Bread

Tidy-looking loaf. For a more open crumb, wet doughs and long proving are the answer, ideally with gentle/minimal manipulation of the dough during proving to maintain air bubbles. You may also want to up the % of white or try using extra-strong flour; rye and wholemeal don't lend themselves to the kind of gluten formation you want for an open crumb.

My routine is haphazard and lazy. My starter's fed only on white flour, and most of the loaves I make are at least 75% white (strong or extra-strong); I find the loaves are much more tolerant of my slapdash approach. I've been very inspired by Dan Lepard's methods: what I've taken from him is that wet doughs are much less sensitive to timescales in the sense that they don't over-prove easily, and that in wet doughs gluten formation can happen without much kneading. I work from home, so my bread-making's not weekend-bound, but the schedule looks something like this.

1. Day 1 AM: take starter out of fridge, refresh.
   
2. Day 1 PM: make up sponge for overnight ferment - 250g flour/325g water/ladle of starter. (This is for 1 loaf; sometime I double up)
   
3. Day 2 AM: add another 300g flour, 7-8g salt, mix. This produces a very wet dough, so at first I tend to just give it a stir with the dough whisk, and do the same again half an hour later, and again at the hour mark. At that point I just give it a stretch out and fold over a couple of times on an oiled board every couple of hours, and then give it a final shape later on.*
   
4. Day 2 PM: Pre-heat casserole in oven on max, then whack in dough, turning oven down after c. 15 mins and taking the lid off after c.45 mins for a total bake of an hour or so.
   
   

As I said, this is very approximate, and I've compressed or stretched timings without great disaster - sometimes I only refresh the starter an hour or two before I make the sponge; in the past when things have got in the way I've let the sponge ferment for 24 hours or even slightly longer; sometimes if I want fresh bread in the morning I let the dough prove for 24 hours, either sticking it in the fridge overnight or even leaving it on the side overnight (I have a cold kitchen, which no doubt slows everything down). The sourdough flavour is obviously stronger with these long ferments and rises, but never unpleasantly so.

The starter goes back in the fridge after I've made the sponge, and I will tap some off for pancakes when I feel like it or when the container's getting a bit full; otherwise I stick a glug into the breadmaker when I'm using that for a loaf or for pizza dough†.

*This works really well; I've made perfectly acceptable loaves even when I've literally just stirred the dough with the dough whisk a couple of times over the course of the day - every time you do it you can feel the gluten formation as the dough gets stiffer.

†I love my breadmaker - the ability to set a timer and wake up to fresh bread when I've forgotten to buy/make some is a lifesaver, and its 45 minute pizza dough setting means I can make excellent pizza any evening of the week.

I listened to this on Radio 4 in the car today -The Food Programme, The Future of Bread. "Dan Saladino talks to Modernist Bread author, Nathan Myhrvold".

^ Nathan seems almost annoyingly upbeat.
Not a good podcast/program for fans of the Chorleywood Process.

He does love his bread, that's for sure.

Looks really good.

One of the regular sellers in the bakery I work at is marmite and cheddar bread. Standard white dough taken to first rise. Add a spread of marmite when you mix the cheese into the dough and a little bit more beneath the cheese topping.

Thanks, it was really nice sort of didn't need to make sandwiches just cut a slice. My partner put all my pack of yeast by a radiator and killed it last week so I'll do bread when I get some more. Rather keen on making a cinnamon babka next.

Been making fudge over the weekend. Dark chocolate and peanut butter.

IME, a more open crumb is difficult to achieve unless you use majority white flour in the dough.

Min 75% white flour, no more than 10% rye, wet dough and you should be good.

Now available as a podcast;
http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/5/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download/proto/http/vpid/p061n625.mp3

Getting good results with @bsb 's pain de campagne recipe.

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Those look great, but 4 days!

I'm still giving it a go

Looks awesome! May have to try that.

This one is excellent: it's a tangy, huge monster!

850g white flour
150g whole wheat or whole rye flour
750g water
20g salt
20g active starter

Dissolve the starter into the water. Mix the salt and flours together. Combine and mix until everything is hydrated in a v large bowl (this is important, as it will rise loads), and cover with cling film.
After a few hours, give it a french fold or three, spaced by ... an hour or so?
After 18-20 hours, pre-shape and then shape the bread.
Let it rise for 2-3 hours.
Place on a floured baking sheet, slash as desired and put it in a cold oven.
Place a metal container on the bottom of the oven with some hot water in it.
Crank it up to 260 for about 10 minutes, then down to 205 for another 40 minutes.

The commercial version that I bake is done in a day. Make the starter in the morning, mix, proove, shape, prove, cut and bake in the evening.

We are thinking of trialling a sourdough version which will take two days.

I guess the stiff starter slows things down, as does the fermentation in the fridge. If begin with a wetter starter and do everything in room temp, it should speed things up, but perhaps at the cost of flavour?

That's the trade off. The further you get from a long aged starter, the closer you get to a plain rye flour loaf.

Our starter is pretty stiff and after about 6-8 hours we get a good flavour from it. We don't fridge ferment though. Might do if we do the sourdough version.

Here's my schedule for it:

• day 1, morning: make the stiff starter
  
• day 1, evening: make the dough
  
• day 2, evening: fold the dough and shape the loaf(s) (quantities given yield one big loaf, I multiply by 1.25 for the two above)
  
• day 3, morning: bake the loafs.
  
  

So not quite 4 days, still fairly long but it fits well around work and life.

When you fold it into shape what stops it flopping into a small puddle, or is the dough itself quite stiff?

Also you could probably cut off half of the proving time (so shape loafs on day 2, morning) if it was done in ambiant temperature, but supposedly longer proving gives more taste, and I find cold dough easier to work with.

Anyone every been tempted to leave a start outside to get more wild yeast spores

Interesting, that prob explains my rather dull rye loaves.

So for anything with rye, long cold fermentation is key? Or just long?

I vaguely recall that most of the yeasts in a wild starter actually come from the flour, so outside may not make that much difference?

I'm definitely too new to the game to answer that. I'll try and remember to ask the boss this evening.

👊

I assumed that the flour was the food and that leaving the vessel open for a period of time was to encourage wild yeast spores to settle onto the starter.

Although that does sound like a fairytale