Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 23:39:36 GMT -------------- BEGIN bread-bakers.v107.n032 -------------- 001 - yguaba@yahoo.com.br - Re: Sourdough help 002 - "Doug Essinger-Hileman" < - Re: Digest bread-bakers.v107.n031 003 - Dan Haggarty Subject: Re: Digest bread-bakers.v107.n031 Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:45:30 -0500 Molly wrote: >I have the 525 watt KitchenAid mixer and I had to send it back for >repairs. I have had it a little over 2 years and believe me, I >would never ever recommend KitchenAid products to anyone. They are >just riding on their name. I think that all the new products are >made in China and are a piece of junk. I spoke with a repair center >and the guy there told me that he has a lot of KitchenAid mixers in >for repairs. Most are the newer models. Molly, I can vouch for the fact that KitchenAid blenders are all made in the US, at a plant in Ohio, to be precise. As for debating the relative merits of KA mixers, I'll leave that up to others. Doug --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n032.3 --------------- From: Dan Haggarty Subject: Compensating for Humidity Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:37:13 -0500 Cookbooks often caution about the need to adjust the amount of flour in a bread recipe depending on the humidity. A bit more flour is needed when the humidity is high and a bit less is appropriate in the winter when the humidity is low. I've never seen, however, any hard numbers quantifying the size of this adjustment. I recently used my bread recipe analysis spreadsheet to help answer this question. According to the California Wheat Commission, , the moisture content of wheat flour is usually within the range of 12-15%. (For what it's worth, the data in the USDA National Nutrient Database, , are within this range for wheat flour but the water content of oat, rye and triticale flours are closer to 10%.) Using my spreadsheet, I calculated the true hydration of my standard weekly bread recipe, using 1209g of 'average' flour with 13.5% water and 87.5% dry solids, as about 90% (vs. a hydration of 65% using the traditional formula). I then created an equivalent recipe using 'wet' flour that had 15% water and 85% dry solids. With the second recipe, I needed to use a total of 1265g of 'wet' flour to get a dough with the same true hydration of 90%. In other words, my analysis said that, in theory, you need to add or subtract up to 4.5% of the flour specified in a recipe to compensate for the humidity. (For a pound of flour, this corresponds to about 3/4 oz; for a cup of flour, it's about 2 teaspoons.) Since it was a very humid day, I decided to test my analysis. I made a test batch of bread by simplistically weighing the flour, but using 3.5% more flour than specified in the recipe. As hoped and expected, I found that the resulting loaf was just like those I bake under more normal conditions. Dan --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n032.4 --------------- From: Mike Avery Subject: Re: Sourdough Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:32:32 -0700 "Doug Essinger-Hileman" wrote: >Actually, the local "air" is the largest determining factor, in my >opinion. The flavor of the sourdough bread is dependent on the >makeup of the yeasties and other beasties, and that varies from >locale to locale. You can buy sourdough starter that is cultured and >grown in San Francisco, and at the beginning the taste will be just >like any sourdough you've had in SF. But if you keep the culture >alive, it will eventually replace the SF "character" with the local one. A commonly asked question I get at the sourdoughhome.com web site is, "will my starter change when I move it?" with its corollary of, "When I moved from St. Louis to Poughkeepsie, my starter changed, what happened?" There are more old husbands tales surrounding sourdough than almost anything else I've been involved with, with the possible exceptions of high-end audio and brewing. Dr. Michael Gaenzle of the German Cereal Institute studies sourdough starters and says he has starters that the institute has had for over 50 years that have not changed in that time. Somehow, I can still hear someone saying, "Yeah, but my starter doesn't taste or work the same as it did before I moved!" There are lots of factors at play here, so it's not as simple and straight forward a topic as you might find in a biologist's lab slants. Before I get too far into the discussion, I'll preface my comments by saying that all the comments apply to a healthy culture. And that many hobbyist's cultures are on the ragged edge of death. Good culture maintenance is very important. Almost all cultures, whether a hobbyist culture or a professional baker's culture are impure cultures. There are around half a dozen yeasts and three or so lactobacillus strains that can make a viable sourdough culture. Most of our cultures have many of these in them, but one strain of yeast and one strain of bacteria are dominant. If we change how we handle our cultures, we can change which strains are dominant. And the taste and activity of the culture can change. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it isn't. Changes in cultures, absent changes in feeding habits, are unlikely, for the same reason that most experienced sourdough practitioners discount the "starter from the air" theory. If you look at the count of yeast and bacteria in a volume of air, and compare that to the count in a gram of flour, it's obvious the odds favor the flour being the source of the culture. Dr. Ed Wood in his "World Sourdoughs From Antiquity" book recounts an experiment he did for National Geographic wherein he tried to capture an authentic Egyptian culture from the air. He irradiated the flour so it would not have anything alive on it. In a lower-rent fashion, a number of people in rec.food.sourdough tried to get local cultures by pouring boiling water over the flour to try to sterilize it. In both cases, the experienced people went from nearly universal success at starting a culture to a very high failure rate. This corroborates the idea that most cultures are started from the flour, not from the air. Similarly, the yeast and bacteria count in an active starter is much, much higher than the count in flour. A large part of the stability researchers, such as Dr. Gaenzle, report in cultures is because the lactobacillus bacteria produce a number of chemicals to kill would-be invaders. The acidity of sourdough starter is just the front line of defense. So, it seems very unlikely that a healthy starter could be taken over by the yeast and bacteria found in either the air or flour. Now then, if you've been taking good care of your culture, what could make the bread made with it taste different? Hunters prize boars that have been feeding on acorns - it gives the meat a great taste (or so I'm told - if you want to send me a care package, I'd love to try some! French farmers force feed their geese special herbs and spices to give the pate made from the livers of those geese special tastes. Many nursing mothers report that when they eat this food or that, their babies no longer like mom's milk. If more complex organisms change their taste, or the taste of things they produce, based on what they have been ingesting, is it any surprise that yeast and bacteria would also change their taste, and the taste of the breads they produce, based on changes to their diet? There are regional differences in flours, even when the brand name on the sack is the same. Different flours taste different. And it seems that yeast and bacteria notice differences we don't. Try converting your starter from white to whole wheat or rye flour. There are very rapid changes to the aroma and taste of the starter, well beyond what you'd expect from the changes in the flour. A number of experienced sourdough bakers have said that the key to copying another baker's bread isn't getting their sourdough starter, it lies in finding out what kind of flour they are using. So, if your starter changes, maybe you need to send back to friends who didn't move and ask them for care packages of your old standby flour. Or just get used to the flavors that the flours in your new home produce. All of this, to me, suggests that the theories about climate and air causing changes in sourdough starters are just old husband's takes. Best wishes, Mike Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com part time baker ICQ 16241692 networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230 wordsmith A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day: "I bet you wouldn't be feeling sorry for yourself if you were dead." -19th Century Bavarian beer drinkers motto Words of wisdom from Wayne Alred --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v107.n032.5 --------------- From: JATRAVEL@aol.com Subject: Problem: burned dough in abm Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 10:28:24 EST Hello everyone, I have a problem that I have never seen mentioned on this list. A few weeks ago I was using my Regal ABM and the bread rose much too high. I lifted the lid and it deflated. I thought the problem was solved until I later smelled smoke. The dough had gone over the side onto the unit and burned. Besides a smoky house, and ruined bread, the pan and unit still smell of acrid smoke. I have tried everything I can think of to remove the smell: white vinegar, baking soda, odor-removing Dawn and soda and vinegar combined. It is still horrible and unusable three weeks later. Any ideas, anyone? Thanks so much, Jan --------------- END bread-bakers.v107.n032 --------------- Copyright (c) 1996-2007 Regina Dwork and Jeffrey Dwork All Rights Reserved