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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.

The baguette 1
The baguette – PANARY style

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.

Newsletter 53 – Gift Vouchers, student’s work, understanding sourness……..

18th December 2019 by Paul Merry

December 16th, 2019

Dear Panarians,

Christmas approaches, the year soon ends, and this is the last newsletter for 2019. Its Bakers’ Topic is for sourdough practitioners, giving some basic background information about sourness.

Click here to view the BAKER’S TOPIC – Sourness

Gift Vouchers

It amuses me how often it is said that a gift voucher that enables the recipient to learn a skill or a craft “is the gift that keeps on giving…” It makes a good point, and surely baking for friends and family is a splendid form of giving.

To purchase a PANARY Gift Voucher, visit – https://www.panary.co.uk/gift-vouchers/

Student’s work

Rob Stander came to learn at PANARY earlier this year as he was gearing up to open his cafe in Plymouth. He brought his chef who was joining him for the new venture, and we did two intensive days together. Now they are up and running in their Early Bird Cafe, Plymouth.

Rob explains:  my sourdoughs are made using a dark rye starter leaven into a production leaven, and then I alternate one day a ‘white’ sourdough and the next a wholemeal dough. 

  • Newsletter 53 - Gift Vouchers, student's work, understanding sourness........ 2
Early Bird Cafe sourdough

More from Rob: “However, in the wholemeal I do add a measurement of rye and spelt to give it a great flavour”. After venting the steam he lets it “crisp up so that I have a medium dark caramel look to top of loaf! As you can see it has a nice lace type texture, but not too lacy! My customers absolutely love our sourdough and have stopped using a major sourdough Baker in town in favour of mine!!!… so really happy about what I learnt in the beginning with you!”

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

Paul

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?

Understanding acidity & sourness 3

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,

Newsletter 52 – 2020 Course dates, students’ work, The Chelsea Bun….

13th November 2019 by Paul Merry

November 8, 2019

Dear Panarians,

The Bakers’ Topic in this newsletter is Chelsea Buns. These characterful sweet buns were a London confection of the 18th century, and have remained popular. Most bakers make a fairly slap-dash version of them, omitting the layering-in of the cinnamon/butter mix at the start which is done as though you were making puff pastry. This photo shows you the technique, having spread on two-thirds, then performing a pastry-like fold.

Click here to view the BAKER’S TOPIC – The Chelsea Bun
Newsletter 52 - 2020 Course dates, students' work, The Chelsea Bun.... 4
Folding in the fat/sugar mix

COURSE DATES, 2020

See the two Christmas courses to finish this year, then take a look at busy February as shown on the website:

NOVEMBER

  • Sat 30th — 1 Day Sweet Doughs (Christmas)

DECEMBER

  • Sat 7th — 1 Day Basic Bread Baking

FEBRUARY

  • Sat 1st — 1 Day Basic Bread Baking
  • Sat 15th — 1 Day Pizza and Italian Baking
  • Tue 18th — 1 Day Patisserie/Viennoiserie
  • Sat 22nd — 1 Day Nordic-Germanic
  • Sat 29th — 1 Day French Baking

To read about these courses, and book, go to https://www.panary.co.uk/course-calendar-and-booking/

RESIDENTIAL COURSES

There are three residential courses in the 2020 programme: one in Provence (late April) and two in Devon (March and November).

For descriptions of these courses, and for booking, go to: https://www.panary.co.uk/?event-category=residential

GIFT VOUCHERS

Soon we shall be overwhelmed by the approach of Christmas and pressure to buy gifts. Gifts involving experiences, training, courses for hobbies, etc., are very popular nowadays. Why not give a special person a day at PANARY on a bread-making course?

For GIFT VOUCHERS, visit https://www.panary.co.uk/gift-vouchers/

STUDENTS’ WORK

Sometimes I like to show in a newsletter something that a keen student has sent me as an aftermath to a course, or pursuing with me a particular topic or type of bread. One-day French Course participant Simon Clifford wrote:

A belated thank you for a most enjoyable and informative day. I have attempted the pain de campagne recipe with excellent results , using my white sourdough starter.
Looking forward to attempting the baguettes next weekend.

Below is the picture he sent me of his sourdough loaf.

Newsletter 52 - 2020 Course dates, students' work, The Chelsea Bun.... 5
Simon’s pain de campagne

Paul

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Every PANARY course is taught by Paul Merry, a master craftsman who favours a very practical approach to learning, regardless of any student’s prior experience..

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panary adj [L.panis bread + - ARY] Of or pertaining to bread; p. fermentation