Food

[geoffbot]

I love gluten (unpopular opinion for some), and I love whole grains. I often add a few tablespoons of gluten flour to my whole grain breads, just to give some air in the rise. However, it's really hard for me to get that nice crust in our oven.

Me too - the sticky, chewy bread is the best. OMG that a great shout - seitan is wheat gluten, reasonable meat replacement that I have around often. Must make bread. I have a free week.

[Henry Krinkle]

I love gluten (unpopular opinion for some), and I love whole grains. I often add a few tablespoons of gluten flour to my whole grain breads, just to give some air in the rise. However, it's really hard for me to get that nice crust in our oven.

I usually add gluten to something like this, or sometimes just for the heck of it. One of my own recipes is known around the house as Gluteen-OOOH. In this case I've found a new source for exotic grains and I am learning how their flours act. Once I've got that down I will play with the rise. This wasn't actually all that dense and it was great with the tuna salad Mrs. K made.

How come you can't get a dark crust?

[Spooky]

I prefer Olive Oil, Garlic & Parmesan Cheese.

Salt yes, I'm not a ketchup guy. Except fancy, not too sugary stuff

Hot sauce.

Put me down for Malt Vinegar.

[skywatch]

How come you can't get a dark crust?

It's not that I can't get dark crust. I'm seeking that special, thick, leathery crust like I remember from the classic San Francisco sourdough of my childhood (it changed dramatically in the late 70s when the three main SF bread companies got absorbed into one and moved to a conveyer-oven factory in Oakland.) It's thick but doesn't break your teeth, and it isn't as dry as many of the french crackly crusts. I know it involves a very humid oven, with very high heat. An excellent nearby wholesale bakery gets theirs with an imported French brick oven with a slowly rotating heavy stone shelf and mist sprayers built in. I have tried trays of boiling water in our oven, with temperatures up to 550ºF (290ºC -ish) but I am nervous to get our oven much hotter than that. It's a small-ish, older gas oven, perhaps the flame tends to dry out the environment too much. I just can't seem to get it looking or feeling quite right. It tastes great, it's just the fine points I lack. (Plus, for me, sourdough is just never sour enough!)

[Henry Krinkle]

It's not that I can't get dark crust. I'm seeking that special, thick, leathery crust like I remember from the classic San Francisco sourdough of my childhood (it changed dramatically in the late 70s when the three main SF bread companies got absorbed into one and moved to a conveyer-oven factory in Oakland.) It's thick but doesn't break your teeth, and it isn't as dry as many of the french crackly crusts. I know it involves a very humid oven, with very high heat. An excellent nearby wholesale bakery gets theirs with an imported French brick oven with a slowly rotating heavy stone shelf and mist sprayers built in. I have tried trays of boiling water in our oven, with temperatures up to 550ºF (290ºC -ish) but I am nervous to get our oven much hotter than that. It's a small-ish, older gas oven, perhaps the flame tends to dry out the environment too much. I just can't seem to get it looking or feeling quite right. It tastes great, it's just the fine points I lack. (Plus, for me, sourdough is just never sour enough!)

For sour, sourdough, have you ever tried old, as in unfed, starter. If you string a batch along for 9 or 10 days without feeding it, it gets distinctly more sour. Obviously it takes longer to get going too, but that's never bad for extra flavour.

For duplicating a steam oven the best luck I've had is to use a pizza stone, superheated and a big stainless steel bowl. The bowl can't be larger than the stone and shouldn't be so small that it restricts the bread when it springs. The bowl traps all the moisture from the bread in a pretty confined space, instead of filling a large oven. Voila- crappy, far from perfect steam oven.

If those Anovas actually work I may replace my never gets used microwave with one of them. Are you familiar with them? They are countertop steam ovens.

[skywatch]

Are you cooking the bread in the bowl, right-side up like in a Dutch Oven, or are you inverting the bowl over the bread to create a small chamber?

Indeed I do often have some pretty skanky sourdough starter. This particular wild starter is around 12 years old now. I have had others that lasted for abut that long, but then died when I went on tour. Luckily we live in a place where we can get new starter from the air on a foggy June night (we live in the San Francisco bay area, and we have wonderful yeasts floating wild around us.) When I don't feed the starter for a week (which is often) it gets quite cheesy, with a whiff of dirty socks. That's a good thing. I have evolved a certain recipe now that tends to magnify the sour as much as possible. It's about 2 1/4 cups flour + gluten, two cups starter, and 1.5 tsp salt. That's the base, then I adjust as needed from there. It's a lot of starter, because I want maximum sour. Still, when I bake it, the magic eludes me. I guess I have not gone to enough extremes of experiment and testing. The results are still quite delicious and we tend to eat only our homemade bread.

[Henry Krinkle]

I am making a chamber. I do use a Dutch oven sometimes, but that's usually if I've made a super high hydration loaf and was too lazy to work it properly. I also do the oven spray thing, but the only time I actually like the results are when I am making a thin, shardy crust batard.

I have a 14" pizza stone that we bought about 30 years ago and this deep pro quality 12" mixing bowl. The bowl doesn't have to be heavy, but it can't be warped in any way. It must fit flat on the stone. My typical bake is in the neighbourhood of 45 minutes at an accurate 450 F. I will leave the dome on for 35-40 minutes and then pull it off for the last 5-10





When I am doing it outdoors on LaMar I'll pull it off a bit early so that one can taste that it was baked in a wood oven. I'll often push the temp a bit higher over a wood fire, 500ish and shorten the time a bit.



Keep in mind that we are a fair bit higher than you. The elevation here is close to 500M/1600 ft and that our relative humidity is probably closer to the Mojave than it is to San Fran, so your results may vary.

[Henry Krinkle]

Speaking of high hydration loaves, I think pan de cristal should be the next thing I try. I have seen recipes with up to 120% hydration and everyone I've seen is over 100%. If you are unfamiliar with it, it is sort of a Spanish variant of ciabatta that was created about a decade ago.

Not my picture.

Attachment 105316

[skywatch]

I am making a chamber.
....

Excellent information! Thank you. We have a pizza stone, but it's cracked so I would probably need to replace it and buy a proper large bowl, Perhaps a worthy experiment. Your Pan de Cristal photo didn't show up, but I can research it. Happy baking!

[Henry Krinkle]

Your Pan de Cristal photo didn't show up, but I can research it. Happy baking!

It's basically huge air bubbles trapped in the finest strands of gluten imaginable.