Baker's Topics Archives

Kugelhopf – popular in the Alsace

15th July 2020 by Paul Merry

The many spellings of the name indicate the provenance of this bread to be from countless places and nations of Central Europe. It is very popular in Alsace, where it is Kugelhopf, and it became a staple among the vast array of cakes in Vienna, where they say Gugelhupf. Other places that lay claim to it, include Switzerland, the Balkans, Czech Republic and Poland. It is found at Christmas and Harvest Festivals, as well as private celebrations like weddings and baptisms.

Kugelhopf or Gugelhupf — Gugelhupf is made on the Nordic-Germanic course (28th Nov 2020)

The bread is rich and soft, and often features raisins and almonds. Like a brioche it is easily described as cake rather than bread. In Alsace and through the southern German regions, the name is used to refer to any type of coffee bread which has the distinct shape of the central hole with steeply fluted sides and top. The fluted sides make the bread look very imposing. It is thought that the shape of the mould inspired its name since in medieval times it was known in some places as the hat bread. Gugel in ancient German means hat or pointy hood.

The original moulds were enamelled ceramic, but metal is most common today. The ceramic moulds can be so pretty that they are hung up as decoration when not in use, and the Alsatians would include an elaborate mould as part of a woman’s trousseau, with the family’s kugelhopf recipe being given to her by her mother on her wedding day.

The shape of the mould ensures easier cooking as the heat penetrates quickly to the centre of the loaf. This would not necessarily be the case with a heavier ceramic mould which would take a longer baking time.

Towards the end of the mix I predict you will become in awe of the amount of eggs and butter that can be beaten into the dough. A well made kugelhopf is so runny that you could virtually pour it into the mould.

I like the look of whole almonds studded into the outside crust, right at the top of the splendid-looking bread. For this feature, you must remember to toss a dozen or so almonds into the greased mould before pouring the mix into it.

Kugelhopf Recipe

Ingredients

The recipe below will make one large bread in a mould of 23cm (9inch) wide.

400 gm (14oz) white flour of medium-strong strength
5 gm (1/2 teaspoon) salt
200 ml (7fl.oz) milk, warmed
20 gm (2/3oz) fresh yeast
60 gm (2oz) sugar
zest of either one lemon or orange
3 eggs
120-140 gm (4-5oz) butter, room temperature – still firm, not soft
150 gm (5oz) sultanas and raisins (soaked in rum-optional)
Almonds for decoration, about 50 gm

Method

Mix the flour, sugar and salt together in a bowl wide enough to make a well in the centre.
Disperse the yeast in the warm milk and pour the liquid into the well.
Draw enough flour down from the steep sides to make a wet batter in the centre.
This is the first stage, the ferment, which will get the yeast feeding actively. At this point make sure the butter is out of the refrigerator.
After about half an hour, when the ferment is frothing vigorously, add the eggs and begin making the dough. It should be a wet dough, but it should be firm enough to leave the sides of the bowl when it starts becoming stretchable and elastic.
Beat it with a rotary action with your hand or a wooden spoon, employing a lifting action that pulls and stretches it. A mixing machine would be a fine alternative if you wish to avoid any risk of exhaustion. When the dough feels pliable and elastic it will also appear glossy.
Beat the butter into it in two or three bursts.
Stop the kneading when you are confident that the butter has been worked in evenly. Don’t be alarmed if the dough is so slack it will almost pour.
Now gently incorporate the fruit and zest. If you have soaked the raisins in booze, make sure they are well-drained before mixing them in.
The proof will occur in the mould, which should be made ready by a heavy greasing with butter, and whole or slivered almonds strewn around the indentations at the bottom (which will be the top of the cake when it is baked).
Scrape the dough out into the mould, which should be approximately half full.
Cover it carefully, and prove in a warm place until it has risen almost to the top of the mould, about an inch short of the top. This will probably take 40 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the warmth of your kitchen.
The oven should be medium in heat. Brick Oven. In brick oven baking this means all the bread baking is over and the temperature of the oven has slumped down to temperatures suitable for casseroles, pastry, cake. Domestic Oven. For domestic, ovens you must make sure your oven is not too hot, because the Gugelhupf is a sugary bread which will burn easily. Somewhere around 190C, 380F or gas mark 6 should be the setting.
The baking time will be 30-40 minutes. The colour should be a deep golden brown, and a test to see whether it is done can be the skewer test: when inserted into the belly of the bread, the skewer should come out clean if it is properly baked.
Further, after turning it out, you can confirm that it is baked by a gentle finger poke to the inside top, whereupon it springs back when you poke a dent in it.
Turning it out must be done with care. Gently shake it out of the mould onto a cooling wire. Before serving, dust with icing sugar when it has cooled.

Learn to bake this bread on my Nordic-German class

Green dough

21st May 2020 by Paul Merry

In the same way that unripe fruit is described as green, the jargon of the craftsmen bakers applied the same expression to wheaten dough that had not developed fully and hence was considered unripe. When I began baking in the seventies, I was fortunate that I could still meet and work with these old tradesmen/craftsmen, and I learned many of their expressions, customs and yardsticks.

There is a price to pay for working green dough, and you will never make your best bread with it. There is a tightness to the structure, and the loaves are of a mean and small stature because the lack of fermentation leaves the gluten undeveloped and less stretchy. To develop fully, gluten needs more than simply time to enable the water to merge wih the gluten proteins (glutenin and gliadin) to form an expandable webbing. There must also be the process of adequate fermentation activity which, by leaving organic acids in its wake, mellows and strengthens the gluten so that it has the capability of expanding fully as it traps the gas made by the yeast. Proceeding to work off a green dough means that you are carrying on with something that has not reached its full potential.

Another fault with green dough is that the resulting bread will stale quicker for the same reason as it has poor stature – the lack of fermentation development results in a rapid staling process as the starches and proteins expel more easily the water bound to them.

There are three signs by which you will recognise that you have worked green dough, well before it reaches the oven:

open, self-supporting shapes like cobs will slump badly
the dough will retain bubbles to the extent that it is difficult to mould (shape), and will have ungainly bubbles on its surface when shaped and
the loaves will be uncharacteristically slow in final proof.

After the oven you will see that the crust colour is strangely bright, even reddish, since there will be a greater amount of residual sugars left behind in green dough owing to the reduced yeast activity. This reddish crust colour was called “foxy” by the craftsmen bakers.

How to avoid green dough?

By being in tune with the clear signs of ripeness of a fully developed dough, and being patient as you await that state.

Green dough 1 — Sideways view of ripe dough

Yeasted Dough

For conventionally yeasted doughs there must be gas deposits on the surface, or the surface must be pock-marked; if abruptly slapped the surface of the dough should sink away; if poked with a floury finger, the resultant hole should not be able to close, but should stay as a distinct cavity. If, as I recommend, you prove the bulk dough in a clear plastic (or glass) vessel, whereby you can see the sides of the bulk dough, you can learn through practice what exactly are the size of the gas bubbles visible at the side when the dough is fully ripe.

Wheaten Sourdough

For wheaten sourdough, which may only rise about a quarter or a third in its bulk, you will learn to recognise the look of the side bubbles as well as the tiny blisters on its surface. With sourdough you will also appreciate the feel of strength and gluten development as you give it a series of folds in the earlier stages of its bulk proof. By the last fold you will feel that it is feeling floppier as fermentation gases are lodging in it.

There are occasions when you may be aware that a green dough has been taken to the table. The situation can sometimes be rectified by giving it an abnormally long bench rest (usually called by me “intermediate rest”), and in that way some more fermentation maturity can be achieved, with the final bread being saved from the most unappealing aspects of green dough.

The baguette

9th April 2020 by Paul Merry

The Baguette

The light and airy baguette, such flavour, with its crisp and delicate crust encircling the creamy soft crumb, is a remarkable bread – provided it is fresh.

History of the baguette

The rise of the baguette as the popular Parisian bread style occurred in the 1920’s. For a long time before that the prized style of bread was called Vienna bread, which was made with the batter-like sponge called a poolish. Vienna bread involved refined white flour, and the baking in ovens with sloping floors that efficiently trapped around the bread the blanket of steam which had been injected into the oven. The crust was superb, and the bread had adequate flavour since the poolish sponge method created organic acids during the 3 to 8 hours that the baker allowed the sponge to mature. While being complex, the flavour was without the sharper acidic tang of sourdough bread (still known as French bread), which had been pushed to the background by the sweetness of the Vienna bread.

During the 1920’s the country was pulling away from the deprivations of the First World War. After years of coarse bread refined white flour was again available, and the public wanted a return to the availability of Vienna bread. But things were shaken up by the bakers, who wanted a change from the committed work and clutter in their bakeries of the sponge system. They wanted to move to the relative ease of making bread with no sponge or levain at all. Hence there was a new method born called fabrication en direct, what here in England we would call the direct “straight dough” method, also known as “scratch baking”. The baguette was fitted into this new method, and was a great success, soon to become a hallmark of Paris and the northern cities. It must be pointed out that in the early decades of fabrication en direct the bakers did a good job. Fermentation was not shamelessly rushed, lasting for several hours – at least three, sometimes five – giving flavour and character to the bread. They still had fantastic ovens, the legacy of the Vienna bread era, ovens of solid construction with steam injection. The baguette was to remain a wondrous thing until the 1950’s when the rot set in, with instant dough and spurious chemicals – like here in Britain. But that’s another story.

My approach

My approach to the baguette is to claim that the most delightful version is achieved from the overnight poolish method. The poolish that has fermented for such a long time will have generated organic acids that assure good flavour, and you will get that appealing contrast between crust and inner crumb. Further, the long-fermenting poolish means that the bread will not stale as quickly as bread made by the scratch method. The one area where British people seem to be let down by the baguette is its proneness to dry quickly. There are several reasons for this rapid staling: it is a light bread, featuring an open, large-holed structure, and with Its slender shape it has a high ratio of surface to volume. Another major cause is that French flour has lower protein than the flours prepared by British millers, making the French flours weaker and softer. Bread made with flour of a low protein count always produces bread that stales quicker than bread made with strong flour which has the ability to produce higher quality gluten which retains moisture in the crumb.

Before beginning, let me draw to your attention my advice for students, and particularly beginners, that urges you to work with 1 kg of flour (or half a kilo) since it permits at a glance the budding baker to know the percentages of other components of the recipe in relation to the flour. When you are mastering these different shapes and techniques of French breads you will be glad to know exactly how much water you have used, and expressing it as a percentage of the flour is the baker’s way, and the maths is very easy when everything relates to the metric system, 1000 gm of flour.

Here are your starting guidelines:

In this baguette recipe we are going to settle for 70% water absorption, 700 ml to the kilo of flour. (Some breads have it higher, many have it lower).
It is common practice by French bakers and other devotees of the poolish system that the amount of flour taken away to be used in the overnight poolish should be 25%, being 250 gm here.
Nothing is rigid, but it is normal that a poolish should have equal weight of flour and water, hence for the 250 gm of flour there will be 250 ml of water.
For flour, do not select the strongest bread flour which has protein of 12-13%. It will be too strong to make an authentic-seeming baguette. The French baguette flour is T55, which has protein barely higher than 11%. If you only have very strong flour on hand, soften it by putting in a quarter of plain flour when you weigh up your 1 kg.
More yeast added when dough-making. This is one of the benefits of the sponge system of work. You can add more yeast so that the breadmaking event can be fitted into 6 – 7 hours

Baguette **by poolish method**

The poolish sponge

250 gm flour
250 ml water (room temperature)
½ gm (ambient) – 1gm (refrigerator) yeast. Halve these figures if dried yeast. The ½gm of fresh yeast is about the size of a green pea. In dried yeast the amount is one-eighth of a teaspoon.

Mix together thoroughly and leave for either 12 – 15 hours (or at least overnight), allowing it to sit in a covered bowl at room temperature; or, if you favour the chilled method, use the higher amount of yeast and refrigerate after a few hours when there are surface bubbles

The dough

Add the sponge to:

750 flour
450 ml water – merely warm, about 20 – 25 degrees. The finished dough should be 22-24C
18-20 gm salt
7 -10 gm yeast (approx 1% of the new flour). Halve this for dried yeast.

Knead it thoroughly, until it has a uniform texture with easily stretched gluten.

Leave it to approximately double in size, something like three hours. During roughly the first half of its bulk proof period, it will benefit from two folds. The first fold can occur after about half an hour, but before the first hour is up. The second fold should happen when it displays small bubbles like tiny blisters pushing up on its surface. If it is in a see-through container allowing you to look sideways at its gas bubble formation, there will be myriads of tiny bubbles visible. While performing the folds, be careful not to tear gluten strands.

When it is ready (at about 3 hours) it will display larger bubbles the size of match heads dispersed throughout. Now it is ready for you to weigh the pieces, rest, shape, and prove – final proof may take a further hour. To fit them into a domestic oven, each will have to be only 150 gm. They are weighed at 300-350 gm for full scale bakers’ ovens.

Wait for them to grow half as big again, slash them and bake at 225 degrees C (domestic oven) or in a hot commercial oven for 20 – odd minutes.

Understanding acidity & sourness

18th December 2019 by Paul Merry

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,

Kugelhopf – popular in the Alsace