The Fugue

We had a little blind taste test here at the southern Fugal base. We compared two baguettes which differed only in the sourdough start used.

The Contestants

Brian Mailman of San Francisco graciously sent me a SF start. I refreshed it twice, baked with it twice, and declared it ready for the taste test.

My start was created earlier this summer from some King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour and water. This start developed very quickly and was made a voluminous loaf after only 36 hours, and it is indistinguishable from my old start, so I think it's likely that they are basically the same culture. Despite the fact that the last time I had used the start was several months before and I started from scratch. So this start is either New Mexican, King Arthurian, or Polish depending on your point of view. (My old start came from a baker in Albuquerque who claims its ancient origin to be Poland)

Methods

When the SF start came I boiled my tools and proceeded to refresh and bake with it. I was careful not to contaminate it with the Polish start.

To prepare these two loaves, I refreshed 25g of each start to 60g, in different vessels and on different counters. Then when they were nice and active I mixed 400g of dough, including salt, until the gluten development was good. It was drier than I like because adding 100g of 100% start would soften it up, but it was all precalculated to give a final hydration of 64%.

I divided the dough into 195 grams each (lost a few grams to the process), then mixed in 50g of the respective starts, again being careful not to cross-contaminate. For some reason the polish dough was a bit wetter, so I ended up adding a tad of flour to it until the consistency felt the same.

I shaped into baguettes and let rise until they were ready to bake. I baked at 450 for 10 minutes then 400 for 5 more minutes, with a little steam (but no cloche) at the beginning.

Results

Both breads tasted good, but neither seemed to taste substantially different from the other. This jives with my earlier observations that the SF start didn't seem to taste any different, although it does smell a little bit different.

Just to be sure we conducted a blind taste test. My wife said the SF one tasted ever so slightly more sour, but that they tasted mostly the same. I said that the Polish one had a more complex almost-sour undertone, but basically the same. Neither one was noticeably sour, which I'm sure had to do with the technique as both of these starts have produced mildly sour bread before with the same ingredients.

The most significant difference was in looks, as you can see at Flickr. Look at the crust comparison but don't jump to conclusions - the difference is easily explained by the position in the oven and my shaping (mis)technique. Look at the crumb comparison, though. There was more rise and spring in the Polish baguette, and the resulting crumb is more desirable. However I can't completely discount the possibility that it remained slightly more wet than the SF dough, which could account for it. Or perhaps it was temperature-induced, or the SF start finished rising sooner and was slightly overproofed. There's just not enough data to tell, really.

One thing is clear, there is no major difference in the two baguettes, although there is a very slight difference in taste. Far more important to love the start you're with than to chase after that perfect start. Nevertheless, for your benefit I've asked for a sample of ACME start, and will get a sample of the authentic Polish start from my dad and will repeat the experiment and see if either of those tastes significantly different from my old standby.

I've been baking bread for awhile now, and like any self-respecting geek I've collected numerous tools in the process. I feel like I've reached an equilibrium now. Some have fallen into disuse, some I couldn't live without, and some are just handy. There's nothing that I feel I need now, although I could probably spring for a few more niceties over time.

I believe bread baking is a wonderful thing to know how to do, even if you're not a fanatic like myself. American bread is so insipid, and baking bread is so simple and yet so deep and rewarding. So to do my part I'm going to group my tools into four categories: essential, nice, mostly superfluous, and unpurchased.

Essential

The essential tools are those tools which were they absent would discourage me from baking bread. Not those which are essential to make bread at a basic level, because those are just a mixing bowl, a bread pan, and an oven.

• Tiles or Stone. If you're only baking pan breads, you can skip this. If you want to make artisan bread or pizza, get something. A few unglazed quarry tiles can be an affordable and flexible solution, but a pizza stone will be better than nothing.
• Digital Metric Scale. You'll thank me.
• Calculator. Nothing fancy, just needs to be able to multiply and divide decimal numbers.
• "Greenhouse". I got a 15x22x6 plastic tub from Wal-Mart for a few dollars (no need for a lid). When placed upside-down on the counter, it keeps the humidity up for proofing and does away with plastic wrap disasters forever.
• Baking Peel. Again, you can skip it if you plan to stick with pan loaves. Indispensable otherwise.
• Parchment Paper. You may substitute considerable skill with a peel.
• Good Bread Knife. What's the point of making beautiful bread if you have to mutilate it to eat it?
• Patience
• Logbook. Any little notebook will do. Write down everything.
• A good book on bread and/or a bread baking friend (that's me). If you spring for a book, get The Bread Builders.

Nice

These are the things that make frequent baking a delight. You don't need them to make bread, but you'll probably want them eventually. Some of these are important for that elusive perfect loaf; if you're chasing the perfect loaf it's time to pick some of these up.

• Kitchenaid Mixer. This is really optional any way you look at it. But it's oh-so-nice.
• Probe Thermometer. Bread is done when the crumb is somewhere between 180°F and 210°F, depending on the type.
• Scalpel. For slashing. When you buy it you can call it a lame if you want. Really cheap at the local university bookstore.
• Welding Gloves. Also great for grilling. $10-$15 at Home Depot.
• Flour Duster. You know, for sprinkling flour.
• Something like a Cloche. A vaulted stoneware lid, a terra cotta pot, or an actual La Cloche. For that really perfect artisan crust.
• Bread Bags. In case you can't eat it all at once.
• Beat up oven-safe metal pan (for generating steam). Don't use Pyrex :-)
• Plastic Mixing Bowl with lid. The less plastic wrap, the better. More reliable humidity for long retards in the fridge.
• Oven Thermometer. Know thy oven.
• Dough Scraper (flat). Comes in handy for cleanup, and really nice for dividing dough.
• Really Good Ingredients. I like to use King Arthur flour, kosher salt, and Brita-filtered water.

Mostly Superfluous

• Bread Tin. How boring.
• Digital Camera. It's sometimes fun to share, if you already have one.
• Plastic Wrap/Foil. Ok, these are sometimes handy but they're such a pain that it's better to get the greenhouse and lidded mixing bowl.
• Dough conditioners. Meh, Strongbad.
• Mill. If your goal is really organic self-sufficient use-up-your-food-storage bread, then this becomes more important. Otherwise, it's easier and more predictable to stick with flours from the store.
• Hot Pads. See Welding Gloves above.

Unpurchased

• Couche. This one could be fun, but at the end of the day I'd probably still use parchment paper.
• Proofing Box. Too complicated. For me, it's fridge temperature, room temperature, or oven temperature.
• Steam Contraptions. If you're that serious about your crust, get a cloche or a brick oven.
• Proofing Baskets/Forms. If you need that little extra structure in your life.
• Brick Oven. This one I really want, someday.

My wife is out of town, which means you can bet your britches I'm eating all the stuff she doesn't like this weekend. You know, like sauerkraut, corned beef, swiss cheese, rye bread. Hey, those are the basic building blocks of one of the most delicious sandwiches ever invented: The Reuben.

This post isn't about the Reuben. It's about the rye bread I used to make the Reuben. It turned out very well. Here's the recipe I used, which I adapted from somebody's New York Style Jewish Rye recipe:

300g 100% start
560ml water (2 1/3 cups)
1 T sugar
2 c light rye flour
2 T kosher salt
2 T caraway seeds
4.75 c flour

I didn't want three bâtards though, so I thirded the recipe. I mixed the dough for a few minutes in the mixer. I had to add some flour, but the dough was still plenty wet. Oh, and sugar is boring and my honey was crystallized so I used molasses instead. I stuck it in the fridge for five or so hours and took it out just before going to bed. When I woke up I preheated the oven at 400 for 20 minutes then baked under cloche for 10 minutes, then without cloche to an internal temperature of 200 F.

It's delicious, but next time I'll use just a tad less salt and caraway. Incidentally, caraway is the taste you probably associate with rye bread, not the rye itself. There was no oven spring to speak of, I think because it was just barely overproofed, in spite of starting the proof cold. I guess I'll just have to sleep less or proof during the day.

I ported my calculator to javascript and an HTML form, which you can find at http://hans.fugal.net/sourdough/calculator.html. Happy baking!

This is a success story. In reality it begins long ago and far away when I began tinkering with bread baking. But it's not the culmination of all bread baking, or even of all my bread baking. It's just good. Everything came together and I will now proceed to tell you how it happened, and how my bread compares to grapestart lady and grill boy (in my perhaps-biased opinion).

It started with a book: The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens. I picked this book up from my university library a couple of weeks ago with the intention of perhaps building a little masonry oven in my backyard. I'd heard that the bread baked therein is exsquisite and beautiful. This book is amazing. It not only tells you how to make a masonry oven, but it tells you how to bake naturally-leavened (sourdough) bread, and it does an excellent job of both. This is Good Reads.

To make a long story short, I learned from the book that I didn't want to build a masonry oven while renting (I do when I buy/build a home), and that I could get nearly identical results with La Cloche, or an imitation thereof. My wife sells Pampered Chef so we got their 9x13 stoneware casserole dish vaulted lid, but you could do with a terra cotta pot. Welding gloves come in handy too.

The loaf development went like this:

• Thursday morning I took 10g 100% hydration active sourdough start and refreshed it with 30g flour and 30g water.
• Thursday evening I mixed up the dough, let it rest for a few minutes, kneaded it, let it rest for an hour, then put it in the fridge overnight.
• Friday morning I took the dough out, let it warm up for an hour (it's hard to handle with bare hands when it's that cold), then formed it into a baguette shape. I put it on the counter under my plastic "greenhouse" to keep up the humidity and let it rise while I was at school (about 8 hours total).
• When I got home I turned the oven to 450 F, with the "cloche" and tiles inside, and let it preheat for 20 minutes. During this time I slashed the loaf and got it onto the peel (that was an ordeal because I forgot to use parchment paper, but it wasn't the end of the world).
• Baked for 35 minutes. (until my probe thermometer hit 95 C which is a good internal temp at my altitude)

The crumb is very nice, as you can see, which I attribute to not overkneading and using a fairly wet dough (about 73% hydration).

The crust was pretty, but not as dark as I'd hoped for (related to the fact that it took too long for an itsy baguette to bake). I think I need to either turn the oven up higher or preheat longer, or both.

This is the recipe I used:

70g     100% hydration active start
170g    all-purpose flour
115g    water
1/2 tsp salt

Well, that's the recipe I should have used, but I miscalculated the salt and had too much salt. Still good but a bit too salty. Yes, this is a little baguette. It's my experimental baking size.

How does my little baguette compare to grapestart lady and grill boy? My baguette wasn't as thin and long as Nancy's, but her crust was tougher and mine was crispy and chewy and tasty without being a workout. My crumb wasn't as delightfully labyrinthine as grill boy's, but still interesting and of good quality. The taste (aside from too much salt) was almost identical to what I remember of the grapestart baguette, which I consumed only a week ago. My start is home-grown here in Las Cruces a month or two ago, perhaps influenced by bacteria that still lingered in my kitchen from the old Polish start that I killed off, but not from San Francisco in any case. So there you have it, the story of my baguette.

I was in the LA area for Von's wedding, and dragged my family across Hollywood to get some "San Fransisco Sourdough" bread from Nancy Silverton's La Brea Bakery. (Nancy shall hereafter be referred to as the grapestart lady.) It was good stuff. The crust was everything you dream of in an artisan crust and the crumb was delicious. One of the reasons I wanted to go there was because the La Brea Bakery won some SF Sourdough contest one year, beating out Acme baking company. This is interesting as La Brea is in LA, not SF. (Take that you stuck up San Fransiscans) I wanted to see what "San Francisco Sourdough" really was, for two reasons: to see if it's worth the hype and to see if the sourdough bread I bake is similar or not. Now that I've tasted it, I can say that it's not worth the hype, precisely because it tastes just like my sourdough bread. My sourdough bread is made from a sourdough start that supposedly came from Poland back in the day but mostly lived in New Mexico then Utah and again in New Mexico. When I get it right, it's good and tastes just like grapestart lady's bread (except for the crust - more on that later). But it's not something magical that can only be reproduced in California.

The big difference between grapestart lady's bread and mine is that hers has that nice artisan crust and mine doesn't. I'm doing some experiments with crust later this week, so keep your eyes open.

Now, on the way home (sort of), we're in Las Vegas. At Redbeard's recommendation we had lunch at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill. (Bobby Flay will hereafter be referred to as grill boy.) They brought us some bread: some "Italian Ciabatta", some cornbread muffin things, and some sesame whole wheat cranberry stuff. It was all excellent, but the ciabatta was beyond excellent. It was, in fact, far beyond the sourdough baguette from La Brea. It had a nice open crumb (grapestart lady's was fairly uniform and boring), and its artisan crust was still crispy and chewy, but not as much work to just eat as grapestart lady's. It wasn't purporting to be sourdough, but it was obvious to me that it was naturally leavened and had all kinds of delicious tastes including sourdough. I was very impressed. The burger was ok, too.

So we can learn a few lessons here. Maybe La Brea had a bad day or Mesa Grill had a good day, or maybe it had to do with the difference between ciabatta and baguette. But it's clear that you needn't believe the hype, that California is not inherently superior, and that grill boy rivals grapestart lady in making bread. Who would have guessed?

I was talking with Redbeard about steam and bread, and he reassured me that steam is good for bread. Helps you get that thin crispy crust. So I decided that the batard I am experimenting with today deserved the steam treatment. There's lots of interesting ways to get steam into your oven at the right time, but one of the more sensible ways is given in this post. It's quite sensible, that is, until you go and try to use a pyrex pan instead of an old metal baking pan or cookie sheet. Man, I should have known better. I once exploded a light bulb with a squirt gun on accident. That was less spectacular than this was.