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Bakers Topic – understanding acidity and sourness

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Sourdough bakers will know that there are millions of natural micro-organisms within their leaven, and among them are the wild yeasts and many different strains of bacteria, the most common being the type that are called Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB for short). Mostly they arrive on the feeding flour, but they also arrive from our skin, saliva, and so on, and even by more mysterious ways. The lactic acid bacteria create the sourness that gives “sourdough” bread its name. While they are busy fermenting the sugars in the flour to create the energy they need to sustain life, scientists have divided them into two camps based on their feeding patterns: the homofermentative LAB only produce lactic acid, while the heterofermentative LAB start out making lactic, but can swap to acetic acid production by switching to ferment a different class of sugar.

What is pH?

The pH is familiarly known as a measure of acidity. In science, when the pH scale is used to describe the intensity of an acid, it relates to the number of free hydrogen ions a particular type of acid donates to a solution. For the layman struggling with science, it helps to know that very acidic compounds are low on the scale, while alkaline compositions are high.

Pure water is regarded as “neutral” (neither acidic nor alkaline), corresponding to a pH of 7. A solution with a pH less than 7 is considered acidic; a solution with a pH greater than 7 is considered  alkaline, or basic. Here are a few common things to act as pointers: the pH of battery acid is 0.8; lemon juice is 2; a tomato is 4.5; milk is 6.4; egg is 8.5; lye is 13-14).

The sour taste of the bread comes from the amount of acid in the bread, being acid content, rather than the pH of the bread, being its acidity level. A  mature and productive leaven will feature a balance between both types of acid, lactic and acetic. Within that balance there are about one hundred times more bacteria than yeasts, and the volume of lactic acid cells will usually outnumber the acetic cells by about 4:1. Acetic acid is more volatile than lactic acid, thus it is associated with aroma as well as taste.

Members of the triticeae family – rye, spelt, bread wheat, durum wheat – all have a pH of a little above 6 when mixed with water.

Understanding Lactic Acid

During the gradual maturing of a leaven (taking months), and in the shorter term, whenever it is left to ripen after being fed, it gradually acidifies, causing the pH level to lower considerably. Lactic acid, being more capable of releasing hydrogen than acetic acid, is more acidic in flavour than acetic acid and thus it lowers the host’s pH more than would be the case if acetic acid was predominant. This comes as a surprise to the layman baker, since in a “common knowledge” way we know vinegar is acetic acid, and we consider that a particularly harsh flavour. (Vinegars are around 2 to 3 pH, slightly less acidic than lemon juice). At the same time, when we think of lactic acid in dairy products we do not think of harshness, and in observing a juvenile sourdough leaven we may place a tiny blob of it on our tongue, and we say it tastes “lactic” as though that is understood to be mild. The point is – of course it is mild since it is a juvenile and its lactic acid bacteria have not been long on the job.

There are bakers, like Chad Robinson in California, who are adamant that superior sourdough bread barely tastes sour at all.

To ensure that their bread has flavour that is regarded as gentle on the acidic scale they adopt two main tactics: they refresh the leaven on a short cycle (possibly twice or even thrice a day) before making their production leaven; and the production leaven itself must always be employed to leaven the bread when it has just peaked in its maturity, rather than being left to go beyond that peak, when it will naturally start to acidify itself. This practice – refreshment on a short cycle, more than once a day, thus always using a just-ripened leaven – utilises the knowledge that it is the wild yeasts that are the early feeders, and if the leaven is repeatedly refreshed when those yeasts have reached ripeness in the region of six to eight hours, such a short cycle ensures that it is the yeasts that always make hay, not the bacteria, which are prevented from ever being left long on the job.

Management of the leaven

Given that a healthy leaven has several times more lactic acid molecules than acetic, the most dramatic changes brought about by the baker’s management of the leaven will be those that affect the volume of acetic acid.  To take an example, if the baker favours wetter leavens with whiter doughs, those choices will lower overall acid production and produce negligible amounts of acetic acid. On the other hand, favouring tighter leaven and stiffer dough made with coarser flour (meaning more bran, more minerals known as ash) will lead to a rise in both types of acid, with acetic acid being a higher proportion of total acid.

When the pH level is allowed to plunge so low (approaching a pH of 3) that the heterofermentative lactobacilli have died out, and only types of yeast that can cope with the most acidic environment are working, those are the circumstances when Type I sourdough (the type that is associated with small craft bakers and household bakers)  is converted to a Type II (associated with industrial-scale craft bakers who keep it in vast tanks and use it as a dough conditioner, or are only making rye bread). The baker needs to be aware that none of this happens if the regime for the leaven is daily feeding, and the temperature range is always kept between 20°C and 30°C. For a juvenile leaven, a starter, such a routine will ensure healthy, active Type I sourdough somewhere between the 10th and 15th refreshments.

Sourdough bread
Typical PANARY soughdough wheaten from commercial baking day

That’s it Panarians. Have a happy Christmas, and I wish you all good baking for 2020,

The Chelsea Bun

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The Chelsea Bun House was a phenomenon of 18th century London. Near the river, it was situated on the main road from Pimlico to Chelsea, benefiting by being close to Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens. Customers came from miles around, some on foot, some by river boat. Although much has changed, today there is still a small street nearby called Bunhouse Place. It was a long one-storeyed building with a verandah, and inside there were tables and chairs in the tea-rooms style where customers could sit to enjoy buns and cakes fresh from the ovens.

The Chelsea Bun before baking

At Easter the Bun House also made staggering quantities of hot cross buns, numbering in the tens of thousands. The throngs of Good Friday bun customers, also reputedly in the thousands, sometimes needed a police presence to control such an unruly crowd.

While contemporary writers say the Bun House was popular with all classes, royal patronage must have assured its fame. Both George II and George III liked Chelsea buns, and George II’s Queen Caroline, along with her brood of princes and princesses, sometimes visited when they were out on a river boat. I like to imagine a London where the monarch could stroll about without bodyguards. Stories of the time describe George III walking through parkland to approach Chelsea from his palace, and there he would visit the Bun House to fill the large pockets of his coat to take Chelsea buns home to the grand children.

The prosperity of the Bun House was overseen by four generations of one owning family, the Hands. However, the closure of Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens in 1804, coupled with the lack of an heir within the hands family, led to its decline and closure in 1839.

While there is recorded diarists’ praise for the buns in the early 1800’s as being light, rich, and delicate, there is no real record of their shape and size, or the technique of making them. Tradition has it that the flattened dough is rolled up in the manner of Swiss Roll into a long sausage from which each piece is cut, working from the end of the long roll. Each bun is to be placed on the baking tray with sufficient space around it to allow it to press against its neighbours during final proof, so that each coiled bun comes out as a square shape.

Most professional bakers making Chelsea buns will use their standard spiced bun dough as the material for a batch of Chelseas. If starting from scratch, be careful not to make the bun dough too spiced, for fear of losing the flavour of cinnamon added to the butter that is placed onto the dough before the rolling up phase. Grated lemon peel accompanying a modest amount of spice in the dough would give your Chelsea buns a lift.

There is a sugar glaze to be washed over the buns as soon as they come from the oven. To make it, have two parts of caster sugar to one part of milk, heated in a small saucepan. 100 grams sugar and 50 ml of milk would cover a lot of buns.

CHELSEA BUNS MADE AT PANARY

Make PANARY’s bun dough using the “one-pint ferment” method.

THE FERMENT

Whisk together first:

  • 600 ml (little more than 1 pint) warmed milk
  • 15 gm (½ oz ) sugar
  • 60 gm (2 oz) fresh yeast, or half that in dried yeast mixed in the flour.

Now whisk in the flour:

  • 110 gm (4 oz) bread flour

Stand the ferment until it is quivering, looking as though it is nearly ready to drop – probably 30-40 minutes  

THE DOUGH

Add the Ferment to:

  • 1 kg (2lb 3oz) bread flour
  • 2 large eggs
  • 110 gm  (4 oz) sugar
  • 15 gm (½ oz)  salt

After only a few minutes of kneading, when the dough is properly formed, without dry lumps or chips,

add:

  • 140 gm (5 oz) butter 
  • the spice, if you are making spicy fruit buns , 30-40 gm

Knead until the dough stretches with well formed gluten.  It will feel silky.

Finally, gently add the fruit:

  • 350 gm (12 oz) currants, sultanas, raisins, etc

FOR CHELSEA BUNS, make three adjustments:

  1. Lower the spice to 20 gm. so that the cinnamon in the Chelsea mix is able to flourish
  2. Add a little less dried fruit, suggested currants/sultanas would be 200 gm.
  3. Add the grated zest of two lemons

Its total weight is about 2.5 kg, enough to make 16 – 20 Chelsea buns of a good size.

Prove the fruit dough fully as you would for bun making.

While it is proving, beat together in a mixing bowl :             

  • 150 gm of butter
  • half-tablespoon of cinnamon 
  • 125 gm soft brown sugar

Turn the proved dough out onto a floured surface and stroke it into a rectangle with the rolling pin, setting it out just as you would for making puff pastry by the “English method”.

Have your rectangle at least twice as long as it is wide.   Spread the paste of butter-cinnamon-brown sugar onto two-thirds of it, then fold on top the uncovered third, making the pastry parcel in the English way. 

The butter/cinnamon/sugar mix has been spread on two-thirds of the rectangle, now the pastry fold occurs
Folded and off to the fridge for a short rest

Put it, covered, into the fridge or a cool place to rest, to relax it, and to make the spread butter firmer.

After about 15-20 minutes, pin it out again, this time into a long rectangle, aiming to have its length at least 2½ times its width.

Roll it up fairly tightly towards you into a long sausage, brushing warmed honey along the front edge to enable a tight seal.

Beginning the roll, concentrating on tightness, makes more handsome swirls in the buns
Students rolling the sausage
Finished sausage, about to glaze the leading edge

Cut this long sausage evenly into 16-20 discs which are then placed on the baking tray as flat rounds.  Each bun should be at least an inch thick, 2.5 cm.

Student cutting each bun off the roll

Place them carefully, at least 2 cm. apart, so that upon full proof they will touch gently, being pushed into a square shape, (yet able to be pulled apart easily when baked and cooling).

Shows the generous spacing of the buns

Egg glaze and prove like normal fruit bun dough.

Bake in an oven that is duller than bread temperature, barely 200 C., 15-20 minutes.

When the buns are out of the oven glaze them with the sticky sugar/milk glaze, or with warmed honey.

Nice buns, but should have been spaced a tad closer!

That’s it Panarians, enjoy your buns.

Paul

Scalded flour

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Scalded flour bread

Making scalded flour in a saucepan

The scalding of flour involves taking aside a portion of the flour in a bread recipe and stirring very hot water into it. The flour starch is gelatinised in the process, and adding the gelatinised starch to the dough imparts different and special qualities to the fermenting dough and the finished bread.

Helpful links

To be gelatinised means that it is made soluble, and in this form as a carbohydrate it becomes readily accessible to the yeast. The scalded material in the dough will give added plasticity to both the crumb and the crust, which is an important feature when making bread without much gluten, such as rye bread. This plasticity also makes the kneading of the dough much easier.

Moisture retention and shelf life

The most noticeable feature of scalded bread is that it retains moisture for much longer. Its “shelf life” may be improved by two days or more. The effect of gelatinising means that the starch is capable of binding more water to itself during doughmaking.

The effect of adding gelatinised (soluble) starch to the fermentation phase of the dough is that it speeds it up. If brisker fermentation is not wanted, the effect is then that less yeast will be needed, and it is always a good thing to be using less yeast. Fermentation is enhanced because the soluble, gelatinised material is “damaged” starch which must be present for the amylase enzymes to attack the starch and convert it to maltose, which in turn other enzymes will convert to glucose which is the class of sugar that the yeast needs to feed on. In the normal bread-making process the damaged starch comes from the destructive force of milling. With the scalded material there is simply more damaged starch added to the mix.

Whisking near-boiling water into wheat flour is known to do a certain amount of damage to the protein in the flour, and eventually, this damage impairs the amount and quality of the gluten that these proteins are capable of forming. This inherent damage to protein and gluten is probably the reason why flour scalding has never caught on in the wheat bread baking cultures, despite the marvellous retention of moisture. Scalding is more commonly found with rye breads, and sometimes with spelt.

How to make scalded flour

For rye and spelt my guide is:

  • put aside about one-quarter  (ranging from 20-25%) of the flour for scalding
  • apply to it at least double its weight with the very hot water

Put it in a sturdy bowl and bring the boiling water to it, to be stirred in vigorously with a heavy spoon. It is an arm tiring task, and you must keep at it until it is smooth. It can wait to be applied to the doughmaking after an hour, or up to 24 hours. At around an hour check that it has cooled sufficiently to be usable without harming the yeast or making an unnecessarily hot dough.

More of my “rules of thumb” to apply when doughmaking for rye and spelt:

  • have the weight of the new flour roughly the same weight as the total of the scalding
  • remove from the normal amount of doughmaking water a little over half the amount of water used for the scalding. (If you failed to remove any at all the finished dough would be unmanageably sloppy. You must accommodate for the extra water that has gone into the scalding process).

If you enjoy putting some scalded material in a white dough made with strong bread flour, use only about 15% of the flour for the scalding, with twice its weight in the boiling water as usual.

I have carefully measured all the water that went into a small roll dough made with strong white wheat flour, including a small parcel of scalded flour that used 15% of the flour. One kilo of that flour would normally take 650 ml water to make dough of the correct softness.  The total water that went into the one kilo flour mix with the scalding was 780 ml.

Swedish style

In Sweden, a recommended method is to make the rye scalding with much more water so that the gelatinised material finishes as a runny paste that has a twofold purpose: most of it is put in the dough, while the rest is used as a glaze on the rye loaves heading into the oven.  To make this runny paste the ratio of hot water to rye flour is 4:1, even 5:1.

Good baking, Panarians.

Paul

Bagels and the water bath

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Bagels and the water bath

Bagels and the water bath

For both bagels and pretzels, dunking them in the water bath is very important for their appearance and flavour. Many experts will say that it is the process of dunking in boiling water that is the making of a good bagel. Industrial baking pursues convenience, and corner cutting is defended as “cost cutting”, so nowadays the boiling is replaced by steam injection in modern rack ovens. 

To an afficianado of the real bagel, this oven steaming gives an inferior result, and bagels made without the boiling are rated as inferior to a point of being not worthy of the name.

The Bagel bath!

The bath of simmering hot water is made up as a caustic alkaline solution, which in the past was made by the addition to the water of lye. Lye’s chemical name is sodium hydroxide and it can climb to 14 on the pH scale. Although one can purchase food-grade lye it is essentially the same caustic solution that is used for making soap and cleaning drains. Its importance concerns the ultimate dark crust, the way it forms and tastes. The alkaline nature of the water bath affects the relationship between proteins and sugars on the surface of the dough. When the alkaline lye breaks down the proteins into smaller amino acid particles these fuse more easily with the sugars in the dough surface, creating flavour compounds, and setting up the crust of the bagel for a more spectacular Maillard Reaction in the oven.

Maillard Reaction

The Maillard process is responsible for browning, and the widely different flavours of many foodstuffs, mainly in roasting, baking, grilling, and frying, of which bread is just one. For the best and quickest reaction it needs high temperatures and a dry surface on the cooking food, which will soon be hotter than boiling point. During the process, literally hundreds of compounds will form, all responsible for flavour, aroma, and colour.

With bread, the Maillard Reaction becomes an important phase of the baking stage, affecting not just crust colour but, more importantly, aromas and flavours. Its occurrence is based on that reaction between reducing sugars (simple dietary sugars, monosaccharides like galacose, glucose, and fructose) and amino acids undergoing extreme heat. It is different from caramelisation, which only destroys sugars, and occurs at even higher temperatures. As explained for the bagel, the Maillard Reaction is enhanced when the food comes from an alkaline environment.

Most amateur bakers and home bakers would agree that it is a big step to handle dangerous lye that requires rubber gloves and protective goggles. You can avoid lye by making instead your alkaline solution for your water bath using soda bi-carbonate, also known as baking soda, some types of which can reach about 9 pH. For those purchasing the common form from suburban shops, use it in the water at 6% (meaning 60 gm to a litre).

Good baking, Panarians, and I hope you try bagels.

Paul

PS. We make bagels to special order on our Thursday productions days. Why not give them a try? Select “Click and Collect” or “Home Delivery” at the checkout.

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