Cafe Dubois

Johnson & Wales Class

2011-11-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

In 2007 I went to a two-day class at Johnson and Wales University and we made a lot of different breads.

Rye Mere Perdu

2010-12-25T15:32:00.000-08:00

This is a hearth rye you can make with starter (mother) that you are about to throw away because you are refreshing it using only a portion for the new mother.

Preheat oven preferably with pizza stone(s) to 475F. Include a steam pan. NOTE the instructions to lower the temperature to 425F after the bread is in the oven. 375F is OK too, experiment.

14 oz sourdough starter, any kind
6 oz rye, any kind but I like pumpernickel
2 oz whole wheat or white bread flour
6 oz water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast (or 2 t active dry, dissolved in some of the water, 95 degrees)
---- optional
1 tablespoon caraway seeds
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons molasses, honey, agave syrup, or sugar

Mix it all up, adjusting the amount of water / rye flour as needed. Typically you need to add quite a bit of rye if you've included the oil or liquid sweetener. Also, I assume here your starter is 4 to 3 flour to water by weight -- adjust accordingly if not.

I typically just knead this in the bowl with one hand in a vinyl glove; it doesn't need much kneading because of so much starter.

Let rise until nearly doubled, form to desired shape (I use a banneton) and let rise again.

Turn out onto pizza peel covered with parchment paper; slide onto pizza stones and add one cup boiling water to steam pan. Lower temperature to 425, and bake 20 minutes, after which remove the steam pan and rotate the loaf, cooking another 15 minutes or so.

Remove to a rack and let cool at least an hour before cutting; two is better. Do not cheat or you make gummy paste. Excellent toasted.

Bread and mixers

2010-02-14T14:35:00.001-08:00

Let's talk briefly about mixers. Oddly, the first question I get when someone is told I bake bread for a hobby is, "Oh, do you have a bread machine?". Although no self-respecting baker would have a bread machine, if you have one there are things you can do with it. For example, you can use just the mixing stage to help make things like chappattis or rotis.

I used to have a Kitchen Aid stand mixer and while they are very good, they really can't take the punishment of multiple loaves or heavy breads. I understand the gear box is plastic (it was metal previously) and it melts. I melted mine, and also broke off part of the bowl securing mechanism.

What I have now is an Electrolux Assistent. I bought it on the Internet from a company in Nebraska, Pleasant Hill Grain. It resembles the industrial mixers that rotate the bowl around the paddle or dough hook rather than rotate the paddle inside the bowl. You can easily and routinely make four loaves of bread in it at once and it probably does more but I haven't tried. Unfortunately the instructions are sparse and the big clues I got on how to work it were from an employee of Pleasant Hill Grain that they managed to find when I called them and said I was stumped.

Briefly, the trick is to not put in all the flour at first, and work toward forming "the tire" and keep it spinning for most of the mixing time. This mixer rewards wetness, which is a perfect fit to the latest trend in baking (see Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day). For three loaves or less don't even get out the dough hook -- that's for Morman-class family mass production. Just put in the spinner and the scraper, and lock the spinner in 1-3 inches depending on volume of dough, so that a doughnut ("the tire") forms spinning between the spinner and the wall and coming off the wall at the scraper.

I usually add the final bit of flour on the counter at the end, so as to get a feel for the amount needed.

The short video shows the Big E mixing the equivalent of six 8-inch cakes at once

Three Loaves of Wheat Bread

2008-10-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

How to make 3 loaves of 33%-50% whole wheat bread

This approach was derived from the formula for one loaf of "Light Wheat Bread" in Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Baker's Apprentice". My family ate so much of it that I needed to bang out 3 at a time, and while his recipe is ideal for winning a baking contest the result is just too big to bag. It also turned out that you don't care a whole lot what the fat or sugar agents are, or how much of them you put in. Experiment until you find a combination you like. This takes about four hours start to finish, but most of that you can be doing something else. Also, up until you start baking it you can stop and put the thing in the frig and take it out later to finish it, in case some kid calls with a Request for Service.

The following makes loaves that are about 27 oz apiece before they go into the oven in standard 4 1/2 x 8 1/2 inch pans (be sure you're not using the bigger size pan used for things like meat loaf). The reason I make this size, which is slightly smaller than one can make with that pan, is that the resulting loaves can go into a gallon-sized freezer bag without cutting them first.

You can vary the amount of whole wheat from a third to a half of the total weight of flour (16 to 24 oz). To go much beyond that in a one-day process like this one is inferior to using overnight techniques. Also if you have not tried the 'white' whole wheat flour, as opposed to the normal 'red', it is very good. This is not white flour, it is whole grain flour made from a 'white' variety of wheat.

If you do not have a scale, get one. About 1 3/4 cup flour is 8 oz, but trust me, you want a scale.

Any equipment or ingredients you do not have can be had at kingarthurflour.com. T means a tablespoon.

I assume here a good mixer with a dough hook or an Electrolux Assistent.

Makes 3 loaves
Preheat oven to 425. Turn it down to 350 when you put the bread in. Bake 35-40 minutes.

48 oz flour:
16-24 whole wheat
the rest white bread flour (not all purpose)
Put all the whole wheat and 2/3 of the white flour into your mixer. Reserve the rest of the white flour to put in later during mixing / kneading. You probably will not need it all. The idea is not to cram as much flour in but as little as you need to knead properly.

Add:
1 1/2 T salt
1 1/2 T instant yeast (bread machine yeast); if not avail, 2 T active dry yeast dissolved in warm water.
3/4 cup dry milk powder
1/4 cup sugar or brown sugar or molasses or agave
1 T diastatic malt powder (optional, but worth the trouble to get from King Arthur)

Mix that all up briefly to distribute ingredients. While the mixer is running pour in:
27 oz room temperature water mixed with
6 T or less of melted or cut up unsalted butter, or vegetable, canola, or olive oil, as suits you.

Knead it about six minutes. If you know what a windowpane test is, do it.

Form into a ball and raise it in a bowl, lightly coated with oil or pan spray, and covered with plastic wrap, for two hours. Turn out and divide into 3 equal parts, and make loaves. One easy way is to make a rectangle whose short dimension is about 7 inches and roll it up with the 'best' side out. You don't have to try to keep the 'air' in it, you want to squish it pretty good to distribute the yeast. Another way is to fold it so the two sides meet in the middle, then pull the top edge all the way over and under to seal. You can rock the loaf to even it out, and plump the ends.

Spray the loaves with pan spray and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in the pans until the tops are well over the top of the pan, 30-50 min. Take a bread knife and slice the top lengthwise about half an inch deep for most of the length. Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes. Take out of the pans right away and put on a cooling rack or sideways on the pan, so that the moisture can get out. Don't cut it for at least an hour, more is better.

Eat one, freeze two. Repeat.

If your mixer seized up, overflowed, etc., buy a better mixer. Meantime, stir it up and then knead by hand. Poor baby. I have an Electrolux and although it is totally weird it is the greatest. The only problem is they don't really explain how to use it. But that is a topic for another day. Hint: make the tire. The tire is your friend.

Bread that tastes like beer

2008-09-08T20:32:00.000-07:00

I've made a variation of the spent-grain bread recipe from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads book that is quite interesting. (Spent grain is the left-over grain used in making beer.)

I use equal parts whole-wheat soaker and whole-wheat sourdough starter. Fourteen ounces of each is needed for one loaf. After joining the two parts after an overnight rest of the soaker at room temperature, I added the salt, butter, and spent grain but no yeast. If I put in no sugar, I got a gloriously loyal sour taste that resembled nothing so much as beer. With some honey, it is still good and might be preferred if you aren't used to real San Francisco sourdough.

Bread Math: the rule of eight and six

2008-05-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

My neighbor gave me a nice dish of chana masala, an Indian dish made of chickpeas, which Americans call garbanzo beans. To go with it, I wanted to make some chappattis, those unleavened whole wheat disks that serve as combination carbs and plates. I got out my bag of atta, the kind of wheat flour they use for this in Northern India. The instructions on the bag are not helpful: "Add water to flour, knead well."

Fortunately, I knew the magic proportion: Eight flour to six water, by weight. Since eight ounces of flour makes enough for two or three people, I weighed out eight ounces of atta, added a teaspoon of melted butter for easier handling, and six fluid ounces of water. In moments I had 14 ounces of dough, enough to make six or seven chappattis.

Americans are used to measuring flour by volume, and eight ounces of whole wheat flour is about a cup and three-quarters, but it is really a mistake to measure it that way, as the volume of flour it takes to make a given weight varies quite a bit depending on a whole host of factors, such as humidity, how settled the flour is, and so on. A scale is a good investment.

So why do I remember the proportion as 8/6, rather than 4/3? Did I flunk elementary math? Don't I know to reduce the fraction?

The reason is that a pound, or sixteen ounces, of flour, is what it takes to make a standard loaf of bread using a 4.5 x 8.5 inch pan. If you have 16 ounces of flour then you need 12 ounces of water, for a total of 28 ounces of dough. Add in another couple of ounces for other ingredients such as oil, butter, egg, dry milk powder, sugar, honey, or agava, and you get a nice high loaf.

However, instead of remembering it this way, 16 / 12, you can just remember it as two units of 8 / 6. This works especially well if using Chef Peter Reinhart's new "epoxy" method for whole grain breads, as described in his new book, "Whole Grain Bread: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavors". The majority of the recipes construct one 8/6 unit from flour, water, and half the desired salt, and another 8/6 unit from flour, water, and a small amount of yeast. The former, called the "soaker", sits out on the counter overnight, while the yeasted part, the "starter", ends up in the frig. Both units require only minutes to prepare.

When you're ready to bake, the two parts come together like the two parts of an epoxy resin, with the rest of the salt, yeast, and other extras added, again giving you one perfectly-sized loaf. The point of this method is that the soaker develops flavor and the starter develops the yeast and gluten, keeping the mortal enemies yeast and salt apart until it is time for the bulk fermentation.

Besides using 8/6 for bread itself, you can use it to feed your sourdough starter. Just keep 26 oz of starter, take a 14 oz unit when you need a unit of starter for some bread, do an "8 and 6" to replenish the remaining 12 oz of starter, and you're back to 26 again. If it has been too long since you used it, just throw all but 12 oz away and do your "8 and 6".

Now that you are an expert in bread math, you can apply what you know to the latest news stories about rising food costs. This week a five-pound bag of fancy whole-wheat organic flour was about six dollars at my local luxury grocery. So a loaf of bread that contains a pound of flour is going to cost about $1.20 for flour, at worst. Bread you make is very inexpensive.

No, what costs real money is eating food other people prepared, or food that was made from food, such as meat and cheese and breakfast cereal. Besides the money you save baking your own, the smell of baking bread raises real estate values all around you.

I become Potts

2008-03-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

I use my old nickname Potts for various online activities like playing bridge and Go. A friend recently asked me where this name came from.

For three years I worked at a summer family camp, run by my home city of Oakland, as the pot washer. The lone pot washer was by tradition always called Pots by the large dish-washing crew, who were jealous of his independence and skilled position.

Soon I got in trouble because I figured out ways (like getting up early and SOAKING the pots before breakfast) to finish the job quickly. Normally the teenage staff worked most of the day and then at night put on skits, square danced with the campers, and so on. Doing my job quickly meant I had a lot of free time both in the morning and afternoon. I was only working about half the time of everyone else.

The dish washers went ballistic. The manager said that despite the fact that I was the only person who had ever done Pots' job this fast, it was demoralizing the dish guys and I would have to stay in the kitchen and help the cooks. I didn't mind this really, as my mother had taught me to cook quite extensively, saying, "I don't want you to have to get married in order to feed yourself."

The first day as cook's helper I was told to make Russian salad dressing and mashed potatoes for 400. I read the instructions on the can and made the potatoes without asking the three cooks how to do it. Various sound effects emanated from the cooks in good Oakland black dialect, to the effect that that boy was sure gonna mess up. One Hobart mixer later, I had what appeared to be mashed potatoes.

Wiith trepidation I sat down to eat, as the staff ate just before we let in the hordes. Some other staff member suddenly said, "What happened to the mashed potatoes?" I thought oh shit, I'll never hear the end of this, until he said, "They're good!" to widespread amazed agreement. One of the serving girls said, "Pots made them." A star was born.

Now the cooks hated me and the dishwashers hated me. But came the day in the third summer when one of the cooks was out for a drug break just one too many times and they fired him and promoted me to third cook, which allowed me thereafter to make enough money to get through college. My parents were only able to give me $40 a month. I cooked and kitchen managed. The lowlight was the 10pm to 6am shift cooking and fixing vending machines for the workers in a beer bottle factory designed by Charles Dickens at the foot of Fruitvale. I think it is still there. Three dead while I worked there, no OSHA. By the time I graduated from college everyone called me Potts. Somehow that extra t got into the name, probably when I had to spell it for my fraternity beer mug.

You may think I might list various intellectual feats as my proudest accomplishments but in fact it was one time later that summer when the other two cooks got paid, went to the local dealer, and had to say they were sick the next day. I made pancakes for breakfast for 400 all by myself -- the union rules would not let anyone else help me. Halfway through a helpful serving girl took a tray of pancakes out of the oven and slammed it into my arm. The nurse came and bandaged my arm while I kept pouring and flipping and moving down the grills of two side-by-side Wolf stoves. Lunch was something simple like hot dogs and salad and I roasted I think 14 legs of lamb for dinner. Carving them took about two hours.

By the way, for those of you with racial sensitivities, yes, the male black cooks used drugs. The old cafeteria cook white ladies did not, but they had another problem: they spilled entire meals on the floor because their wrists were too weak to hold the handles on the large pots. And the first year, the 350 pound woman who was head cook hated life and burned the food on purpose to make the Pots suffer. So, I could have learned to hate blacks, women, and the obese. I just learned to hate dishwashers.

By the way, it takes an entire BOX of paprika to make Russian salad dressing for 400.