Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Dear Panarians,

I have been tinkering about lately with bagels since they are going to be demonstrated here at PANARY when the Bread Angels come for their event in early February.  For today’s Baker’s Topic I am looking at features of the bagel crust that lead to such memorable aroma and flavour, nicely set up by the Maillard Reaction in the piping hot oven. The same goes for the pretzel too.

CALENDAR & DATES for this New Year

Visit https://www.panary.co.uk/course-calendar-and-booking/ to view all courses and their programmes, and make bookings

FEBRUARY

• Sat 9th — 1 Day Basic
• Sat 16th — 1 Day Sourdough

MARCH

• Sat 16th — 1 Day Pizza & Italian
• Sat 23rd — 2 Day French – with Sourdough
• Fri 29th — 3 Day Going Professional

APRIL

• Sat 6th — 1 Day Sweet Doughs (Easter)
• Sat 13th — 1 Day Basic British
• Mon 29th — 4 Day “PANARY In Provence”

MAY

• Sat 11th — Open Afternoon – All Welcome
• Sun 12th — 1 Day Wood-fired Oven

PANARY IN PROVENCE

This course in a French vineyard begins on Monday April 29th, and there is only one place remaining before it is declared full.

Click here, to view this course, and book the last place.

PANARY ‘EXPERIENCES’

Panary Experiences are being designed now and will be launched in Spring.

• Shorter
• Much smaller fee – under £100
• Experience a deep and rewarding treatment of the course topic in barely 4 hours
• Experience a deep and rewarding treatment of the course topic in barely 4 hours
• Fees will be layered with a higher fee to include a collection of useful baking equipment

BAKER’S TOPIC, bagels, 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 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.

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

We are continuing the theme of last newsletter, plaiting.
The 5-strand plait
This time there is no clever starting in the middle liked you learned about the 3-strand plait.
Remember to plait loosely, to allow it to hold its shape while it grows and eventually springs in the oven.
The moves for plaiting a 5-strand: 2 over 3; 5 over 2; and 1 over 3

First picture (above) shows the strands laid out in front of you, and 2 over 3.

Second pic shows 5 coming back the other way, placed over 2 (sitting now between the new 1 & 3).

Third pic shows the final move, 1 over 3,( now 1 is the new 3) and you start the three moves again…..
This is what it is looking like when you are half-way through:

Good luck with plaiting – practice makes perfect after all.
Paul

We all know the benefit of good quality bread flour, which has a protein strength sufficient to make robust gluten that assures the baker a well risen and handsome loaf. This is what we know to expect in typical English bread flour. However, there are occasions when the strength of the gluten in strong bread flour will undermine what you are setting out to do.
Take, for example, the Danish pastries shown here in the photo – the type based on the folded square. They were made on my recent Patisserie – Viennoiserie course. When the flour is too strong, the folded sides unfold again when they are proving, or when they meet the shock of the oven. The gluten has not become totally relaxed and its propensity to be elastic has defeated your purpose as the pretty folded envelopes unfold to become failed flat things with their filling totally exposed.

The solution is two-fold: (i) weaken the flour by adding a good portion of plain flour to the bread flour; (ii) complete the making of the slab of Danish pastry many hours before you are going to use it, and let it sit in the refrigerator to relax fully.

In both the above solutions you are employing a tactic to beat the component of the gluten in the bread flour that gives it elasticity, wherein lies its strength and firm pull. By parking it in the fridge overnight after completing all the folds and laminations, it will have many hours to relax, and there will be less elasticity, less risk of the square shapes opening out.
The solution (i) is also achieved by simply learning about all the flours available on the market so that you have flours of weaker protein (and gluten of course) in your store. Flours of merely 10-11% protein will often suit your purpose, and imported European flours are suitable because their characteristics feature more pronounced extensibility of gluten rather than powerful elasticity and strength.

This discussion centred around Danish pastries is echoed when you think about pizza. I always get the students at PANARY to add plain flour to the strong bread flour when they are making pizzas all in one morning session (meaning they are not able to be parked in the fridge for 12 hours). The strong and bucky gluten in the bread flour is fighting you when you are trying to flatten the pizza into a thin disc, so something has to be done to render it less elastic, meaning weaker. Regarding imported flour, those famous Italian pizza making flours that you come across in specialist outlets here are surprisingly high in the actual protein count, but they are astonishingly stretchy (extensibility), and have so little elasticity that they are a dream to work with. That’s mother nature for you – European flour is big on extensibility, short on tough elasticity.

Yes, Panarians, the world of flour is diverse and exciting.