cranbo's blog

I had read on Chowhound in a 2003 post that Puritan Bakery in Carson, CA supplies most notable SoCal burger chains (including InNOut, Fatburger, and Tommy's, among others) with their buns. 

Interesting article in last week's Orange County Register about Puritan & their process:

From "The secret behind SoCal's best burgers" by Nancy Luna

Puritan buns are made the same way your grandmother used to bake bread in the kitchen – only at a much larger scale... Flour, water, shortening and yeast are mixed and set aside in a large trough where it rises and develops flavor...

At the end of the four- to six-hour fermentation process, the mixture (not considered dough, yet) bubbles up – becoming a taffy-like blob.

Plant workers and machines then take the sponge mixture and add sugar, yeast, salt, flour and water to make dough, which is then shaped into buns before baking. The end result of the seven-hour process is a spongy, pliable bun...

While its base sponge-dough recipe is the same, Puritan customizes buns for restaurants and chains with specific needs. For example, In-N-Out's four-inch buns are "tweaked" (Puritan won't say how) for better grilling results. Tommy's buns are made to better support its heavy chili slathered burgers. Islands restaurants use a larger, five-inch bun. Seeded buns are delivered to The Habit.

Full article at http://www.ocregister.com/articles/puritan-293345-burger-bakery.html

I learned from the photos that Puritan does use hamburger bun pans. In the photo gallery, there is a decent photo showing the bun texture. 

Sometimes two + two = five, and you roll with it.

Reading a thread earlier today got me looking at the book "Bread Builders", including a section about about L. sanfranciscensis and dental plaque. Very weird. This got me thinking about some travel show I saw (Bourdain? Zimmern?) I saw a while back, where the host drank chicha somewhere in South America.

Sure, starters get going in all kinds of ways: wholegrain flours, whole fruit, pineapple juice. Now I've been reading with interest about fruit waters lately. 

This got me thinking: what would the outcome be of a chicha-inspired starter?

So goes my experiment:

• 25g whole wheat flour
• 25g rye flour
• 25g spring water

Mix all ingredients until it's a firm dough (50% hydration seemed right). 

Tear off small quail egg sized pieces of starter. Chew each piece for 30-60 seconds...yep. Really was not unpleasant, kinda gummy, but becoming slightly sweeter as I chewed. Place each chewed piece in a small container. 

I let it rest for 2 hours, then added 25g more water and mix to make a 100% starter. Seems to me that 100% hydration starters are more conducive to certain bacterial growth, so this should be interesting. 

Gross? Yes. Interesting? Absolutely.

Day 1: It's been probably 12 hours or so. Not much activity yet. I wonder how different this will be from my usual starter, which was built about 2 years ago using the Silverton organic grape method.

Will the chewing have an effect? As a control, I'm going to do one using the same feeding, the same schedule, but without the chewing. We'll see what happens. 

So I've been baking breads for some years now and experimenting with various recipes. 

Today I've been working on these English Muffins as well as my version of Theresa Greenway's Griffin's Bread.

The versions I'm making are 62% and 68% hydrations respectively. 

Most of the time I use a KA mixer with C-hook to knead.

Both doughs clear the sides of the bowl reasonably well, but neither of these totally clear the bottom of the bowl. I ran them both for maybe 1 minute at KA speed 2 to combine, then about 3-4 minutes at speed 3. 

In the case of the muffins (which use about 70% preferment), there was about a 2.5" diameter circle at the bottom, and I added some additional flour (about 10g) and it shrank to about 2". 

In the case of the sourdough (which uses about 82% preferment), it stuck to a large circle at bowl bottom, probably 5-6" around. I had to add probably 30g of flour to make it clear the sides better, leaving about a 2-2.5" diameter circle at the bottom of the bowl. 

My questions are about hydration and mixing to clear the bowl: 

1. Am I correct to assume that all 62% and above hydration flours will never totally clear the bottom of the bowl? 
2. What hydration typically will clear the bowl bottom? 

On my search for a specific type of sandwich roll. A good description of what I'm going for:

1. chewy but light inside
2. crust that is very thin, slightly crispy, shatters into big thin flakes then you bite in or tear off a piece, slightly leathery too with a little bit of tug
3. crust finish is yellowish & golden.

Tried Norm's rolls sans onions, but didn't achieve the result I was looking for. The interior of the Norm's hard roll was too fluffy, too hamburger bun-esque, with insufficient chew. The crust was not bad: it had the right thin leatheriness, some of that tug, but did not have that shattering quality that I'd like to get. Will try to post photos in a bit. 

I think I might have to try the Kaiser Roll recipe. As far as crumb goes, I think I might have to try a preferment (sponge, etc) of some sort to help with the chew & flavor. Any other recommendation for recipes to try would be appreciated. 

EDIT: based on some feedback, I have corrected my original post. 

I set out to locate a list of protein levels in common flours, and I found a handy list, reposting for your perusal:

Flour Names & Protein Percentages

• King Arthur Queen Guinevere Cake Flour (8.0%) 
• King Arthur Round Table Pastry Flour (9.2%) 
• Caputo 00 Extra Blu Flour (9.5%) 
• Generic All-Purpose Flour (10.3%) 
• King Arthur All-Purpose Flour (11.7%) 
• Caputo 00 Pizzeria Flour (12.0%) 
• General Mills Harvest King Flour (12.0%) 
• Robin Hood All-Purpose Flour (12.0%) 
• King Arthur Bread Flour (12.7%) 
• Bob's Red Mill Semolina Flour (12.9%) 
• Five Roses All-Purpose Flour (13.0%) 
• Eagle Mills All-Purpose Flour (13.3%) 
• King Arthur Whole Wheat Flour (14.0%) 
• King Arthur Whole Wheat Organic Flour (14.0%) 
• King Arthur Sir Lancelot Flour (14.2%) 
• Arrowhead Mills Vital Wheat Gluten Flour (65.0%) 
• Hodgson Mill Vital Wheat Gluten Flour (66.6%) 
• Bob's Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten Flour (75.0%) 
• Gillco Vital Wheat Gluten Flour (75.0%) 
• King Arthur Vital Wheat Gluten Flour (77.8%) 

• 1 cup KA AP flour weighs  about 125g. If 11.7% is protein, then there is about 14.63g of protein per cup of this flour
• 1 tbsp of Bobs Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten weighs about 8.5g. If 75% is protein, then 6.375g of protein per tbsp of this flour.
• 1 cup KA AP + 1 tbsp Bob's Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten = 21g TOTAL protein
• 21g of protein / 133.5g total ingredient weight = .161, or 15.73% of protein in the flour mixture

You can use this same method to calculate the adjusted protein in your flour. 


END OF MATH :)


What's interesting to me is that at the recommended dosage, adding 1 tbsp. of Bob's Red Mill gluten to every 1 cup of KA flour would make an extremely high protein flour, higher than what is typically commercially available. I wonder if it would make it totally unusable & gummy?


Then again, if you had a relatively weak, generic AP flour (9% protein), then 1 tbsp per cup would probably bump you to a very respectable 13.2% protein level, close to that of KA Bread Flour. For those that have actually tried this technique, I wonder if it actually performs in a similar way (e.g., similar to KA Bread flour) or do other flour factors (such as ash content, type of wheat, etc) play more into the overall performance of the flour and resulting bread?

In researching another thread, came across this interesting article on preferments from Lallemand, in PDF format.

One interesting morsel:

The preferment minimizes the lag phase by providing an optimum environment for the yeast. The result is higher gas production later inthe process, especially in high-sugar doughs.

The lag phase is the "ramp up" phase that occurs before yeast reach their maximum productivity. The article has a nice chart. 

Here's another interesting one:

Yeast activation takes place during the first 30 to 60 minutes in all types of preferments. Longer preferment times are not necessary for yeast activation, and can have a negative effect because yeast start to lose activity once the available sugar has been consumed. The only reason for longer preferments is for flavor contribution or dough development.

I think they're referring to the activation of commercial yeasts here (Lallemand is a commercial yeast producer, after all). Yeast activation is sourdough I think is different altogether. 

So I've been poring over some older TFL posts on autolyse, as well as other web sites. 

The traditional definition of autolyse means that only flour and water are combined to enhance flour hydration and gluten formation, with a host of other benefits. 

One post I found said that yeast should not be included in an autolyse because it can potentially form too acidic of an environment, which may not be conducive to flavor (or possibly to gluten development). I can imagine that the addition of lots of leaven (yeast, preferement, etc) could cause problems with autolyse, but I have never experienced this myself.  

My question is:

In your own experience, have you tried autolyse with yeast, as well as without? If so, what difference did it make in the final product for the same recipe? Note I'm not looking for theoretical answers here, i want to know if you were able to perceive a significant difference in the resulting bread. 

For me, I guess my next step will be to run some experiments, and compare the results of autolysed doughs which contain levain vs. those which don't. Considering doughs are autolysed 20 min to 1 hour, those are the intervals that I will be working with. 

So in a recent thread I posted a recipe that I based on a bread someone had seen on TV. I just did my best guess, based on provided ingredients and my own experience. 

I figured I should post the results, because it was mostly theoretical, but I believed it would work. The goal was yeasty, soft, fluffy bread, and use of a preferment. 

Here's the recipe, makes eight (8) 92g rolls/buns, or one good-sized loaf of bread...hence BreadBuns!

• 100% hydration starter (sourdough or not) 100g (26.50%)
• All purpose flour 375g (100%)
• Water 218g (58%)
• Brown sugar 38g (10%)
• Salt 10g (2.65%)
• Yeast (instant) 12g (3.30%)
• Melted butter 26g (7%)
• FINAL DOUGH WEIGHT (g) 778g

First, make a 100% hydration starter with 50g flour, 50g water and a pinch of yeast, mix, cover and leave at room temp for at least 6 hrs (or use some existing sourdough starter). In this case, I used some starter that I had around. 

Combine starter with remaining ingredients. This is after 1 minute of mixing at low speed. 

Mix with dough hook for 6 minutes total at KitchenAid speed #2 (low speed); this is the end result: soft, supple, quite smooth and satiny. 

Flatten, then roll into log and/or shape into ball and let rise for 1 hr in warm place, covered. 

Shaped and ready for rising...

In the bucket, ready to rise

After a 1 hour rise, it's doubled.

I decided to shape into 92g rolls, placed in a greased 9x13 pyrex dish:

Cover and let them rise in a warm place for about 1 hour, til doubled. Preheat oven to 400F

Bake for 23 minutes at 350F on middle oven rack.

Here's how they look after 10 minutes, just starting to get a hint of browning.

After the full 23 minutes, they're looking nice and brown. 

Remove from oven, carefully remove from pan and let cool on rack about 10 minutes before devouring. 

Crust and crumb are soft, light, tender and fluffy as expected. I think they could use a bit more brown sugar though, a touch more sweetness for this kind of bread. 

I like to store these in a Ziploc plastic bag to maintain that fluffy softness. Enjoy!

So last night I set off on my first Pita adventure using the TFL recipe. 

I like weight/percentages, so I weighed out the measured ingredients to develop a formula by weight. This is my conversion technique pretty much for all baking now.

The original recipe was much too sticky for me as well (worked out to ~68% total  hydration for me); had to add 50g more flour to get a manageable dough, and even then it was a tad bit wet. Overall hydration of 59-61% seems to be in the right ballpark for pita. 

The below recipe is ~60% overall hydration:

Makes 8 balls @ 105g each

• 346g AP flour
• 148g whole wheat flour
• 297g water
• 28g olive oil
• 22g honey
• 11g salt
• 7.1g instant yeast 

What I learned: 

• Hot oven is a must, 500F worked best for me, baking stone on center rack
• 2 to 2.5 minutes was perfect for me; I would go ~2 minutes, and flip for 30 seconds. 
• The rolled-out pitas that I left to rise covered for 30 minutes gave the most even puff. It also could've been the 450F oven, though...at 20 minutes and 450F, only a few of them puffed up completely.
• Next time, I will try the skillet/stove-top technique for better browning. Also much easier to place & turn than a 500F oven + baking stone! 

I make a 60% rye bread, and I use a buttermilk & rye soaker. Hydration is around 65%; remainder of flour is generic bread flour. I knead in a Kitchenaid for about 7-10 minutes total. I also stretch and fold 2-4 times, depending on how lazy I am. 

The unbaked dough of the last 2 I've made starts to "rip" after I start to fold it. I doubt I could windowpane it. Is that typical? I know rye is low-gluten, but could I be overkneading it? Seems unlikely, but I'm looking forward to feedback.

Thanks!