Yesterdays starter looked like this. Not massively impressive.
I have just finished the next stage which is :
500g starter
200ml blood temperature water
3g yeast
250 strong flour
15g salt
Pinch of rye flour
Bring all the ingredients together bar the salt. Just as mix comes together add the 15g salt. Place dough on floured surface and need for 5 minutes. Cover and rest in a warm place for 45 mins.
He talks of kneading the dough without fighting with it which is lovely. He has good expressions. One of the recipes calls for a gesture of salt. That’s up there with the squeezing of a lemon.
On the subject of salt note that this recipe calls for 15, that is FIFTEEN grammes of salt. No wonder his bread tastes so good. There are certain guidelines about quantities of salt in food production. I am unaware of them but appreciate they must exist. I love salt and all my food gets a generous allowance of it, but 15 grammes for this dough seems a lot. The more the merrier if you ask me.
The starter seemed dense to me but then it did have the tiniest amount of yeast. I followed the instructions and by the end had an ok dough but were I not following this recipe I would have given it more of a knead. I find it a little lumpy still. I also thought bread needed more, ahem, kneading do get the glutens stretching.
Also the 45 mins seems to be a short proving time.
As I said yesterday I think to be a baker is the profession. I wonder what my Chinese doppelganger would consider it to be.
One of the things I love about making bread is the kneading process. It is so contemplative. I doubt whether a masseuse would get the same satisfaction even if it is a similar movement. I really like any activity that makes answering the phone impossible and kneading is one of those things. I have a lovely marble surface to work the dough on and I look out of my kitchen window at this:
so the more i knead the happier I am.
1 comments:
Lately I have been baking bread a lot. Ever since we came back from summer teaching and discovered our baker no longer delivers (and he's the only one still working we like, and his village is half an hour away, and has hardly any shops...). So I've been baking. Never the same twice, but my husband claims he prefers my bread to any other. Also it's cheaper. BUT I haven't got a variation that makes pa-amb-tomaquet yet. So far it's always better with butter, oil and salt, or plain with cheese. Texture is the problem. I've tried some English (my god, Asda own brand, I think) "instant" yeast brought by my mother-in-law (but though I've finally used it up, only once did I use the recipe on the packet), and I always only used 1/2 the packet for 750-ish gr. of flour for a quilo-ish loaf.
Next up, some non-instant, but still dried yeast. (I've occasionally used the live yeast my baker uses, but he USED to GIVE it to me, and now he - or rather his wife, who is the shopkeeper - charges a lot. Maybe because he's lost a client? I still buy a loaf from there about once a month, because one of the shops in his village has the brand of milk I prefer.)
This is probably boring. But I'll bore you some more, soon.
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