How to Become a Baker Overnight

Last week I took a jump at pretending I was a baker for a few nights.  Found myself helping someone out briefly in their cafe because their baker/pastry chef never turned up for the job.  There I was 24hrs later getting up at 4.30am for a 5 o’clock start producing yeast loaves for an order and some for the cafe.  It was not my finest hour nor my finest week as far as producing bread I myself would be willing to purchase.  After a couple of burns on my fingers and a deflated spirit I knew I was on a losing streak with no sight of conquering it.  After my time there I walked away with a huge list of what not to do in a bakery with the number one priority being;  purchase the right oven!

How do you become a Baker overnight?  This is how:  the night before watch youtube clips of Jeffrey Hamelman’s showing how to mix dough in mixer, pre-shape and shape.  Then take Jeffrey Hamleman’s Bread book in with you and follow his straight forward recipes but watch out for the stupid way the grams are marked as .009 kg, or .090 kg, or .9 kg and try your best not to get them mixed up at 5 in the morning half asleep still lacking caffeine because when you do add 90 grams of salt instead of 9 grams you feel really really stupid.

There were many great lessons I took away from the experience;  pre-shaping makes complete sense when handling 15+kg of dough, yeast dough doesn’t like slow hands, so much easier to shape yeast dough than sourdough or hybrids, shaping on stainless steel top is the best surface, important to have right mixer, workspace has to be streamlined to be effective, fresh yeast goes off before its best by date, poolish & pre-ferment taste the same in the end, tools are a necessity, wear gloves because you will burn yourself, you can’t be a baker and have longish nails, fighting against pre-conceived ideas of fluffy-high-volume-flour-improver bread is hard work with yeast breads, working in the middle of the night is stupid, sourdough & retardation are a baker’s best friends.

Getting the Right Oven

Although this was a 3 deck 3 tray oven it wasn’t really a bread oven, no steam, only one deck with stone and it was rubbish at producing what I can turn out in my domestic oven.  This oven I’m convinced is a heat-up-frozen-dough oven.  But it was extremely good at burning my hands…I did in the end learn it was worth wearing the gloves prior to using it.

The More You Shape the Better You Shape

The biggest challenge dealing with a mound of dough to shape for a domestic baker is speed.  I am painfully slow so much so I could not be profitable to be a baker in my own bakery.  The only way I can see how to overcome this is to practice over hundreds of loaves at a time.  Back breaking work.

Stainless steel surface is fantastic to shape on I discovered.  With the round shapes I was fine doing it quite quickly shaping them just like professionals do, I was getting into a good rhythm with them it was the little batons that were my downfall.

Right Equipment

Getting a mixer like this which is slow and worst of all is fixed meaning you can’t remove the bowl is also the worst thing to spend money on, you are forced to take out the heavy dough bending your back and it’s the most awkward back-breaking thing to do to yourself.  In the end I was mixing dough by hand.

This mixer which is like an industrial Kitchenaid was good but I never got around to using it.

Good Layout

The layout of your baking section alongside buying good equipment is the most important thing to get right.  Having a workstation too far from the oven with a peel that can only carry one loaf at a time is too in-effective not just from time but also contributing to heat loss in the oven.  Having a prover unit that works effectively is also a necessity and racks set up properly are a must.

Producing a Good Crust at Home

I brought home the worst examples of what was going wrong with the loaves to explain why I was having so much trouble.

If you’re not aware by now I bake every other day and often every day, yeast or sourdough but I am yet to produce as lousy loaves as the ones I produced last week in the commercial oven.  Next time you’re complaining you can’t produce a lovely crisp crust loaf because you have a domestic oven, I will say to you: *bull*…in the nicest possible way!

I’ve always managed to produce a lovely crust on my loaves.  In order to do so I can’t be worrying about having my oven on for too long prior to baking and wasting electricity.  My domestic oven comes up to my baking temperature of 200C fan within about 12mins, but believe me it is not hot enough.  I leave it to heat up 20 mins then add cold water to a hot tray on the bottom of oven, let it steam up for a further 20mins.  Only then add a loaf.  

This will produce a good crust even in a domestic oven.  I add 2 pints of water because I have a wide oven with wide tray and the water will evaporate halfway through baking which is what I want.  If appropriate for some loaves I’ll turn the temperature down by 10C halfway through.  I can produce a good loaf at home.  Now lets look at what was going wrong last week.  

Bursting Loaves

The colour of the loaf above is pretty much the correct colour of what was being churned out in the commercial oven.   But colour wasn’t the only problem, some of the loaves were doing the weirdest thing of bursting on the side.

For a while I thought it could be because I wasn’t slashing deep enough but then I often don’t slash deep enough in my domestic loaves and this has never never happen to me.  The only other thing I can think of since it was some loaves and not all of them was having cold spots in the oven, maybe from having the door open too many times to put the loaves in one at a time.

Wrinkly Crust

I had resorted to a water tin in the commercial oven making up for lack of steam but the loaves still never resulted in the lovely glossy crisp crust I’m use to at home.  Having slept on this a few nights I can only come to the conclusion the oven was not being pre-heated long enough.  Just as with my domestic oven the temperature indicator on this oven wasn’t enough to produce the loaves I wanted.

The crust was never stretched enough as in my domestic loaves, it appears as if they weren’t being pushed and stretched to their full potential and ended up with this wrinkly skin.

The very tight crumb of this loaf was the result of the fresh yeast being on its last legs near its best by date and having no umph.  I discovered this when a visiting pastry chef tried some and had trouble with it for his croissants.

Poolish – Pre-ferment

The crumb below was I think using a pre-ferment in Hamelman’s Country Bread, the other recipe I used a bit was pain Rustique using a poolish.  I didn’t follow his recipe for the mixing on this batch, I used the folding method which I must say works well with 10kg flour recipe.  It’s a 100% yeast loaf and I thought it worked well to give you the irregular open chewy crumb normally associated with a sourdough.

I also made a yeast ciabatta using poolish Hemelman’s recipe, and the feedback from people was good on that one.  Handling the wet dough was no trouble having been use to Dan’s sticky sourdough doughs.

A poolish is equal amounts of water and flour and a pre-ferment is a stiffer mixture but as far as yeast doughs goes taste-wise I could not tell them apart.  

What occurred to me by the end of the second day was making different types of loaves using the same flour was pointless.  Yeast loaves lack the complexity of a sourdough culture and unless you’re adding drastic things to it for flavour all you are left with is the flavour and texture of the wheat you’re using.  Hence using the same sacks of flour for a Pain Rustique to Country Bread or Ciabatta results in ubiquitous bread.

The Importance of Flour

This particular flour I was using at the cafe I had tested prior to starting in my domestic oven against my normal flour and I was astonished to find when proving the dough how much volume it created…so much so sitting next to my loaf it appeared like a dough on steroids.

When I spoke to a seller at the mill I buy my flour from to ask his opinion on this other flour he said it sounded as if the flour had ascorbic acid – vitamin C.  Apparently it’s added to make otherwise poor performing flour have “umph”.  He said on rare occasion when there is bad crop they themselves have to use it but it’s not the norm.  

The baker before me was also adding flour improver to his dough.  Ascorbic acid, flour improvers and anything else you want to throw at it are all good things for the miller and baker interested in churning out mediocre bread.

Stupid Baker’s Hours

By the end of my experience I wasn’t sleeping at all.  The having to get up at 4.30am meant my mind was worrying of over-sleeping I kept waking up at midnight and on the hour every hour.  Unsurprisingly by the end of my experience I was shredded into little pieces with lack of sleep, physically exhausted of handling, mixing dough with my back and worst of all a down trodden spirit of producing lousy bread I knew I could make better in my oven.  I had made a loaf using the same flour in my oven and produced a reasonable loaf but couldn’t do it in the cafe.  This kind of stuff messed with my head.

Bloody lousy commercial oven.  Or maybe it was just me…but from what I remember having seen the previous baker’s loaves in the cafe they too were a pale unattractive colour…so I don’t think it was me.

Above on the left is my loaf baked in my oven using my flour on the right one of the lousy loaves baked in the commercial oven using their flour.

Well it was an interesting experience and one which I know more now than I did before I started.  Given all the trouble I had I managed to handle the dough ok and I have Jeffrey’s Hamelman to thank for that.  It is an excellent book, my criticism of it is the stupid way grams are shown, decimal point is easy to miss half asleep…and may force you to throw the dough into the bin.  And the other change I would make in the book is have more photos of the loaves and less photos of decorative loaves which do nothing for a wannabe baker.

Autolyse

Nearly forgot to mention the other thing I did a lot of and I now do it at home and that is autolyse.  In Hamelman’s recipes he appears to do it as a way of cutting down on bulk fermentation time (if my memory serves me right) and it’s easy enough to do with a mixer.  At home I now do it when I’m adding things to dough like the nut & fruit loaves because it gives the gluten (gliadin & glutenin) a chance to start developing with the water without interference giving the dough strength.  For those not knowing, it means adding your flour and water together for 30mins – 1hr before adding everything else. Can also mean you can add a portion of the recipe’s flour and water 8-12hrs before carrying on with the dough, according to Advanced Bread and Pastry book by Michel Suas.

From reading McGee this method is suppose to, “makes the dough easier to manipulate requiring less kneading and therefore less exposure to oxygen, and so better retains the wheat’s light golden colour and characteristic taste”.  I’ve read a blogger harp on the wonders of autolyse producing a better flavour loaf swearing they’ve blind tested it on people who say it produces better flavour.  That hasn’t been my experience, either with yeast or sourdough, I can’t detect a better tasting bread.

What I can see and feel is a more developed crumb, a textured chewier crumb.  Yes, you’re giving the gluten a head-start to develop and I’ve mention on previous posts how sugar/fat and lots of other things can interfere with the development of gluten in various ways but here you’re also doing something else.  After the 30mins of autolyse you’re then mixing again the salt (and maybe other additions to the dough).  In this mixing you’re having to be fairly thorough to make sure it’s combined reasonably well.  Then you rest dough as normal in bulk fermentation.  

You are mixing the dough well twice.  Mix for the dough for autolyse.  Mix again to add salt (maybe other ingredients). Then rest.  You have to account the effect this second mixing does in itself to the overall result of the texture of the crumb…not just the autolyse.