police force for housebreaking. I informed the local constabulary of this.

A few weeks passed before the next report. I was at my bench doing the makeup on a batch of batards when the policeman in charge of the investigation came in with Polaroids of the delinquents. I recognized the older one, but wasn't too sure about the younger kid in the picture. I just wasn't. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king; I passed the pictures to the cop and got back to the dough at hand before it started getting old.

Business is brisk on Sunday mornings, and customers seem anxious if they wait more than a few minutes before being served. After packing the day's special orders in the back, I go out front to front to help expedite service.

I was shoveling sticky buns into a box when Ryan ( by this time the investigating officer and I were on a first name basis )walked in. After ringing up the sale at hand, I went over to the coffee pot and we started talking in hushed, cryptic language. Our conversation revealed that the fingerprint on the glass was not of the quality originally believed, and was in fact unusable for evidence. He promised to interview the two as soon as they were done testifying in another criminal case.

It didn't turn out like that. It was snowing the day of the Vernal Equinox when Ryan came in the front door, stamping his shoes and shaking snow from his jacketless back. The police were ham-strung by the boys and their parents refusal to respond to a request for an interview. That was it. Case closed. I squelched whatever emotions were rising inside of me... those people were within their rights.

Investigations don't use clocks or watches, they use calendars; those kids grew a foot each by the next time I saw them. They came into the shop again, obviously enjoying their pubescent growth spurts with the gun-moll-in-training that accompanied them, and asking for some ridiculous thing or other. They cleared the sample tray like hurdlers. Close behind their eyes they were laughing at me, and what was I going to do about it anyway. I consoled myself with visions of lengthy prison stays looming in their collective futures.

A few days later, I was chatting with Chris in front of his shop about the whole thing. Well, we agreed, no real harm done, and after all they didn't make off with anything.

Just then, a limousine pulled up, the window rolled down, and the driver stuck his head out. "Hey, which way is Oak Lane from here?"

I looked at Chris. "I guess dey made out bettah 'n we thought!" he boomed.

We just threw our heads back and laughed, and laughed.

The Ryes Have It

Working with rye breads is a little like a composer learning to write in the minor mode. It's the same only different, if you get my meaning.
I never bothered with a separate rye starter, I simply used "old" white starter that had become very sour. After reading the book "Bread Alone", I decided to give all rye a chance. The formula and directions for rye starter in "Breads from LaBrea Bakery" were a good starting point, but I changed a few things, most notably the addition of a little whole rye flour (pumpernickel) to each feeding.
The breads were a revelation. They tasted the way rye bread should taste, not like an imitation loaded up with caraway seed in an effort to give it some kind of flavor.
Caraway, as listed in "On Food and Cooking", is a member of the carrot family, as are parsley and anise. So that got me thinking, thinking about carrots, then root vegetables in general. Rye bread may pair well with roasted root vegetables. I'll have to try it and see.

Croissants

Many of our customers travel a great deal, so, when I hear them say that our croissants are equal to the best that Paris has to offer, I can only infer that the croissants in Paris suck. Or, at least, that used to be my reaction.
I have spent at least three years of my life on a Quixotic quest with a more and more elusive goal, one that appeared to be unattainable: that is, to produce a perfect croissant that was both light and flaky with a firm bite. I was able to create a reliably flaky crust, but that firm crumb was a stickler; mine was always gummy and heavy.
At one point, I even went online to some chat group in that snakepit Yahoo, where a bunch of bread nerds told me to bake them longer and at a lower temperature.
Guess what happened! Flaky became cast-like enough to set broken limbs. The inside was gummy.
My vexation grew. For years I'd been using a formula from the Culinary Institute of America, applying my knowledge of baking to correct it's flaws, but every correction created a new and unexpected problem.
And then an odd series of events occurred. For one thing, I chucked that stupid recipe in favor of one from the Bread Bakers Guild of America. At first try it showed tremendous promise, but was only an approximation of what I had in mind. Then a friend of mine, DeliRay, called and said he had some flour he wanted to give me. I wasn't familiar with "patent" flour, but I dumped it in my bread flour bin and used it as such. It is here that my continuing saga enters the realm of the surreal.
While kneading croissant dough for the first time using this new flour, it was obvious in a few minutes that it was much too dry. I shut off the mixer, got more water and added it to the dough. Another couple of minutes of mixing and the necessity for more water was again evident. I stopped the mixer, added water, and turned the mixer back on. I kept track of the total amount of water added, but not the rest times in between each addition.
When the croissants came out of the oven and cooled, I had by that time given way to a life of silent desperation concerning the goddamned things, I bit into one for my customary "test". I cannot suitably convey to you here what I felt, but I can certainly describe the pastry. Light for it's size, it had a crispy-flaky crust redolent of butter and cream. The internal structure was firm to the bite but airy with the slightest bit of stretch. It tasted of fine butter.
I turned to my wife, "I can't believe it! Oh my God I just can't believe it! This is it, it's the croissant I've been trying to make for all these years!". Or something like that.
One of the tenets of scientific research is reproducible results. When I made the next batch of croissants I simply increased the water to the previous batch's total amount. The result was, well, just OK. Now what the hell, I wondered. I thought back over what I did for the perfect batch, and the only differences I came up with were the stopping, adding water, and starting the mixer again, and the assumption that the patent and bread flours had mixed in the bin. After several tries I determined the ratio of flours, but the croissants still weren't spot on. The only other thing left was the method in which the water was added to the best batch. It seemed preposterous to me, but if all other variables were ruled out, it was the only thing available to explain the difference.
As skeptical as I was, I tried it, and the result was unmistakable. They were perfect, at least according to my opinion of things, and our globe-trotting customers seem to concur.

Starting a Powerful Levain

The book "Breads From LaBrea Bakery" is where I learned how to make starter, with one small change.
My background is in cooking, not baking. French cuisine, actually. My larder always included seven or eight different vinegars, one of which was an unfiltered, unpasteurized cider vinegar. It had a creepy looking slime growing in it, which I surmised was the mother. So, I filtered it through a jelly bag and scraped the captured bacterial culture into my baby starter.
That was six years ago, and man, does our levain have some wang to it! A single tablespoon of that seething mush added to a paste of rye flour and water turned into a ripe rye sour in just one day.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. After I made the starter, I put it in the refrigerator until we opened our bake shop, about a four month period. Now, I greatly respect Jeffrey Hammelman and Professor Calvel, but I must disagree with their assertion that refrigerating sour starter will kill the wild yeast. Boys, the yeast is wild. It lives outside all winter. Ten below and all that, yet still it liveth. How can refrigerating yeast at 40f kill it if it is native to a place with a cold winter climate? To wit, when I fed my hibernating levain it sprang back to life instantly.
My poor starter had been sorely abused by ignorance when I first began using it to make bread. Working twenty hours a day at the shop, I only fed it once daily. It became offensively sour, and weak as far as leavening was concerned; at one point it actually began to liquefy. So I made a habit of feeding it three times a day, which vastly improved the yeast content but diminished it's tang to the level of insipid. I discovered that a bit of whole wheat flour restored it's acidity.
Now the starter sits in the fridge over the weekend and gets fed for a full day before being used in bread. My sourdough is better than the stuff they sell in San Francisco. At least that's what they tell me. (See "Croissants".)

Wake Up and Smell the Fermentation

It isn't so much the fact that our breads are mixed on low speed, or hand cut and hand shaped, or that they are put on wooden peels and baked in stone-lined ovens that makes them so good, it is the fermentation that they are allowed. An experienced baker can tell just how far along the fermentation of a batch of dough has gone simply by smelling it; the phases are unmistakable.
God knows, I have to endure lectures from people who've never tried my breads telling me about some big bakery in some mid-sized town, and how superior their bread is to anything I can produce. Fact is, the leftovers languishing in my freezer, if popped in the oven for ten minutes, far excel just about anything belched from the machines of most large bakeries. And here's why: those huge shops have to move the product out FAST, so, instead of allowing their doughs to ferment naturally, they shovel chemicals into it ("Dough Conditioner" on the label), let it rest 30 minutes, put it in the divider, shape it, proof it and bake it. All in a couple of hours.
Not so in our shop. The craft of the baker is based largely upon his ability to control and manipulate fermentation in order to achieve specific results. I'm going to make a list of some of my breads and the ferments involved, editing them as I discover something new. And, since nobody other than blood relatives and people trying to sell me shit ever read this blog, I have no fear of anyone stealing my "secrets". (Not that anything to follow is original, mind you, it's mostly a concentrate of research from many different places. I may have observed something in my work, but no doubt it has been observed and noted before.)

Italian

Flour, water, yeast, sea salt, malt syrup.

A straight dough, it will smell grassy as it first begins to ferment, then develop a fruity aroma. Both of these stages are too young to render an excellent bread. The dough will take on the smell of beer after that, which will grow stronger over the course of about an hour. This is the time to do the make-up and, if not, the dough will get old, it's aroma taking on the sting of alcohol, the reek of beer overpowering.

After making up the loaves and rolls, they are retarded overnight with their final proof occurring in the refrigerator. This slow ferment changes everything about the final bread: the crust, the flavor, the oven spring. The loaves are peeled into the oven directly from the retarder, and an hour later as I shovel the bread onto cooling racks, the smell of fermentation is still readily discernible.

Baguette

Preferment: Soft flour, water, a trace of yeast.

As the name suggests, part of the batch is fermented first. The ingredients are mixed into a batter and, in my shop, allowed to ferment overnight at an elevated temperature, around 90f. The next day, a wallop of alcohol will come from it as the lid is lifted; if not, it is allowed more time until the sting of alcohol does develop.

Dough: Preferment, strong flour, yeast, sea salt, whole wheat flour.

Mixed into dough, with an autolyze before the yeast and salt are added, and given one turn halfway through the bulk ferment. The dough is gassy and delicate.

The loaves are given a quick mise en tourne as they are cut, then full shaping, and long bench rests as they are gradually elongated into baguettes. They are retarded overnight on linen couches, given a final proof with plenty of humidity, and baked in a very hot oven with steam. The aroma of fermentation permeates the finished loaves, and they are remarkably crusty.
UPDATE: WE NOW USE THREE PREFERMENTS.

Sourdough

Sour starter, flour, water, whole wheat flour, sea salt.

Starter requires about as much care as a puppy. It needs to be fed three times a day, hydrated with filtered water, and stirred frequently to give it plenty of oxygen. The balance of white and wheat flours must be exact in order to give it the proper balance of sweet, complex tang, and beer flavors. It will be kept at room temperature, or in a warm spot, or refrigerated, depending on it's mood. Moodiness is more like it. But oh, what breads you can coax from it!

Once the water temperature is determined for a batch of sourdough, it is mixed, with an autolyze ( 20 minute rest ) before adding the salt. Bulk fermenting to thrice it's original volume, this dough usually requires between three and four hours to ripen. It is scaled up, given a mise en tourne, rested, then given it's final boule shape. The loaves are proofed to half the desired size in an hour or two at about 80f with moderate humidity, then retarded overnight. Next, they are given a final proof in the same conditions as the first proof, then baked in a moderately hot oven with steam. The crust smells of citrus, caramel, and toasted pecan; the crumb has a subtle, earthy tang to it.

Rye

Starved Sour Starter, Yeast, Bread Flour, Water, Molasses, Dark Rye Flour.

Everything but the Rye Flour is mixed and left to ferment at room temperature for 12 hours. The Rye is then added and refrigerated overnight. The dough goes slack at worst and forms an ugly loaf at best when the rye flour is over fermented, and the dough lacks flavor when the preferment doesn't work long enough. The solution is to add the rye after the sour has had a chance to develop, then retard it.

Above Sour, Bread Flour, Dark Rye Flour, Bitter Cocoa, Caraway, Salt, Wheat Gluten.

I'm sure purists will give me a hard time about some of the ingredients in this bread, but I'm not making my breads for them; I'm making bread for my customers, and I can either make things the way they are supposed to be made, or I can make them as delicious and beautiful as possible.

The dough is mixed, given a 30 minute rest, made up and put on the peels as it is shaped. The loaves are given 3/4 proof, sprayed with water and sprinkled with rye flakes, docked, and baked with steam. It's good and crusty with a nice tangy flavor.

Semolina

Bread Flour, Water, Yeast. Think pasta dough. With a little yeast. The next day it will be light and give off a zap of alcohol when the lid is lifted.

Semolina Flour, Water. Semolina is granular and needs a bit of a soaking (an hour or so) before it can be mixed.

The Above Mixes, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Honey, Yeast, Salt, Whole Wheat Flour.

The dough is fermented to double it's original size after mixing, and has an alcohol smell. Scaled, given 3/4 proof, and baked with steam, it has muscular oven spring and a shattering crust. Breads with this deliberate level of fermentation, that is, with the smell of alcohol, are not ready to be eaten until they are completely cooled.

Three Raisin Vanilla Bean Cardamom

All of the Liquid, Half of the Flour, all of the Yeast. This is called a flying sponge; it's an American style preferment. It works for two hours, then all of the other ingredients are added:

Flour, Butter, Vanilla Syrup, Vanilla Sugar, Egg Yolks, Yellow Raisins, Dark Raisins, Currants, Salt, Cardamom. (The extra sugar requires extra yeast.) These loaves are baked in old, lidded Pullman pans that keep in the fragrance of the ingredients. These ingredients mask the smell of fermentation pretty completely.

European Style Whole Wheat