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February 17, 2013 by Mark 2 Comments

Relax and Make Better Pizza Dough

Rod and I swapped a few emails yesterday about the perfect pizza dough. We’ve been talking about different flours, additives and techniques to achieve the perfect crust.

It was a great conversation, because the only thing I love more than pizza is getting all geeky about flour and fermentation. But then I realized that, of all the things I’ve done to perfect my pizza process over the years, 85% of the awesomeness comes from one thing.

The secret? Relaxation.

A relaxed pizza dough is easy to spread out or toss. You can make a paper thin crust with little effort, but still get a great spring in the oven.

If made well, your relaxed pizza dough can bring incredible flavour to the party as well.

The good news is that making a relaxed, delicious pizza dough takes very little effort. All it takes is time.

Here’s what I do:

For a 450g dough ball, enough for a 13″ pizza, combine:

260g Unbleached White Flour
5g Salt
1g Instant Yeast (a small pinch)
13g Olive Oil
190g lukewarm water (70F – 75F)

Make sure everything is very well mixed. You don’t necessarily have to knead it, but you want a consistently wet, loose, sticky dough with no lumps.

Then transfer the shaggy dough ball to a large, lightly greased bowl (I use cooking spray) and cover with plastic wrap.

Leave the dough on the counter for 90 minutes. Every 30 minutes, take the dough out of the bowl, give it a fold and place it back in the bowl.

The first two times you fold the dough, it will be rough and sticky, so lube your hands up a bit. After the final fold, you should notice that the dough is much smoother and stronger than when you started.

After the 90 minutes, place the bowl in your refrigerator overnight. Or freeze it until the day you want to make pizza (just take it out and place in the fridge in the morning and it’ll be thawed by supper time.)

While the dough is resting, both on your counter and then in the refrigerator, amazing things are happening. Enzymes in the flour are breaking down the starch into sugars, which taste great and will brown your crust. Gluten proteins are forming long chains which give your dough strength and tenacity, but the long rest times are also allowing these chains to untangle themselves so the dough ball will also be loose and extensible when you spread it out.

When you’re ready to eat, preheat your oven to as hot it will go and get your toppings ready. Let the dough ball warm up to room temperature for 20 minutes then either spread it on a pan or toss and place on a peel if you have a baking stone. Top and bake for 15-20 minutes.

Pizza dough is easy to make — all it takes is time — but if you’re in a hurry we have frozen dough balls at the bakery. Pick up a few for your freezer and you’ll never be far from great homemade pizza.

Photo by British Mum

June 5, 2012 by Mark Leave a Comment

Baker’s Magic: How To Control Sourdough Flavour

This post is the third in a series about sourdough culture in bread baking. It all started with an overview called What is Sourdough and went on to discussing those things that contribute to great flavour in sourdough bread. Now we’ll wrap things up and show how you can control the flavour in your sourdoughs.

I love bread bakeries. I love them so much I should have a bumper sticker that says “I Brake for Real Bread.” Whenever I stop at a new bakery I always buy a sourdough loaf if they make a sourdough (not many do.) I’m always amazed at how remarkably different a ‘sourdough loaf’ can taste depending on the bakery.

How is that possible? If the ingredients are the same (flour, water, salt and possibly some extra yeast) why doesn’t the bread taste the same? It comes down to how the baker keeps her starter.

This is the third in a series of articles that try to answer the question ‘What is Sourdough?’ In the first article, I talked about the main actors in a robust sourdough culture (enzymes, yeast and lactic acid bacteria.) The second article described the fermentation process and the components of sourdough flavour (glucose from flour, lactic acid and acetic acid.) Now that we have the building blocks, let’s talk about how the baker can manipulate fermentation to get the flavour profile she desires.

The wheat starter on the left is very liquid (100% hydration) , like thick pancake batter. The rye starter on the right is thicker (80% hydration), like drying concrete (?!)

There are three main variables I have at my disposal:

Temperature: I can keep my starter relatively warm (at room temperature or slightly warmer, say between 73F – 78F), so fermentation is very active. Lots of enzyme activity creating glucose. Lots of activity among the lactic acid bacteria creating lactic acid (think ‘yogurty tang’), at least until the starter runs out of food (which will happen quickly due to the high activity.

Alternatively, I can keep my starter very cool, refrigerated even, for long periods of time. This slows fermentation and creates a good environment for acetic acid (think ‘vinegar’) creation.

Hydration: This refers to the amount of water in the starter. I could keep my starter very wet, like a thick pancake batter. Or, I could mix a very stiff starter, like a stiff pizza dough.

More water = more active fermentation (more lactic acid created). Less water = less active fermentation (more acetic acid creation.)

Amount of Available Food: This refers to how much fresh flour is made available to the starter culture for the enzymes to turn into sugar and keep fermentation happening. I think of how often the starter is refreshed (once, twice or three times daily.)

If I feed my starter once a day, I will generally get a more ‘sour’ starter than if I feed it twice or three times per day. That’s because the starter will run out of food and oxygen quicker, creating a great environment for acetic acid production, until such time as I feed the starter again.

With these building blocks, let’s look at two examples:

– At Orange Boot Bakery, I like a mild sourdough, with a fresh wheaty taste and just a tiny hint of a tang at the finish (when you swallow.) So I keep my wheat starter wet, like a thick pancake batter to produce more lactic acid and less acetic acid. I feed it twice every day to make sure the starter has lots of food to keep actively fermenting. And I keep it out at room temperature (ideally, at between 73F and 75F.)

– my hero Nancy Rubiliak, former owner of Tree Stone Bakery in Edmonton, preferred her sourdough to have a more pronounced tangy ‘bite.’ So she mixed her starter stiffer than I do and kept it for long periods in her cool basement, while still feeding it twice daily. These changes contributed to more acetic acid production and a more ‘sour’ finish. BUT, it should be stressed, Nancy made incredibly tasty bread! It just tasted different than what I make.

When I attended the San Francisico Baking Institute in 2008 we took this to the limit, making three different white sourdough loaves from the same flour, the same water and the same salt. The difference? We used a range of starters, from stiff, cool and rarely fed to warm, liquid and often fed. The result? As you have probably guessed by now, we had everything from crusty, sour loaves (aka ‘San Francisco Style’) to light, airy, mild (still crusty) loaves, which maybe one day will be known as ‘Orange Boot Style.’

So there you have it. Once you understand what goes on during fermentation and how you can use feeding times, temperature and hydration to control fermentation and flavour, you can create a sourdough loaf that meets YOUR idea of what ‘proper bread’ should taste like.

Happy Baking!

I hope you enjoyed this series on Sourdough baking. Are you making sourdoughs at home? What’s your starter like? Any other questions? Let me know in the comments!

[Updated on June 11 to get Nancy’s process right. Thanks for the reminder, Nancy!]

May 24, 2012 by Mark Leave a Comment

Where Does Flavour Come From?

This is the second of a series of articles getting into detail about sourdough and bread baking. It all started with this post about what’s in a sourdough culture and wraps up with a discussion of how bakers can control the flavour of their sourdough.

Part of the fun of bread baking is the how one can bake a huge variety of breads, each with its own distinct flavour, from a few simple ingredients. In the case of Sourdough baking, it can be as little as three ingredients: flour, water and salt.

In the last article, I talked about the difference between commercial yeast and a mature sourdough culture. Now I want to talk about the different components of flavour that exist in a sourdough culture, which the baker can control during the baking process.

So, how does the sourdough culture affect flavour? Well, it helps to think of your sourdough culture as a continually fermenting dough. And there’s a lot going on during fermentation. At a microscopic level, once flour and water come into contact with each other, all hell breaks loose:

Enzymes which have been lying dormant in the flour wake up once they get wet. And they are cranky little fellas. They start attacking the starch molecules in the flour (the white bits in the centre of the wheat berry) and converting it to the simple sugar, glucose.
The baker’s best friend, lactic acid bacteria, LOVE sugar. They convert the glucose into lactic acid. That’s the hint of tang you get from buttermilk, yogurt, or a fine sourdough loaf.
Yeast cells also LOVE sugar. The little yeasties only want to do two things: eat glucose and divide. And they do both really fast — eating the glucose, belching out carbon dioxide and dividing into new yeasties which eat more, belch more and divide more. (As an aside, it’s the carbon dioxide that gets belched out by the yeast that makes bread rise. Gluten protien — the bakers other best friend — traps the gas inside the loaf, like air in a balloon, and the bread goes “up.”)

It’s mayhem in there! But for the first several hours, everyone is happy and healthy and making yeast babies. All good things must come to an end, however. If left long enough, like 8-12 hours, the starch in the flour gets used up and there’s much less starch and sugar left and much more carbon dioxide (from the yeast.) That upsets the balance in the culture; starved for oxygen, the lactic acid bacteria start to fade away and a different type of fermentation begins. This “anaerobic” fermentation starts creating acetic acid. Instead of a light yogurty taste, the culture starts taking on a stronger, vinegary taste.

Taken to the extreme, all the starch is used up, the protein bonds break down and your starter begins to starve. At that point all that’s really there for flavour is the vinegar. It’s time for a feeding — mixing in more flour and water so there is more starch for the enzymes and sugar for the yeasties and bacteria.

Of course, it would be nice if there was some yummy glucose left for us to eat too! People like sugar and besides, sugar caramalizes when baking which gives your bread a dark brown crust.

So there you have it! Flavour from the flour itself (wheat bran and other minerals taste yummy), lactic acid, acetic acid and glucose. We get to play with these four factors to create a range of flavours in our sourdough bread. But how exactly do we control the flavours, so our bread tastes the same every time? That’s a great question — and that’s the topic for my next post. Stay tuned!

Note: The picture above shows three stages of my wheat starter. From left-right: just fed starter, fermenting starter, ready to feed again. Click on the picture for a larger version.

May 22, 2012 by Mark Leave a Comment

What is Sourdough?

Over on the Orange Boot Facebook page, Gwen asks: “As someone who ‘captures’ this thing, could you expand for our FB friends what [sourdough or wild yeast] is exactly?”

Sure thing, Gwen!

First off, let’s talk about “commercial” yeast. You can buy it Fresh, Active Dry, or Instant, manufactured by Fleishmans or Lesaffre, but it’s really all the same thing: a single strain of yeast cells (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) that is cultivated by the yeast manufacturer. Then large quantities of yeast cells are compressed and/or dried, packaged and sold to bakers. Years ago, this yeast was a byproduct of beer brewing, but now it’s manufactured on its own.

There’s nothing wrong with commercial yeast. It does its job very well — making your dough rise (aka leavening.) But that’s really all it does.

A sourdough culture (also called a levain) is a different beast all together. The baker creates and perpetuates a sourdough culture to accomplish two goals: raise the dough and develop flavour. That’s accomplished by keeping two organisms healthy and flourishing in the culture:

– “wild” yeast: This is a slightly different yeast cell, called Sacchraromyces exiges. This organism exists in the air, on our hands, and especially in flour. All we have to do is capture it and help it multiply, and it will raise our bread.

The main difference between it and Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the “wild” yeast likes a more acidic environment. Good thing too, because a sourdough culture is more acidic than a “normal” bread dough!

– lactic acid bacteria: This single celled organism is the bread baker’s best friend. The little guys converts sugars in the flour into lactic acid, giving the loaf a delicate, yogurty tang. The extra acidity also helps the loaf stay fresh longer. Different regions of the world have different lactic acid bacteria, which helps sourdough bread taste different in other parts of the world. For example, the cool, humid climate of San Francisco has created a specific strain called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.

And that’s what a sourdough culture is all about. Hah! Not by a long shot. There’s much more to the sourdough story. Next time, I’ll focus on what we can do as bakers to create different flavour profiles with your sourdough culture.

Do you like knowing what goes into your daily bread? What did I miss explaining? What other topics are you interested in learning about? Let me know in the comments!

This is the first in a three part series of articles about sourdough culture. The second describes all the critters that bring flavour to your sourdough bread. The third article discusses how bakers can control these critters in our baking, or at least suggest specific flavour profiles.

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