27 October 2015

J'ai fait deux « bâtards » hier matin

Different flour, more water, less yeast, and a longer rising time went into making my latest bread. As I've said, our bread delivery woman is on vacation this week, so we are fending for ourselves. We eat bread nearly every day, and I don't want to have to take the car out every morning to find fresh bread this week.


Longer rising time: I decided to try letting the bread dough rise for 18 hours this time, compared to less than two hours for last week's loaf. I wondered what that would do to the texture of la mie — dictionary definition of mie : la partie molle qui est à l'intérieur du pain (opposé à croûte). Too bad we don't have a better word in English for that soft part of the bread. One term is "crumb" but that's not too exciting or appetizing. It's definitely just a technical term.


Be that as it may, I'm not sure my experiment was conclusive, since I changed too many variables compared to that other loaf of what we'd call "French bread" that I made last week. Different flour: this time I used mostly a hard wheat flour (farine de blé dur) produced by a mill up near Blois and Chambord on the Loire River, 30 miles north of Saint-Aignan. It's organic. And I supplemented it with some of our ordinary, everyday flour from the supermarket, to the tune of 150 grams mixed into 350 grams of organic flour.


I put in just 4 grams of yeast. You don't need to put in as much yeast when you plan to give the dough an extra-long rise. The little yeast organisms will multiply over the hours and be sufficient to do the job. And now I know why in French they use the term fermentation for what we call letting the dough rise. When I took the lid off the bowl yesterday morning to see how it was going after 12 hours, the smell was definitely alcoholic, almost like wine that was turning bad. It wasn't unpleasant, but the odor was very noticeable.


And more water: I wanted to make a softer dough. I increased the amount of water from 300 milliliters to about 350. That meant the dough was slightly sticky and I had to add more flour when I finally took the dough out to shape it into loaves, just to keep it from sticking to my hand and the work surface. Then I let the shaped loaves rise for another hour or so. They were sort of flat but they really puffed up in the oven. Because of the extra water and the long rise, the dough needs little or no kneading, just the initial mixing.


I ended up making two loaves rather than just one. They were sort of short and fat, which is a style of bread called un bâtard that you don't see much these days — at least not around these parts. Maybe they still make and sell such "bastard" loaves in Paris. It's called a bâtard because it's the same weight as a skinny baguette and shorter than, but with the girth of, what is called simply un pain — a bread.


I didn't bake my bâtards on a stone but just on a pan lined with kitchen paper and in a hot oven. The baking took nearly 40 minutes, and I set a shallow pan of water on a rack under the baking pan to make steam. The resulting crust was hard but not too hard, and the cooked loaves sounded hollow when we tapped on them. The mie of the bread was fairly dense still, but not as dense as the mie of the earlier loaf. It was also sort of moelleux (tender, "mellow") and not dry at all. I guess that was because of the flours I used.

20 comments:

  1. Even though it requires kneading, I have to try this. It looks gorgeous.

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    1. It requires very little kneading, because of the long rise.

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    2. Here are the ingredients:

      500 grams of flour (preferably high-gluten bread flour)
      4 grams of yeast
      10 grams of salt

      Mix all that together and then gradually mix in 300 to 350 milliliters of warm water. I use a stand mixer. The amount of water depends on your flour and on the level of humidity in your kitchen.

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    3. Ken, thank you.... humidity is very low this time of year, but there are work-arounds. When my hands will stand it, I'll be trying and let you know how it goes!

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  2. That's my kind of loaf, Ken....
    I can smell it from here...
    and it hasn't got any hole in it!

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    1. The holes are small, but they are there. You can just eat around them (don't know where I heard that before...).

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    2. Ken, that's how they should be.... it looks lovely.
      the ones I am always knockin' on about are the ones in our baker's bread...
      diameter of around a 2 Euro coin and from that in length, to 10cm or more...
      the record so far was one that was big enough to house a Toulouse sausage...
      unfortunately, I'd already started to slice into it...
      else I could have grilled a soss and wrapped the bread around it without compressing the crumb!
      If I want to try and make a sandwich with a hole in the middle....
      I'll buy bagels....
      but even there, I never know where to leave the hole...
      should it be placed on the side of the plate....
      or discarded onto the floor?

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  3. If you want to repeat this exercise regularly, you'll eventually find the juste milieu. In this loaf, the mie seems to be sticky, but the overall look is great. Hope it tastes as good as it looks.

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    1. Not sure what you mean by "sticky" -- if it were sticky that would mean that it's not completely cooked. The bread is very tender and kind of moist inside, in a slightly oily kind of way, even though there's no oil in the dough. It's not dry. The farine de blé dur might be oily compared to farine de blé tendre; I don't know.

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  4. One of the bakers in Preuilly makes bâtards every day. Thanks for the definition -- I didn't realise that's why they were called bâtards.

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    1. I just looked at Wikipedia and their description sort of confirms that definition — « Le bâtard, de même section que le pain mais de même poids que la baguette » ...

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  5. Your bread looks really super and I am sure tastes as good as it looks. You say that "Because of the extra water and the long rise, the dough needs little or no kneading, just the initial mixing." How can you tell how long to knead for? I've always kneaded on a 'longer to be safe' basis as I have never been aware of much change in the dough.

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    1. I think the proof of the kneading (or not) is just in the eating. There's no real rule. My impression is that the longer the rise, the less kneading you need to do. I could be wrong about that.

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  6. Wow, those are two realllly beautiful loafs of bread, Ken! I just love the mix of science and beauty and enjoyment, of cooking. These look like they would have been delicious. Yumm :)

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    1. We ate most of one loaf yesterday, and I had a piece of it toasted for breakfast. The other loaf is in the freezer. We're not eating bread today, so we'll have it tomorrow. I like the bread a lot.

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  7. Whenever I see the circumflex I remember my French teacher telling me that the "s" has been fropped from the latin word.

    Is it better to bake bastards on a stone? (sorry, couldn't resist)

    They must be better for sandwiches as you get more interior surface area than from a baguette, which has more crust.

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    1. It's supposedly better to bake French-style breads on a stone (or, better, on the stone floor of a traditional wood-fired bread oven). I've been getting pretty good results without the stone, though, in our electric oven.

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  8. We are lucky that a Berkeley bread shop delivers to our local store, so we can have fresh baguettes, batards, and cibattas every day. Still, your bread looks wonderful, and i would choose home made over store bought....

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    1. We used to really enjoy Acme bread from Berkeley when we lived in SF. I wonder if the Acme bakery is still in business.

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    2. They are still going strong. They do not deliver out here to the 'burbs, so we get Semifreddis, which is good as well.

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