BAKER’S TOPIC – the “Ferment”

This is a timely topic because the ferment is firmly recommended by real craft bakers when you are making rich breads, full of sugar, eggs, butter, spices, and so on, the very stuff of Christmas and festive baking in general.

A ferment is one of the large Sponge family, being a pre-ferment set up by the baker as a preliminary to dough-making. Sometimes in older bakers’ texts you will see it referred to as a “flying ferment” which pays tribute to the speed with which it gets on with the job. Its purpose is to give the yeast a flying start. The yeast is pampered in the ferment by being given warm milk, a nice little parcel of food and an overall environment in which it will go on a feeding frenzy. Thus it gallops along, building up a massive head of steam before it encounters the rich ingredients that are contained within the festive dough.

The rich ingredients are troublesome to yeast because this single cell fungus, our little hero, has a very delicate cell wall through which it sucks in its food and nutrients, and pumps out its waste products (including alcohol and carbon dioxide gas which we bakers need to leaven the dough). Imagine if you were a yeast cell looking for food and you had to nuzzle up to butter and egg yolk, such heavy and greasy substances that cannot pass through the cell wall. There is also the sugar problem: an over-abundance of sugar stresses yeast because sugar, being hygroscopic, draws water to itself, stripping away from our little hero an adequate level of moisture for it to easily allow things to flow in out through the cell wall. Christmas is bad news for yeast cells so we make up for this by employing a ferment to help the yeast along.

Here is the ferment I use to make 4 stollen at a PANARY class.

Ferment: 400 ml warm milk

40 gm fresh yeast (15-20 gm dried yeast)

15 gm sugar

110 gm bread flour

Whisk together milk, yeast, and sugar in a deep bowl, then whisk in the flour until there no lumps. Put it aside in a place where the room temperature is not cool. In less than an hour it will have gassed adequately, creating a handsome frothy pile with a shuddering and moving surface which are clear signs it is ready for use.

To make the 4 stollen you will need 800 gm flour, 10-15 salt, 2 eggs, 75 gm brown sugar. After kneading until it is gathered together you add the 175 gm butter, and at the end of kneading there is lemon zest and a generous measure of raisins soaked in rum to be gently added. After baking they are washed over with melted butter to help preserve them, and whenever served at table they are dusted afresh with icing sugar.

A classic ferment is the ancient one-pint ferment employed in bun dough:

Whisk together: 560 ml (one pint) warm milk; 15 gm (half-ounce) sugar; 55 gm (2 ounces) yeast; 110 gm (4 ounces) bread flour.
When the yeast is fresh the head on top of the one-pint ferment resembles the head atop a pint glass of Guinness – solid fine froth.

While salt is included in bread for purposes of improving or enhancing its taste, it imparts a complex and important influence on the fermentation process. Salt kills moist forms of yeast while they are actually on top of each other by drawing out its moisture (dried yeast is safe from attack because it has no moisture) . However, in dough salt simply gives yeast a hard time by causing it to have to spend energy regulating its water supply that is being taken by the hygroscopic salt (it draws water to itself). This dampening of yeast activity means that salt is known in fermentation as a “retardant”. It also explains why in leavens and sponges salt is rarely used seeing as in these pre-ferments the whole idea is to promote yeast activity and reproduction.

While steadying and retarding the process (in hot weather this is a bonus), another effect of salt is that it strengthens gluten by acting as an “astringent”, meaning that it improves the elasticity and strength of the gluten. When the salt has been accidentally left out, the baker would most likely become aware of this disaster because the dough will have fermented wildly and its volume is vast. In bakery quantities this could lead to a great chunk of dough falling out of a proving bin and plopping onto the floor.
If the problem had not been spotted while the dough was in bulk, it would be felt at the time the dough was cut up and handled. See the picture at the top where the weighed piece of dough is being stretched sideways by my hands in preparation for it being folded inwards then rolled up into a loaf shape suited to a large tin. It has resilience and tension borne of the nature of elastic gluten, but if it was a saltless loaf it would extend greatly meaning that the sideways tug of the hands would render it far too broad for the job in hand. Its extensibility would feel wrong. The presence of normal amounts of salt prevents the dough from being too slack and slumping when you make shapes like the cob.

Salt will also act as a mild preservative, inhibiting the activity of moulds.

In your kitchen, if you are a person who likes to minimise chemical additives, the salt for you is sea salt. Sea salt is pure, never containing the types of added chemicals that other salts have in order for them to flow freely and avoid going lumpy.

How much to use? For home bakers this is an entirely personal matter, depending on the family’s approach to use of salt. I always advise students that less than 1.5% of the flour weight will alarm many people who will think the bread tastes insipid. Salt used at over 2% will, on the other hand, lead to many people people remarking that the bread tastes salty. The professional baker is advised through trade bodies to toe the line as set by the Food Standards Authority (FSA), who release their edicts on many matters, and being a government body must take into account community issues such as heart disease. The current FSA edict on salt is to use it at 1.8% of flour weight, with the warning that during 2017 we can expect it to be put down to 1.6% – which is the level now recommended by the Real Bread Campaign. At the moment I use 1.8%, and during PANARY courses that is the amount we use.

These percentages are for making bread with conventional factory-made yeast. When we make sourdough, using less salt is normal practice, acknowledging that mature leaven has its tangy sour flavours.

It is interesting to note that 1.6% – 1.8% was the level of salt used by craftsmen bakers making British styles of bread right up to the 1950’s, the period during the previous century when the craft was at its peak. Then followed the disastrous period of industrial bread and “instant dough” which, being insipid and characterless through no time being allowed for fermentation, led to a rise in the amount of salt used in order to give the insipid stuff some flavour. Soon salt was used at 2% or higher. It was at 2% everywhere when I began baking during the ’70’s. It took concern over heart disease to bring it down to previous levels that the society once would have thought entirely normal, and what bread should taste like.

When conditions are very cold, and experience tells you that by using water at normal warm temperatures you will not be able to finish the dough at a desired temperature (between 22C and 27C). However, it is reckless and foolish to use very warm (i.e. hot!) water because this will damage the yeast, and the gluten in wheat flour also suffers when it meets hot water.

Yeast is stressed and calling for mercy at 40C, damaged at 50C, dead at 60C.

What to do?

The tip is to get the over-hot water into your machine bowl, or mixing bowl, then wait for it to fall inside the bowl to a sensible temperature like 30-35C before proceeding to add flour and yeast/leaven/salt. In this way you have thoroughly warmed the bowl or vessel, enabling the dough to finish at a reasonable temperature like 22C or even higher.

Notes: *All this is less of a problem for sourdough bakers who form the body of the dough first before adding the leaven, because the leaven’s wild yeast will not have to be thrown into water that is too hot for comfort.

*If you are a fresh yeast user it can be dispersed in a tiny amount of hottish water and its fridge coldness will promptly drop the temperature to a safe level.

Baker’s Tip

Remember that the coarser flours take more water. This is because bran is very thirsty, and the presence of bran is why any flour would be described as coarse. Strong English wholemeal to make a cob loaf will take 70% water, whereas a cob loaf from strong English white flour will be taking only 60-62% water.

This awareness of water absorption becomes very important when you are working from a recipe but do not have on hand the same flour as the recipe stipulates. For example, the recipe may call for a flour that is basically coarse but has been sieved, like a brown stone-ground, and you may have on hand only wholemeal. In those circumstances you would need to add 5 – 10% more water.

On the other hand, perhaps you have become accomplished at making baguettes or ciabatta using strong flour that can take 75% water to make a suitably soft dough. If you were setting out to make them with an imported French T55, or a standard English bread flour that was not particularly strong (11% protein, say), it would be prudent to opt for only 65% water to the flour.