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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The point of a ratatouille is not that it has precisely bell pepper, eggplant, tomato, and zucchini. It’s that it’s a stew of summer vegetables, and the point should be to figure out what the summer vegetables are for you.
We live in a world where we can buy summer vegetables in January (imported from across the world), so we don’t have to deal with those limitations.
I think it’s a fool’s errand to determine the precisely correct formula for the correct (tm) way of making x, y, or z.
This might be different if you work in a Michelin-starred restaurant or get a kick out of the scientific method.
But if you cook at home, the point is to make delicious things for the people you love.
Of particular importance are the ratios of starter-flour-water when refreshing your culture (thrice daily! then bundling or floating for overnight storage...) It influences the ratio of Saccharomyces to Lactobacillus which has an effect on the pH of your dough after the first or second fermentation. If pH goes too low the gluten will dissolve and your dough will disintegrate when you try to knead in more ingredients.
One of the USA panettone masters, Roy Shvartzapel, insists you need a pH meter to be successful but after flailing around with one I found copying the refresh ratios of one of the Italian masters to do the trick. Unfortunately, refreshing is usually not part of published recipes!
Look, the author isn't technically wrong. But also, I have to point out that the reason for all the control and preciseness is replicability.
If you measure out everything by gram, mix/kneed for the right amount of time, set the temperature the the right number, and bake for the right amount of time, you'll get the same loaf, texture, everything, every single time.
That's why we have modern store bread loafs. That's why all bakeries aren't using more "artistic" methods of intuiting the amount of ingredients.
So long as you can accept that by doing thing by feel you'll end up with loaves that are rocks, crumbs, or dough balls. That are overcooked or undercooked. Then yeah, you can intuit as much as you like. Sometimes you'll get something good. You'll even get better at it till you usually get something good.
Precise reproducibility requires not just monitoring ingredients, but overall environment, dough response, and more.
Or ... you can roll with it as an amateur (both in the "nonprofessional" and "for the love of it" senses), recognise that every bake is its own experiment, measure what you can, but allow for variation. I've been baking bread for about six years now. Results vary, many look great, and all but a very few taste amazing, even where I go far out of nominal parameters.
Biggest goof to date was omitting salt from a batch. (Salting the finished product ... recovered mostly.) Otherwise I've survived odd assortments of flours, accelerated or extended prooving cycles, high- or low-temperature ovens, different cookware, and more. Bread is just really freaking resilient stuff, and so long as you're not planning on hitting the same spot every time, have fun with it, and learn, in the spirit of TFA.
Assume you have 100g of flour at equilibrium 20% ambient humidity, and the same 100g of flour at 80% humidity.
I don’t know how different the effective moisture content would be, but measuring the weight of the flour to the gram seems like you’re including the moisture in the weight of the flour. Maybe one packs denser on a scoop. I don’t know. But I don’t necessarily think it’s more accurate.
On the other hand, it’s really easy to just pour in 540g of flour, mix in a shy tablespoon of salt, 280g of water, and a good glop of starter. Far easier than trying to get consistent scoops or measure to the meniscus in a liquid measured.
I eventually decided mass measurements are most useful when the amount you need in mass is fairly small relative to the volume of the particles of the thing you're measuring. Measuring a small volume of nuts can be tricky, for example, because the nuts are different sizes and shapes, but mass is fairly consistent.
Measurement with baking in general is conducive to replicability assuming the same conditions are met. That is, that you're in the same bakery, with the same oven, same flour, and so forth. It becomes less reliable as you start changing variables.
This is pretty obvious even with flour: two bread flours can absorb really different amounts of water, so you almost have to be aware of texture and so forth. What you want to achieve in a recipe is a certain outcome, in dough characteristics and final loaf. How you get there can be informed by a bunch of things but is never guaranteed unless everything is the same every time.
Mass will only change based on things not related to your in-the-moment technique (e.g. humidity).
This is the crux.
Sure, if I bake a loaf of odd bread every couple of days, I will EVENTUALLY get good enough to produce something good rather than just edible. After how long? A week? A month? A YEAR?
So, in the interim, I am WASTING those ingredients and my time.
I liken this to knife sharpening. Sure, EVENTUALLY you will get the feel for sharpening on whetstones and then sharpening your kitchen knives is quick and straightforward. But how many times will it take--especially if you have no mentor to teach you? Alternatively, you can get a fixed-angle sharpener and have sharp kitchen knives tonight.
https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework
3.6k stars
This guy and book is great. Idk if he invented it but he might have popularized using low hydration or high hydration starter to change the flavor of your sourdough.
The idea I remember is that lower hydration starter gives you yogurty flavor and high gives you more sour.
Machinery for fancy twisted form factors is available. Here's the Fritsch Multitwist.[2] That seems to be more of a European thing. Although it can be configured to make big pretzels.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfnFpOEEvU
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xVNK_XRkxM
It’s near impossible to find decent bread, compared to EU countries like France/Belgium/Germany. :(
Good bread exists, it’s just not cheap like it is in Europe.
Boston Logan is probably your closest truly useful airport, and the Dartmouth Coach goes direct from there to Hanover.
I’ve found though for things like hydration or proofing times your environment is going to have a noticeable impact on that.
King Arthur recipes are written with their products in mind, so if you’re using other flour make sure to check the protein content and that it matches! I’ve made that mistake before when I had consistently bad results and realized the flour I had was quite a bit lower in protein content despite having the same general “all purpose” moniker.
That said, I've used a cheap bleached white AP flour when that's all that's available and had ... quite good results. My preference is bread flours, and generally at least some whole wheat in the mix.
Even when something is a "9 grain" bread, usually what that actually means is it's wheat bread with other grains in the crust.
Very hard to find a rye bread in the US.
- The quality is highly uniform.
- The quality is highly bland.
As with any mass-produced food, the goals are typically quantity and low cost, though often with a putative appearance of quality or artisanal character. The compromises are largely against a high-quality product, though there are places where this may be found, albeit at far higher prices.
Of you may bake your own.
But, there are local bakeries here and there and many of them seem to make pretty good breads? Maybe I don't know what you're specifically looking for though. I'm in LA at the moment and I can be both frustrated with the average but still find some good stuff.
Oh gee, who’d imagine you’d be able to find a decent baker in in LA?
Always hilarious how people in LA/NYC assume that obviously the experience of living in one of the largest cities in the country applies to the whole of the country.