Biga breads - Carol Fields Bread book

Hi Dee,

You and I should team up to bake; I've never had a failure on a Carol Field recipe. However, most, if not all, of the recipes require additional yeast. The Como and Coccodillo breads are the only ones in the front of the book that don't require added yeast. If you are trying to make another bread from this book with no added yeast, then it's another kettle of fish all together.

I've made a lot of the recipes, most of them several times. Which one are you trying to bake and what's happening?

Barry

I am not familiar with Carols book. But your question is related to bakery expereince . Old time bakers usually use very little yeast when making preferments.And if you use that fermented sponge or biga, you will need to subject the mixed dough( the biga already in it) to bulk fermentation for a one to a few hours before you cut it down for rounding and molding operation. That is if the biga or poolish use a flour which is just a quarter or a third of the total flour used. If you apply this system like a normal dough where you just give it a short rest after mixing then divide and mold ,the proofing will be long and the dough appears squat lookin,close grained and with less volume. Another efficient way to use it is make the biga from 60-70% of the flour and ferment that well. Then when the ferment is ripe( it recedes from the fermentation container) add the remaining flour with the rest of the ingredients and make a dough. Give it a floor time of 15-30 minutes then divide it into pieces, round the dough let it rest for 15 minutes then mold. Proof properly and bake. Making biga and poolish with little yeast in it demands that it should be fermented well. The yeast level will be in the range of 0.25-0.5% fresh yeast basis. Some of these new instant yeast do not have fermentation tolerance as fresh yeast. Therefore if you apply long fermentation of your biga with little yeast use the standard compressed yeast as that was designed for such fermentation process. Using a rapid rise yeast and many instant yeast will usually result in poor performance as instant yeast was designed for the modern fast breadmaking process.It does not have much tolerance to long fermentation. Roy

The Como Bread beginning p. 102, and the Como Bread of the Past, beginning on page 103, the Pan di Terni, p. 114, Bread of Puglia p. 122, do not rise. There might be others, but these are the ones I recall now.

I have left the Como Bread 102 even to rise 3 days and it finally did rise, but tasted pretty awful-flat.

I have followed all instructions diligently with the bigas, leaving them to set various days. I have used variously a mixer and a food processor. I think her instructions for the food processor might be out of date regarding how cold the starter should be before you put it into the processor, as the new food processors do NOT heat up with the new low speed and dough/low settings. Do you use a mixer exclusively or do it by hand (I cannot do it by hand because of physical limitations.)?

Even the ciabatta p. 107, doesn?t turn out correctly. It is more like one big cracker with a teeny-teeney layer of bread inside. I Have made ciabatta from other recipes which turned out fine.

I was thinking if I could make the previous ones, I would be able to tackle the crocodile bread. Before I joined this site, I threw all my notes on these breads I made of Carol Fields? and put her book in the back of the cookbook shelf. What a disappointment. These are the breads I specifically want to make and EAT!

I have used strictly King Arthur all-purpose flour for my Carol Fields? recipes, distilled water, active dry yeast, taken the temperatures of my water, and used ?real? salt.

Ah, Barry, what to do!

Yesterday I went to the old ?Oster Bread Machine,? and put in a recipe for oatmeal/rye/barley flakes at dough setting, left it to rise another hour while the stone was heating and it turned out pretty good, but it is will never be the bread(s) I really want.

Dee

Dee, The issue is not that the food processor heats up, but rather that the mixing/kneading of the dough causes the dough to warm. This occurs with the KitchenAid, commercial mixers and more quickly/dangerously with a food processor because the processing time is so quick. Roy Basan can probably tell us what happens to the dough chemically with fast mixing and over-warm dough. I do know that we want the final mixed temperature of the dough to be (depending upon source) between 75-80F. Janet

I use a FP for some small batches of dough. The friction of the blade does cause the dough to get warm, fast. I agree it isn't caused by heat from the FP motor. You can start with cold liquid if this is a problem. One way to mitigate the heating is to add the liquid until the dough consistency if right and then let the dough rest for about 10 minutes. Then you can turn the machine back on to knead. I let the dough ball rotate about 50 times, or about 1 minute. More than that and the dough gets too hot.

Hmmm.

Let's review the Pane di Como on page 102. I last made it on 7-17-03 and marked it as Excellent.

Starter:

1 teaspoon dry yeast or 1/3 cake fresh yeast. I used the dry yeast. 1 scant teaspoon malt syrup. I used diastatic malt from the home brew shop. 1/3 cup warm water. 2/3 cup milk, room temp. 1 cup (135 grams) all-purpose flour.

Stir stuff together, add milk and flour and beat till smooth. Let stand at least 4 hours or over night.

My notes to here:

This starter is VERY wet:

224 grams water/milk, 135 grams flour => 160% hydration.

**** Comment: The milk may mitigate the hydration somewhat, but not enough to alter the general effect.

**** I use tap water all the time. We use city water and have a water softener in the apartment complex's domestic water lines.

Dough:

2 cups water 6 1/4 cups (860 grams) all purpose flour 1 tablespoon salt cornmeal

Make a dough with the starter and the rest of the stuff.

This is 35 ounces of flour and 24 ounces of liquid, which is 68% hydration, give or take. This is a wet dough. The malt syrup will add a bit, probably enough to offset the solids in the milk. This is probably putting too fine a point on the process.

First rise: 1 1/2 hours or until doubled.

Shaping and second rise: Shape and rise 1 hour, until fully doubled.

Bake 400F for 1 hour.

Discussion:

This amount of dough would normally have at least a packet of yeast, 2 1/4 teaspoons. I remember that I had some question whether the initial starter would have enough food supply for the yeast to develop overnight and then carry the whole load itself with just the one teaspoon, but it did. This may be due to the malt syrup.

As I remember it, I knocked the dough down and gave it another short rise,

20 minutes, after the first rise. I also gave the dough a rest between scaling and shaping, probably another 20 minutes, although my notes don't mention either of these. This procedure is my standard practice in most breads.

Questions for Dee:

Did the starter work properly, i.e., did it bubble and rise and collapse as it should?

Check your yeast: Put the yeast, a half cup of water, a teaspoon of sugar and a half cup of flour in a bowl, mix them up and let it sit in a warm place for an hour. This should just about blow the lid off a plastic bowl. As an example, I'm testing a couple of batches of starter -- 5 ounces flour,

3 1/4 ounces water, 1 teaspoon yeast -- one with all-purpose and one with bread flour. The batches have been sitting for twenty minutes and the first one (the bread flour one) just blew the lid off.

Your comment that the thing was like a cracker leads me to think that the yeast isn't active or that you killed it somehow.

How warm is the kitchen and the rising place? It's unlikely, but you may have risen the dough in a place that was so warm that you killed the yeast. I doubt this, since you can make other breads work.

My notes on the other two, the Terni and the Pugliese, indicate that I didn't do much differently from the recipe and that the breads turned out well. I made the Pugliese on 7-31-01, and have written in the Pugliese from BBA as a comparison, along with a description of the modifications I made to use the stretch-and-fold technique, which involves two 1/2 hour rest periods during stretch-and-fold. In the Pugliese, although the dimples are supposed to keep the bread from rising too much in the oven, my bread went crazy.

Sorry to take up so much time with such a long-winded answer, but I'm intrigued that something that's worked for me so many times isn't working fo r you. If these recipes were something new or experimental, I could understand it, but these are traditional breads. There must be something going on that we're not noticing.

Barry

In my sentence, I should reword it to include "THE DOUGH"

as

Even with the newer processor I have with the dough setting, I do measure the temperature of the dough not to reach over 80 degrees. So far it never has.

Thanks very much for answering. Dee

Thank you for your comments, Barry.

What do you think about using "King Arthur" (DRIED) "Diastatic Malt Powder"

1 teaspoon. I have on hand also "Non-Diastatic Malt Powder."

Yes, my starter worked alright previously. (It is the bigas left in the refrigerator that definitely don't work for me.)

**** I'm going to do testing on your suggestion: at 16:50 using this:

I'm testing a couple of batches of starter -- 5 ounces flour,

My house is 69 degrees.

**** During these biga-making recipes, my house was always cool. When I made the breads I always feel I erred on the "cool side" because I don't like a real quick rise, mainly I don't like the taste of over-yeasted bread and that was the reason for my failures. As Carol Fields says to take the dough out of the refrigerator and put it into the processor if you are using a processor, because you don't want the dough to heat up. ****

Your comment, Barry Your comment that the thing was like a cracker leads me to think that the

I made a ciabatta (another recipe - not Carol Fields') and used the same yeast. No problem. But I'm testing it at your suggestion.

***

Will get back to you and the newsgroup. Thanks for your time. Dee

Should work.

I've had trouble with stored starters, too. I now make them all fresh when I need them. (Knead them? )

I've had such varied luck with "remove the dough from the refrigerator one hour before use..." that I ignore the time and go by the temperature.

If the yeast works one time then it will probably work another time, eh.

Now I'm wondering if it's just as simple as being a starter that's been in the refrigerator.

Barry

Barry, I just re-read your yeast testing information. At 4:50 to 6:20 - when I opened up the container, it only puffed at me. But I'm re-reading your paragraph "Check your yeast. where above your test ingredients , you say to put a teaspoon of sugar -- But I tested it without the sugar as you mentioned in your next sentence. I will re-test tomorrow with the sugar. I want my lid to be blown off.

Will let you know. Dee

I made the two batches at about 4PM. They pop the lid about every twenty to thirty minutes.

Each has 5 ounces flour (one has AP, the other bread flour), 3 1/4 ounces water (cool) and 1 teaspoon dry yeast.

If your starter doesn't really pop the top off a sealed plastic container, then something might be wrong with the yeast.

Barry

OK Barry, my test did not have sugar in it, and as you say yours did not have sugar in it -- correct?

Well, mine is sitting here at 21:46 and it has since 16:50 (5 hours), room temperature now about 70.5 degrees, just about doubled in size and has very few holes in it. Now, my container lid is quite strong and when I popped (pryed) it off, it let out a lot of air. But I would say, that the yeast is probably not as good as it should be. I've put a picture of the starter as it is now at 10:00 pm on a web page so you can see it.

me your "sage" advice.Dee

Dee,

The ciabatta and pizza look perfect to me.

No, I did not use any sugar in my starters. Your starter doesn't look too bad from what I can tell. Mine, at roughly 65% hydration, will flow slowly if I tilt the container on its side. They both give off a good, clean, yeasty smell. I'd say you probably have weak yeast, but that's a guess. You might try adding a pinch of sugar to the starter and stirring it up a bit. This might kick start the yeast.

I'm not sure whether being old yeast affects the number of cells in the process or the strength of each cells or both. Somewhere I read that yeast colonies double every two hours. So, if that's the case, one would expect weak yeast to "catch up" in some period of time, say two hours. In other words,you would need a head start of two hours to get the volume and activity with the old yeast that you would get with the fresh yeast. I don't know if this is correct, or if it's even generalizable.

Barry

It's now 9 am and the starter has set 16 hours and hasn't raised or lowered any since last night. There may be a few more holes this morning. It will not flow out to the side easily. But it has that wine smell that I don't like. Sometimes I get this smell when cooking bread; it smell horrid to me. But I threw it out this test. . I will make another test today using a pinch of sugar with this current yeast. Then I will l buy a new batch of yeast Monday and make another test Monday. The yeast I'm using is active dry -- I think it's Fleischman's from Costco. I open a large bag and put it in Ball jars in the refrigerator. Perhaps it's been in there too long. But buying a new bag is the thing to do at this time.

Thanks for looking at my yeast. I have more questions, but will ask when I'm up and around a little more. Dee

I am a glutton for punishment because I started 4 more starters since I can't do anything until Tuesday, when I get my new yeast Monday -- we live in the sticks.

1) all purpose with sugar 2) all purpose without sugar 3) bread flour with sugar 4) bread flour without sugar

I'll tell you when I put thepictures of them on-line. Thanks, Dee

OK, I finished with the starters. I itemized them well and said how long it took for the lids to pop or not to pop. You can see them at

for any comments.Dee

Thank you Roy for your thoughtful answer. Your answer was a little above my expertise, but I'm sure others will benefit from it as well. My best, Dee