Year end, gift vouchers, scalded flour, new PANARY Experiences ….[Newsletter 47]

4th December 2018 by Paul Merry Leave a Comment

December 4, 2018

Dear Panarians,

The year end has been reached for 2018 courses, and now we approach Christmas baking for loved ones, and I plan interesting things for next year’s programme.

A tip for making good mince pies: don’t fill them generously full. By the time the pastry has cooked the filling will be boiling, and if too full it will bubble over and leak out, generally staining them and causing the batch to look a bit ragged. Have restraint with the filling, and as you spoon it in you must feel a little mean.

CALENDAR, 2019

January 2019

- Sat 26th — 1 Day Patisserie/Viennoiserie
- Sun 27th — 1 Day French

February 2019

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

March 2019

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

For viewing course descriptions and making bookings, visit https://www.panary.co.uk/course-calendar-and-booking/

New, PANARY Experiences starting in March, 2019

I am designing a new group of courses that are a half-day duration rather than the usual full day.

At these snappy Experiences, guests will get a wonderful view of a baking style, or different types of bread made from one dough, or a snapshot of a particular country’s baking culture

the PANARY Experience is lasting a mere 3-4 hours
prices kept below £100
guests go home with scintillating warm breads taught in the session

Interested to learn more? Please, contact me and I will share more.

GIFT VOUCHERS – the perfect Christmas gift

Among your friends, family, and loved ones there may be a budding baker ready to be drawn out. Or an existing baker thirsty for more knowledge. Nowadays courses and experiences are thoughtful gifts for people who already have all they need.

Purchasing a PANARY Voucher entails only a few clicks – go to https://www.panary.co.uk/gift-vouchers/

Looking across vineyard to the big house with the gites where we stay

PANARY in PROVENCE, April 2019, almost booked out!

The gites are almost full, and now we have room for one person to attend the course, starting on April 30th.

To read about this course that occurs in a beautiful vineyard in Provence, and for booking, go to https://www.panary.co.uk/craft-baking-courses/panary-provence/

BAKER’S TOPIC – scalded flour

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. 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.

The most noticeable feature of scalding is that the bread 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.

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 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.

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

Wheat sets currency, forthcoming courses, buy our bread, “green” dough [Newsletter 46]

Wheat sets currency, forthcoming courses, buy our bread, "green" dough [Newsletter 46]

28th August 2018 by Paul Merry Leave a Comment

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Dear Panarians,

When I became a baker, I was alert to references to baking and wheat which showed how culturally and historically deep these subjects are in our civilisation. For example, I have always respected the expression that “bread is the staff of life”, which first appeared early in the 17th century. Imagine the catastrophe of widespread famine that occurred regularly in past times when unusual weather events ruined the wheat and rye crops for a season or two.

Juvenal, the Roman satirist, showed political awareness when he pronounced that in order to keep the populace happy and quiet the rulers must provide sufficient “bread and circuses”.

For the Christian there is the communion wafer to represent the bread that Christ instructed was a symbol of his body; more bizarrely, there was the cutting of a cross on the loaves and buns to dispel the devil.

Recently, when for my book research I was delving into the origins of the Assize of Bread (13th century), I gained an insight into the origin of our currency and the establishment of the English pound, later to be called “pound sterling”. At the time of the Assize the silver penny was often the sole coinage used, and it had been the most popular form of currency for the preceding six centuries. It was introduced during the 8th century by the great King Offa of Mercia. The pound mentioned above was a pound weight of silver, to be divided into 240 silver pennies (and 12 pennies made a shilling, with 20 shillings to the pound).The penny weight of silver had been calculated as 32 grains of wheat, dry, and taken from the middle of the ear. This fascinating link between wheat (and other grains too) and money standards goes right back to Roman times. It stands as yet another example of the deep role that wheat has played in our civilisation.

CALENDAR, forthcoming course

October 2018

Sat 13th – 1 Day French
Fri 19th – 1 Day Basic

November 2018

Sat 3rd – 1 Day Nordic-Germanic
Sat 10th – 1 Day Sourdough

Courses that feature Christmas cooking

November 2018

Sat 24th – 1 Day Sweet Doughs (Christmas)

December 2018

Sat 1st – 1 Day Basic
Sun 2nd – 1 Day Basic British

To find out more about all these courses, visit the course calendar

NEW – there has been a request for a special one-day PANETTONE course. Date yet to be set.
Contact me to find out more if you wish to join.

PANARY in PROVENCE April 29, 2019 – booking now

Vines in the spring time, looking across vineyards to Mont Ventoux on the horizon.

Spring weather, outdoor relaxing during the course

5 nights in a beautiful vineyard with superb accommodation gites made from the ancient farm buildings.

Baking French style breads in domestic ovens as well as a wood-fired oven in the courtyard. Lots of baking,two half-day excursions, and lots of fun. Read more about PANARY in PROVENCE, here.

BUY OUR BREAD

Within days this section of the website will be live, featuring a shop. It is all about our once-a-week commercial baking day every Thursday. Bread can be picked up, or sent to you by parcel post

BAKER’S TOPIC – “green” dough

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.

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.

Good baking, Panarians.

Paul

Temperatures, leaven & sponge, and our recent German visitor – Tommy Weinz

Recently we had a photographer at PANARY and he is creating a German bakery magazine for craft bakers.

14th July 2018 by Paul Merry Leave a Comment

Recently we had a photographer at PANARY. His name was Tommy Weinz, and he is creating a German bakery magazine for craft bakers. He is keen to nurture the craft revival there, and explained that to date

Balance scales used at Panary

Germany has not had a zealous body like our Real Bread Campaign. As a young man he trained to be a baker in Germany, undertaking their long apprenticeship system. As he scuttled around snapping lots of photos of work performed by me and apprentice Martin on a typical Thursday commercial baking day, I noticed how he liked to dwell on some of my crafty and traditional equipment, such as the balance scales here.

Late Summer Calendar

July

No courses

August 2018

September 2018

To read about the courses, see daily programmes, and make bookings, visit Calendar.

Vines in the springtime, looking across vineyards to Mont Ventoux on the horizon.

PANARY in PROVENCE, 2019

Six days in a vineyard on the Rhone valley north of Avignon. Four days baking, two days fun including excursions. Baking done in both a courtyard wood-fired oven and domestic electric ovens in the gîtes. Accommodation is splendid, and the local area unforgettable, with vines, olives and lavender, and beautiful hilltop villages. Book Panary in Provence today!

BAKER’S TOPIC

The 20 degree threshold

In my years as a baker, and more particularly as a sourdough man, I have found that there is a great significance to 20◦ C, when regarding the ambient temperature of your bakery or kitchen. Below 20 C there is a steady development of sponges and leavens and you can plan how much yeast to use for the given number of hours that you want sponges and leavens to sit maturing.

Winter temperatures

In winter, of course, it is a constant battle to keep ambient temperatures up, and my teaching bakery is always hanging around a cool 14 C until it is a full-on baking day when I can bump it up to 18 C. In the depths of winter the flour comes over from the mill at below 10 C, and the ground water is coming out of the tap at only 7 C. It is easy to make the dough too cold in those conditions. Away from winter it is more pleasant as temperatures rise, and with ambient and flour temperature in the 16-18 region work in the bakery fits comfortably to plans and schedules.

Summer temperatures

Dough thermometer

However, come summer, and see the overnight ambient at 21 C and you know things are suddenly to go haywire. The groundwater is coming in at 17, and the flour on the stand (or your pantry) will also be 21 degrees. The thermometer shows that the finished dough temperature is 21-22C, which shows that the friction of the big arms of the mixing machine diving through the dough has added a couple of degrees, hence the coolness of the water is nullified. Now you can see why in summer, when professional bakery temp sits on 25 deg or more, bakers must use refrigerated water.

I am happy enough with 22 degrees for large doughs, that is what we look for with the amount of yeast planned. But I could only succeed to get it by running the dough water straight from the cold tap.

White sponge

However, it is more tricky to control the white sponge and the sourdough wheat leaven sitting out at 21 degrees for 11 – 12 hours overnight. The sponge was so developed that a big whiff of alcohol rose when its lid was taken off. This picture shows its open texture, and you can see that it has started to deteriorate. At overnight 21 degrees it was probably ready at a mere 7 or 8 hours, not the 11 to 12. Yet its yeast was only 0.3 of 1%. It should have been 0.1%, which would only cover your thumbnail.

Sourdough leaven

Now to look at the sourdough leavens. This wheat one has behaved alright. Such openness and array of decent bubbles it is telling us that it is perfectly ready, but not over-wrought or damaged.

Sourdough wheat leaven made with brown flour (81% extraction)

To sit maturing for the 11 hours overnight, the wheaten leaven was seeded with a blob of common leaven that was less than 1 % of its bulk. (80 grams for a 10 kg Production leaven). When I arrived at 6:00 am and looked at it I would have preferred that it needed another hour to continue maturing because then I would have time to make a large autolyse dough to sit for an hour. But when it is developed and ripe like this photo shows, no time to be doing other jobs first.

Next week, if bakery temp is again 21-odd, it will be inoculated with a mere 0.6% of leaven. ( When the ambient temperature is a calm 17-18 degrees, the amount of seeding yeast for its overnight 11 hours is more like 2.5%).

Rye production leaven

Wet leaven shining in the middle

And now to look at the rye Production leaven, after 3 days at 21C. Lately, it has to spend so long before use because we have to overcome the current problems of over-abundant enzymes from last summer’s difficult harvest conditions here in the south of England. It must be grossly acidic to counter the over-abundant amylase enzymes that will produce too much dextrin in the pure rye loaf as it bakes, causing it to have a soggy, sugary middle, and usually a horrible hole too. Often, after three days at 21 degrees, the rye leaven will have grown mould on its surface carpet. For this photo I have gently scraped the carpet aside and you can see the wet leaven shining in the middle.

In other years during hot spells I have noticed that the mould arrives when ambient temperatures are steadily over 20, so for the rest of this hot summer I shall hold my breath and hope that I remain lucky about the mould issue.

BAKERS’ TOPIC – volume

Loaf volume

23rd May 2018 by Paul Merry Leave a Comment

The volume of any loaf has great impact because it is the first thing to be noticed by an appraising eye. Nobody is attracted to a small or heavy loaf. On the other hand, a discerning customer or guest will be put off by an overblown and blousy loaf that has a structure that is too open. That overblown loaf will soon dry out, and for most people its open structure will not be a satisfactory vehicle for butter, toppings, or fillings.

An exception would be a bread like ciabatta, seen in the next picture. Its open structure is the very nature of the bread, and a tight crumb would be a failed version of it.

Imagine that ciabatta structure, with its open random bubble, being a sandwich loaf. A travesty, with honey all over the plate, or mayonnaise on your shoe. Hence the sandwich loaf maker must not only drive gas pockets from the dough, but also keep a tight rein on final proof to keep the uniform and consistent bubble suitable for toast or sandwich.

Any discussion of volume has to begin with the dough. To make good bread the bulk dough itself must achieve a satisfactory volume, it must be left to gas and rise. See the picture here where the soggy surface of the fully-proved dough leaves a distinct hole when the floury finger is inserted deep into it. Like the test shown at the top of this post, a poke with an outstretched finger is not to quickly close up, which happens when the gluten is still unripe.

To summarise, there must be proper volume in both the bulk dough, and the resting dough before it is shaped. Then the baker must judge the final proof so that the loaf springs in the oven and gives satisfactory volume to the final product. See the loaf in the next picture, a stoneground white high tin. Notice that when the volume is right, everything else looks right: lovely crust colour, handsome rip along the loaf’s length where the oven spring has torn it, overall proportions look right.

Oven spring can be viewed as the final accolade for the baker. When proof is right, volume is right, and you pop it into the oven when it has sufficient life to give a little spurt that results in handsome oven spring. For breads that get slashed, the oven spring opens out the cuts.

Now see a loaf that went into the oven a bit early. It was a sourdough loaf made with heritage wheat and thus had feeble and delicate gluten when compared with modern flour. Fearing it may collapse with the impact of sliding it off the peel onto the oven tiles, I made my misjudgment that led to an oven spring that was gross. A few slashes would have helped release that spring.

Now you have the full picture. There will not be satisfactory volume in a finished loaf unless there was satisfactory volume along the way – in bulk dough after its first rise, in resting dough pieces, and in final proof. To achieve correct volume of any loaf the gluten has been fully developed (ripened, “conditioned”), with good judgment of final proof, and with adequate gassing power at the time it is placed in an oven holding the right temperature.

Good baking, Paul

Bakers’ Topic

Bakers' Topic - poolish sponge

17th April 2018 by Paul Merry Leave a Comment

Here is an excerpt from my note about poolish that is handed out to PANARY students when they attend a course which has used this type of sponge in one or two of the breads on the programme.

POOLISH

This is the French term for a type of pre-fermentation that forms a portion of the dough into which it is incorporated many hours later or, possibly, the next day. It belongs in the category of the large family of what we call in English “sponges” and “ferments”, and some would call it a “starter ”.

One of its distinctive features is that it is a fairly liquid fermented culture, and in modern baking is usually made with equal amounts of flour and water. It is leavened with factory-made baker’s yeast, and is prepared with part of the main dough’s flour and water. The rest of the dough’s flour, water, salt, and yeast are added at dough-making time. Its flour as a proportion of total flour ranges from 15% – 50%.

In large commercial quantities, in the ambient warmth of a bakery, if the poolish is set to mature slowly over 8-10 hours or more, the amount of yeast added is miniscule, being only 0.1%, which is one gram of yeast to each kilogram of flour. Household bakers could use a little more. When I prepare a tiny poolish at night for a small dough in the morning I describe the amount of fresh yeast used as being the size of a green pea. If conditions were cold, or it was going to sit for less than 8 hours, enlarge the green pea to a marrow-fat pea. With dried yeast, it is only a pinch, denoting an eighth or a tenth of a teaspoon.

As a preliminary fermentation its function in breadmaking is to bestow benefits on the final dough. The benefits are many: flavour, moisture retention, and the creation of the open structure with large and randomly distributed gas bubbles so peculiar to the continental style of breads. Hence it is commonly associated with the baguette. The Parisian baguette was developed as bakers copied the remarkable and innovative pastry and bread methods of Vienna. These innovations occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, probably in the late 1840’s, just before fresh baker’s yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae) began to be made in factories. At that time, when bread bakers still obtained their yeast from beer brewers (also saccharomyces cerevisiae) a shortage of yeast occurred when many brewers were changing from top-fermenting tanks to bottom-fermenting. Collection of yeast froth is easy from top-fermenters, but difficult from the bottom fermenting types of beer.

The sponge method certainly makes a small amount of initial yeast go further. For a short period the style and skills of Polish bakers must have influenced the Austrians. We assume the Poles’ technique became known as the poolish. Its sparse use of yeast would have continued to be attractive to the bakers of the 1850’s when compressed yeast remained scarce and expensive, being a new product.

A poolish must be set to work at room temperature for at least 3 – 8 hours before it is added to a dough, possibly 12 – 15 hours if conditions are cool. On the other hand, if conditions are warm, after 3 – 4 hours it would be wise to put it in a refrigerator. Although it starts with only a small amount of yeast it gets surprisingly active at room temperature because after about 5 hours those yeast cells start to reproduce. They will continue to multiply while they have food. (In any type of dough or sponge yeast will begin to reproduce after some 4 to 6 hours). After its long fermentation period the poolish will be classed as mature and ready for use because by then the feeding yeast will have created acids and by-products from their fermentation activity, and these will greatly enhance the dough that receives the poolish. More yeast has to be used if it is expected to reach maturity in a shorter time, such as 4 – 5 hours. There will be more flavour in the final bread, the crumb will be porous and open while giving a satisfactory chewiness, and the bread will retain its moisture for longer – meaning it is slower to stale.

The appearance of it when ripe reveals many bubbles on its surface, with the gas bubbles looking as though they are pushing upwards to burst. It is classed as over-ripe if it has begun to sink or settle down, and is no longer appearing to be moving upward. When over-ripe it may reveal around the sides of its storage vessel a line indicating the “high-tide” level that it had reached before sinking or collapsing.

Suggested poolish:

500 gm breadmaking white flour

500 ml water

½-1 gm fresh yeast ( ⅛-¼ teaspoon dried yeast)

Mix until a loose, batter-like dough is formed, with no dry patches.

Cover the bowl you have mixed it in, and put it aside in a quiet place for it to ferment for 8 to 12 hours.

That’s it. I hope you enjoy working with sponges and tinkering with poolish in particular. Good baking, Paul