Day 8: Earth Meets the Oven

Finally, I'm just about caught up with the blogging here. I'm actually writing about Day 8 on... Day 8!

So, today was pretty much the day I'd been waiting for. All I had to do was work the dough a bit, let it rise again, and then throw it in the oven.

Nice expansion in the preceding 12 hours

Sounds simple, but as you may have learned by now, I juggle a lot of variables when cooking. I don't really know why I do it, but I always do.

Let's go over the variables I dealt with in the final few stages of the bread baking process:

1. Following three different sets of instructions.
2. Not thinking about the wetness of the dough until the day of baking.
   
3. Using a DIY cloche made out of a 7" terracotta azalea planter with saucer (without proper usage instructions at all).
4. General lack of knowledge and unpreparedness.
   

I decided to skip out on Ed Wood's instructions for the rest of my baking, since he only required 1 minute of "mixing" in the morning, then more proofing and then immediately baking, all in a bread machine that I am staunchly opposed to using. This left me with King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking and Peter Reinhart's The Break Baker's Apprentice. Each has excellent instructions with great detail, so I pretty much borrowed from both of them.

The first thing I borrowed was folding on a floured surface. Since my dough was already fairly dry and stiff, I should not have added any more flour. But hey, it happened.

Then, following the lead in KAF's book, I waited 20 minutes and folded again. I excitedly tried the windowpane test, but the dough failed miserably, tearing almost immediately. So I stretched and folded some more, waited a bit, stretched and folded some more, and then did the test again. Getting there. I continued with the folding and stretching until I finally got a good enough result. Amy woke up in time to help me out by taking a picture.

Amy saved me a lot of annoyance by taking this picture. I had been trying to hold the stretched dough to the light with my left hand and take a picture with my doughy right, which, I swear, is impossible.

The moment was rushing at me, now. I set up a makeshift proofing bowl (opaque pyrex with a cloth napkin dusted heavily with flour) and plopped my best pal in.

Pre-final rise

My three sources recommended a final rising time of between 2-4 hours, but I ended up going a little too long into the fifth hour because of some work I had to do for my job. Oop, there's another variable: real life. I'm not sure if this extra time caused any issues, but I don't think I'll wait nearly as long with my next bread, since there was not much growth between the 3rd and 5 hours.

Post-final rise

I preheated the oven with my terracotta pot (soaked in water experimentally for 10 minutes) and saucer inside, up to around 450 degrees F. This is where Peter Reinhart became an influence in this bread. Ed Wood specified 375F, but that was for a bread machine. I was trying to recreate a brick oven with the terracotta, and brick ovens are HOT. So I went with Peter Reinhart's temperature and hoped for the best. Then I had to be very gentle and cautious. I had to handle this risen dough more delicately than I had handled anything before in my life (I've never held a newborn, so...). Real bakers use a peel and slide the dough onto a baking stone, but I don't have either of those; I just have a terracotta saucer with an inconveniently sloped edge. Why didn't I think about this darned edge when I was in the gardening store? These kinds of questions were pointless at this stage, so I overturned the bowl and let the dough slip into my left hand. Since the dough had technically been rising in the bowl upside down, I had to shift the dough to my right hand to get it onto the saucer upright. This was not an issue, but I feel that the risen dough lost some of its height in this process.


Another factor I never considered was the insane amount of heat loss that must have been occuring while the above picture was taken. I let the bread cook for about 10 minutes and then removed from the oven again for two reasons. One was to check and make sure nothing horrible had happened, and the other was so I could thread my probe thermometer through the hole in the bottom (now top) of the pot and make sure the bread reached the proper internal temperature. I hated myself at this moment, because I knew there was a massive amount of heat dissipating from the dough at such a crucial time. Next time, I will either not use the probe or I will stick it into the dough first thing.

Back in the oven, the probe gave me some upsetting readings for the oven temperature (which was actually getting the ambient temperature within the terracotta pot). It was not budging past 250F. I had made obvious mistakes that caused this problem. First, I didn't make sure the pot reached 450F before getting the dough in there, and second, I opened the pot up partway through the cooking. I decided to crank the oven to its highest setting, which was surprisingly all the way up to 550F, and managed to get the external reading to around 400F. I sat in the kitchen with my laptop and did some more stuff for my job, waiting for the Polder to beep when the internal temperature of the bread reached 205F. I'm not totally sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say this happened after approximately 50 minutes of total baking.


I had no idea what to expect when I lifted the pot off of its saucer. My biggest concern was that the dough had grown too large and would be stuck to the uncovered walls of the pot, and my second biggest concern was that the bread would be totally burnt. Luckily, neither of these atrocities occured.


The crust was leathery and strangely smooth on this first New Zealand bread of mine. The smell was a mix of nice fresh bread and earthy terracotta, and really, it was not a bad combination at all. Earth meets the oven; it summed up my hopes in baking sourdough quite nicely.

I was immediately disappointed by the visible lack of growth, no doubt due to the low, inconsistent temperature, but that was not the true concern I have with this bread. I sliced a piece and observed the expected lack of open crumb with a slight shake of my head. But I figured that it couldn't be too bad, since I had made a lot of breads in the past that didn't rise too well and they all tasted fine.

I took a bite, expecting the hear choruses of angels from the windows and trumpets blasting at my from the cabinets, but instead felt my tongue quiver under the intense sourness of something that surely was not bread. Never had I tasted a baked good so sour. Very comparable to the sourness of sour cream and nearly that of lemons, I was struck into a still despair. At first, I was downright repulsed, but with each bite I felt that it could possibly just be another of those adult, acquired tastes. I certainly love coffee now, even without sugar.


Perhaps I will acquire the taste of this bread, too. After all, I expect that I will be the one to eat the bulk of it, and I just polished off a nicely buttered second slice that turned out to be intensely pleasurable, with an air of forbidden pleasure I don't usually experience with food I've made. Maybe if I made a sandwich next...

Notes for next time:
-fully preheat terracotta and leave it closed the whole time
-don't let dough rise too long
-read more of what the King Arthur Flour kitchen, Peter Reinhart, and a few good websites have to say on sourdough, and really learn a method
-keep experimenting, regardless of weird results!