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Flour : Ash Content

Didier Rosada talked at length about flour during last week’s Artisan III workshop, detailing the flour testing process by which the miller determines the level of enzymes, the protein content and the ash content.
What’s the ash content? The ash content represents the quantity of bran (outer layer of the kernel of wheat) remaining in the flour after the milling process. It is impossible for the miller to separate all of it from the endosperm (starchy part of the grain where most of the carbohydrates and proteins are stored). But the baker needs to know the amount of bran left in the flour as it will have an impact on water absorption, nutrition (mineral content), fermentation activity, breakdown of gluten during mixing, color of the dough, etc. The information will be present on the flour specs sheet, sometimes on the label as well although usually not in this country.
In order to determine the ash content, the miller incinerates some flour at 900 degrees C. All organic components burn and only the minerals are left (most of them are contained in the bran).
In France, the ash content is used to classify the flours. Type 55 flour (T55) : 0.55% of the bran is left in the flour Type 150 (T150) is whole wheat flour.
In Italy, 00 flour contains the least amount of bran and is used for cakes, whereas 0 flour is used for pasta, 1 is all-purpose and 2 is whole wheat.
In the old days, patent flour (the whitest flour) was very much sought after. Not anymore. Today in France, most bakers are moving to T65 because consumers are interested in complementing their diet with more fiber. Some bakers even put T80 in their baguettes as whole wheat is a good way to boost flavor and nutrition.
Yeast feeds on the minerals, so the greater the ash content, the more fermentation activity. For that reason, a smaller amount of yeast should be used in whole wheat dough. Otherwise the fermentation will be too fast. If you go from 100% white to 100% whole wheat, you should use 30 to 40% less yeast.
The bran will affect the strength of the dough as it interferes with gluten formation and punctures the dough, lowering gas retention. Therefore the baker needs to be very careful when fermenting whole wheat dough.
The larger the amount of bran, the darker the color of the crumb and the stronger the flavor ((except if using white whole wheat which is paler and sweeter), the denser the bread and the soggier the crust. For that reason, when baking whole wheat bread, it is best to open the door of the oven towards the end of the baking to make sure the crust stays nice and crispy.
According to Didier, a flour with 0.48 to .54 % ash content is good for artisan baking. You can got to 0.58% with no problem (except that the bread will be a bit darker). The equivalent in France would be T55 to T65.

Dough Consistency



I came out of the recent Artisan III workshop with Didier Rosada at the San Francisco Baking Institute with the knowledge that it was much more useful for me to try and understand the processes used during the course of the week than to write down the exact mixing or fermenting times. Didier did his level best to get us to see that a dough isn’t necessary ready to be mixed on 2nd speed because we just spent 5 minutes mixing it on first speed.
Thus for each of the breads we made during the week, he gave us the mixing times as reference points, making it very clear that back home or at the bakery with a different mixer and in a different environment, they will most likely be different (and the same holds true for fermentation, proofing and baking times).
But what will NOT change and what we need to focus on is the required dough consistency and gluten development for each type of bread. So Didier always gave us these two elements of information first. For instance for the miches, he specified “Improved mix, Medium Soft”, for the spelt bread “Short Mix, Soft” and for the ciabatta that we were going to retard overnight in the cooler “Improved Mix, Soft +”.
On the last day, he mixed some flour and water to give us visual clues to the various dough consistencies. (Sorry for the unintended plug for the drug company in the above pictures. These stickers were all we had and we didn’t think of cutting away the name)
Dough consistency is sometimes confused with gluten development but they are two different things. Dough consistency has to do with the hydration rate (the amount of water the baker puts in the dough) while gluten development (ascertained through the windowpane test) is the degree to which the gluten chains are organized.
Controlling the strength of the dough is the main challenge for the baker. The more we mix, the finer the air pockets and the resulting crumb. But the less we mix, the weaker the dough. One solution is to mix less but to increase the fermentation time and to fold the dough once or twice (or more, as needed).
Folding however is not always an option. For instance, in a bakery where ciabattas are made on a large scale (say, 5,000 kg per day), it is impossible to fold the dough manually. A different approach is needed.
While the goal is to have a lot of free water in the dough (this free water holds multiple microcells of gas), too much water at the beginning would interfere with the gluten development and make the dough very weak. The dough is therefore first mixed to medium soft consistency (68 % water), then developed to improved. Then and only then the reserved water (usually 12 %) is added and the mixing resumes until the water completely incorporated (double hydration technique).
The added water coats the dough in such a way that it protects it from oxydation (which would decrease the flavor) and the resulting dough is very wet (soft +) but very strong because very developed. It can ferment in tubs for 2 or 3 hours and, without any folding, create big holes and have good volume.
At home or in a small bakery where folding isn’t an issue, you can aim for a short mix, add the reserved water and then resort to folding during the fermentation. In other words, for ciabatta, consistency is always soft or soft+ but gluten development can be either short or improved mix, depending on whether or not you plan to fold the dough during fermentation.

Ciabatta
(improved mix, double hydration, soft + consistency, no folds, retarded overnight in cooler)

Well, that’s it for today. I hope you will find helpful this short recap of what Didier tried to teach us. Stay tuned for more Artisan III tidbits!

Fun Fougasses

Baking with a 4-year old is a lot of fun. You have help scaling and pouring (“Can I pour the yeast over the flour? Can I mix it myself? Why does it have to be mixed? Can I add the water myself? Why do you need to go slow? Why can’t I add the salt now? Why does the dough have to rest? “) and get a watchful sentinel who raises the alarm whenever the dough tends to go off center (“Come quick! The dough is going to the side again. Why does it do that?”) and mans the red and green buttons on the mixer with fierce determination, which means you don’t have to do it yourself with your dough-sticky fingers (“Why don’t you like to touch the button with your sticky fingers?”at which point I gave her the same answer my darling of a grandpa used to give me when he got tired of my questions: “To give little girls a reason to ask why” and she giggled). I must remember that she likes this answer! She also likes it a lot when I counter with a “Why do you have to ask why?”. So that’s two good lines to use when I get too busy to actually think! Especially when she has already asked the question the day before and will do it again the day after. Some times I test her by saying that she already knows the answer and she invariably does. So I guess she’s testing to see whether or not I change my story from one day to the next.
But besides devouring what she calls her “favorite sandwich” everyday for breakfast (a piece of ciabatta with butter, honey and Swiss cheese), my grand-daughter isn’t a die-hard bread eater. So I decided to make fun breads with her and that was a huge hit! I heard her talking excitedly to her parents on the phone that night (they were on a cruise somewhere in the Atlantic) and telling them we had made a yummy house bread and two leaf breads, including “a huge huge” one. I wonder what they made of that…
As strange as it may sound for a French native, it was my first time making fougasse, a bread I hadn’t been especially attracted to in the past, and since my targeted audience probably wouldn’t eat it if it contained olives, anchovies or, God forbid, herbs, I made it plain. But even plain, it had a very aromatic flavor, probably because the olive oil I used (from Trader Joe’s if I remember correctly) was very fragrant, and also, of course, because of the starter-based sponge.
But then, flavorwise, you can never go wrong when you make one of Nancy Silverton’s recipes in Breads from La Brea Bakery, the book where I learned most of what I knew about bread making before taking classes at the San Francisco Baking Institute, and the one I turned to for these first fougasses.
We did make three loaves: a tiny house, a small leaf and a gigantic one but I forgot to take a picture of the big one! Sorry about that… Anyway it looked a lot like the small one, only twice the size and with many more openings.

Please note that this is a two-day bread.
Ingredients (for 2 large loaves, or two small ones and a large one, or 4 small ones):
For the sponge
254 g cool water (70F/21C)
57 g mature white starter
227 g unbleached all-purpose flour
For the final dough
556 g cold water (55F/13C)
5 g instant dry yeast
the whole sponge
1136 g unbleached all-purpose flour
25 g salt
54 g extra-virgin olive oil

Method:

  1. The day before baking, make a sponge by placing water, white starter and flour in a mixing bowl and stirring with a spatula
  2. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let the dough ferment overnight at room temperature
  3. The day of the baking, place water and yeast in the bowl of a mixer. Uncover the sponge and add it to the yeast mixture, along with the flour
  4. Mix the dough on low speed for 4 minutes
  5. Cover the dough with a proofing cloth and allow it to rest in the bowl about 20 minutes (autolyse)
  6. Add the salt and continue mixing on medium speed for 4 minutes, scraping the dough down the sides of the bowl as necessary with a rubber spatula
  7. Add the olive oil and mix on medium speed until incorporated and desired dough temperature (74-78 F/23-26C) is reached
  8. Remove the dough from the mixing bowl. It should feel soft and resilient. Mix it for a few minutes by hand on a lightly floured work surface
  9. Place in oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap and let ferment at room temperature until doubled in volume, about 3 hours
  10. Preheat the oven to 500F/260C one hour before baking
  11. Uncover the dough and turn it onto a lightly floured surface
  12. Stretch it into a rectangle about 24 by 18 inches (61 x 46 cm) and at least 1 inch (2.5 cm) thick
  13. Cut the dough in half with a dough cutter into two 12 x 9-inch (30.5 x 23 cm) rectangles
  14. Working with one piece of dough at a time (leaving the second one covered with a cloth), fold in the edges of the longest sides of the dough to meet in the middle and invert the dough, seam side down, onto a floured, parchment-lined baking sheet. Dimple the dough slightly with your fingers to seal the seam underneath. The dough should be 1 to 1.5-inch (2.5 to 4 cm) thick
  15. Cup your hands around the top end of the dough and shape it into a half oval using a pushing motion. With a similar motion, shape the bottom end of the dough, leaving the edges slightly squared.
  16. Uncover the second piece of dough and shape it in the same manner
  17. Cover the loaves with a cloth and let them proof at room temperature for about 1/2 hour
  18. Uncover the first piece of dough and cut/decorate as desired (you can make leaves, trees, buildings, boats, trains, whatever your imagination will suggest) but don’t forget to always enlarge the cuts with your fingertips so that the openings are 1 to 1.5 inches (2.5 to 4 cm) wide (if not, they will close during baking
  19. Lightly sprinkle each fougasse with flour, cover with a cloth, and let the dough relax for about 45 minutes
  20. Open the oven door, spritz the oven heavily with water from a spray bottle and quickly close the door. Open it again and slide one baking sheet in, spritz some more
  21. Reduce oven temp to 450 F/232 C, spritz 2 more times during the next 5 minutes, then refrain from opening the oven door for the next 15 minutes
  22. After 15 minutes, check the loaf and rotate it if necessary to ensure even baking. Continue baking until the crust is an even brown color from top to bottom (10 more minutes in my case)
  23. Repeat with the second loaf
  24. Let cool on a wire rack before eating.

The Fun Fougasses go to Susan, fromWild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

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Hamburger Buns

I was looking for a hamburger bun recipe yielding a roll that would work fine with or without a hamburger inside and I stumbled upon this one by chance. I had started out by following Nancy Silverton’s directions in her terrific Breads from La Brea Bakery but I hadn’t read the complete recipe (always a big mistake!) and found out too late that Silverton uses in fact a brioche dough with 5 large eggs, close to 300 g of butter and 85 g of sugar.
While I am sure her recipe is delicious, for health and other reasons, I don’t really like baking with a lot of butter and eggs. So here I was with a beautifully bubbling sponge and nowhere to go!
I turned to my other bread bible, namely Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread : A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes – which I had had the lucky foresight to take with me on our trip to the river – and looked up Hamelman’s recipe for hamburger buns. It did use sugar, some butter and eggs but the sugar could be skipped and the butter replaced by olive oil. As for eggs, it only required one and since there was fresh milk in the sponge, I could skip the powdered milk (a good thing since I didn’t have any).
I scaled the ingredients taking into account the amount of flour, water, milk, starter and yeast which I had used in the sponge and we were in business.
The resulting rolls are a little bit more crusty than simply yeasted buns but they are quite tasty.
The crumb is mostly tight enough to keep ketchup or mustard from leaking through, yet airy enough to make a nice dinner roll. In other words, this stumbled-upon recipe is a keeper, especially as the rolls can be made ahead and frozen, which means I can make them whenever I have a surplus of starter (I am always looking for ways to use up my starter).

The recipe is made over two days as the sponge ferments for about 24 hours beforehand and I found the final dough to be pretty resilient. As we had to go out, I set it to wait in the fridge and even though we were away for more than three hours, it hadn’t overproofed when I took it out.

Ingredients (for 18 rolls):
For the sponge

  • 171 g cool water at 70 F
  • 1 pinch of dry instant yeast
  • 184 g mature liquid starter
  • 115 g fresh milk
  • 282 g unbleached all-purpose flour 

For the final dough

  • 373 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 118 g water
  • 40 g extra-virgin olive oil
  • 13 g salt
  • 1 egg
  • 4 g instant dry yeast

Method:

  1. To make the sponge, place the water, yeast, starter, milk and flour in a bowl and stir with a rubber spatula. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and leave it at room temperature for 10 to 12 hours
  2. Bubbles should have formed on the surface. Resecure the plastic wrap and place the bowl in the refrigerator for 1o to 12 hours
  3. 24 hours later, remove the sponge from the refrigerator and place it in the bowl of a mixer (I use a spiral one), together with the water, the flour and the yeast
  4. Mix on low speed until just incorporated and let rest, covered, for 20 minutes (autolyse)
  5. Add the salt and mix for a few minutes until the gluten network is moderately developed, then add the egg
  6. When incorporated, slowly add the olive oil
  7. Remove from the bowl of the mixer and place in an oil-sprayed container. Cover tightly before setting to ferment at room temperature (the dough will take longer to ferment than indicated in the Hamelman’s book because the sponge is taken straight from the fridge. In my case, the dough temperature was 72 F/22 C at the end of the mixing, which is clearly on the lower side since the desired temperature would have been 76 F/24 C. It took about 2 hours but right before it was done, I placed it in the fridge for more than 3 hours, so all together, it fermented for at least 5 hours. I wouldn’t particularly recommend this technique of retarding the dough out of personal convenience but it is good to know that it can be done)
  8. Divide the dough in 70 g pieces, pre-shape round
  9. Let the rounds relax for about 5 minutes under a sheet of plastic
  10. Lightly flour the work surface and with a rolling pin (I actually used the flat of my hand), roll each piece into a disk about 3.5 inches/9 cm in diameter
  11. Proof on sheet pans lined with parchment paper and cover with plastic
  12. When risen, lightly spray the top with water and drizzle with sesame seeds, poppy seeds or grated parmesan cheese (I left one batch bare as my 4-year old grand-daughter can be picky when toppings are concerned) and bake at 400 F/204 C for 20 minutes. The crust should be golden but the rolls should be soft when gently squeezed, according to Hamelman (mine had a little bit more body because of the starter).

These Hamburger Buns go to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Meet the Baker: James McNamara

Bakeries are my favorite food stores and bakers my favorite artisans in the culinary world. I am sure wine and cheese makers are just as passionate and dedicated but since I haven’t (yet) started making my own wine or cheese, I tend to seek them out less, so I can’t really tell. What I know for having met with several bakers over the past few months, in and out of school, is that bakers breathe and dream bread, and that, I find very endearing.
They think about it all the time, how to make it good, how to make it better, how to ensure timely delivery of a consistent product to a client base that has come to rely on it. James McNamara, head baker at Wave Hill Breads in Wilton, CT, is no exception. He describes lying awake at night trying to recall where he read something that could apply to a problem he might be encountering, then getting up and going straight to the book or books, taking mental notes and plotting out the best way to implement the solution.
A baker I met last year in Switzerland, told me: “Bakers are basically insomniacs”. I think that’s true or, at least, that being an insomniac is an asset for the baker as, given the relentless pace, there is no opportunity at the production stage to comb through notes or to just sit back and muse.
Wave Hill Breads makes several kinds of breads, all from the same dough – a creamy and aromatic 3-grain poolish-based beauty (spelt and rye grains are milled daily and added to the wheat flour).

Making multiple batches of the same dough over and over offers a baker an unique opportunity to hone his or her skills, to learn to “read” the dough and stay attuned to its slightest variations. On busy nights, there might be up to 12 batches, 75 minutes apart, at Wave Hill Breads. Each one tells a different story and that makes the task endlessly new. For instance, because of minute changes in temperature or flour characteristics, McNamara is constantly monitoring the dough hydration, adding water or taking some away.

The poolish (which is mixed during the day while the mixing and baking are done at night) is allowed to ferment for 6 hours before being added to the flour and water in the mixer with the tiniest pinch of yeast. After a shaggy dough is formed…

…it rests in the mixer for a while (autolyse), then salt is added and once all the ingredients are incorporated, the mixing starts. It is kept to a minimum (one minute on second speed), then the dough rests for 15 minutes. Another short spin and another resting period. Another spin, then the dough rests in the mixer until it is time for another batch.

It is then transferred to a wooden trough…

…where it ferments some more in a temperature-controlled environment. When it is ready…

…it is taken to the bench…

…and the shapers’ work begins.


Kathleen and Beverly at the bench


Bâtards proofing

Tonight Sharon, the other baker, is in charge and she’s the one manning the ovens…


…loading, unloading, rotating, constantly assessing the doneness of the loaves.


Not done yet

Baked to perfection

McNamara came to Wave Hill Breads in the summer of 2008. As quite a few other bakers I have had the privilege of meeting (including Sharon, who was an accountant in another life), he didn’t set out to be a baker. He was on the premed track in college and graduated with a degree in English. But he went on to attend the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont and became the assistant pastry chef at La Panetière in Rye.
As luck would have it though, a relative gave him a starter from King Arthur Flour as a present as well as the book Bread Alone by Daniel Leader. It is no exageration to say that this serendipitous event changed his life.
He started experimenting with sourdough and baking from the book and soon realized that bread was his true calling (“Bread dough is ALIVE, so much more interesting than butter and chocolate, don’t you think?”). He set to training as an apprentice baker by volunteering to work on all his days off at Daniel Leader’s Bread Alone in Boiceville, NY. Such was the pull of the bread made over there that he doggedly put up with the 1-hr and 45 minutes commute each way from his home in Katonah.
After a year of this hectic life, he moved to Boston, a city which features several good bakeries and was soon hired at another remarkable bakery, Clear Flour Bread in Brookline, MA. Clear Flour was very different from Bread Alone where a baker learned to do everything from the mixing to the shaping and the baking. It was a very organized 24-hour operation where the bakers worked in dedicated shifts (some mixing, some punching and folding, some shaping, etc.) In terms of sourdough baking and punching and folding, it was a teaching bakery, bent on educating its bakers. McNamara was encouraged to take classes, which is how he came to train with Didier Rosada at the National Baking Center in Minneapolis. A Master Baker from France, Rosada has trained the American teams which competed for the Coupe du monde de la boulangerie (Bread World Cup) and he is widely recognized as one of the leading bakers in the United States.

Duly trained, McNamara went on from Clear Flour to open his own bakery in Easton, MA. His wife – who is a pastry chef – made the cakes and pies and he made the bread. But he is a perfectionist and called upon to produce by himself daily a wide variety of breads with many different doughs, he found it difficult to focus consistently on high quality. He and his wife also soon tired of swimming across the current of the anticarb wave that the Atkins diet had created. He cast about for a while, working for a friend in Ohio (but that friend already had a bread baker, so he found himself making croissants and pastries, which wasn’t what he was looking for). Coming back East, he worked briefly at Le Château before getting a job at SoNo bakery and finally joining Wave Hill Breads.
When he first came to Wave Hill, McNamara was given a formula and asked to work within well-defined parameters to produce the bread the customers had come to know and love. After a few months of going with the flow, he decided he had to introduce a few changes to make the product even better. With the owners in cautious agreement, he moved the bench to the other room, away from the oven, changed the mixing, cutting it from improved to short-mix, added a tiny bit of yeast, incorporated punches and folds, upped the hydration to the high sixties (it had been in the lower to mid-sixties) and introduced temperature control.
Since there is no leeway on time (the bread has to be ready by 4:30-5:00 AM when the baggers arrive), he had to increase the yeast and to cool the dough down to maintain quality. Even after doubling the yeast, the amount used at Wave Hill Breads is still the lowest he ever worked with. The challenge is to set the right balance daily between the temperature, the length of the fermentation and the percentage of yeast.


The bâtard I took home for tasting

As he needs to keep in mind what the owners, Margaret Sapir and Mitch Rapoport, understandably desire (which is to continue making their signature bread, thereby keeping their customers happy), McNamara has to compromise. If it were up to him, he would double the amount of poolish, increase the mixing time and prolong the fermentation (introducing more poolish would counterbalance the more intensive mix). But, as it is, he is proud of the product which he deems consistently very good, and satisfied with the direction the bread has taken at the bakery under his stewardship.

As Rosada puts it, “to grow and excel, bakers must not only learn ‘what’ to do, but understand the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of what they’re doing.” Minding the how’s and why’s is McNamara’s calling as a baker and it does translate into a near-perfect product. When I visited last fall, the bread was already great. Now it is extremely good, with a beautiful crumb and a tasty and crunchy crust. My only reservation would be the amount of salt, which is a bit high to my taste. My guesstimate would put it in the 2.3-2.5 % range (and I am more used to 2%, or even 1.5% as now required by law in Europe) but, obviously, I can be wrong. Even if I am not, I don’t doubt that there are reasons for that, if only that it is what the customers want.

Since joining Wave Hill, McNamara has assembled a whole new team of full-time bakers and part-time helpers and learned how to put the pieces together to get the work done. He is very proud of that accomplishment and has discovered he loves the managerial aspects of his profession. But when retirement age approaches (since he is only 39, we are talking a rather distant future), there is a little mountain bakery in his dreams where he and his wife could live and work, gazing at the scenery between batches of golden loaves and visions of wedding cakes. Meanwhile, he cannot picture himself doing anything but what he is doing right now and that’s certainly excellent news for all of us who live and eat in Connecticut and nearby New York!
For a list of the stores and farmers’ market where the bread can be found, please click here.