hamburger

Mixed meat patty prepared earlier and frozen waaaaaay back here.

Hamburger buns made fresh even though hamburger buns were already made yesterday. I am trying to get the size of them right and  the earlier buns are 1/4 whole wheat. I wanted new bread that is 100% A/P flour, which is a little bit weird, in order to use the surplus for bread pudding which will be included in a chocolate soufflé. I want to try something I had at La Central last night, and that will take plain white bread. 

So here are the new buns. Rarely will I make bread entirely from A/P flour because it harkens back uncomfortably to a poorly informed previous life in which all bread was Wonderfully Wondrous Whuh (?) Under white-foam bread, in which the chief nutrition, or so it is claimed, is added scientifically by a process termed fortification. These buns are not far from that, and although delicious, they make me a little bit sad. 

*  1 +1/2 cup water

*  2 +1/2 cup A/P flour

*  1 level teaspoon commercial dry yeast

*  3/4 teaspoon sea salt

The flour was added unsifted by the cup. Water weighs twice as much as flour. By  baker's percentages, where the weight of flour is expressed as a percentage of the weight of water, then, 100% would be 3 cups of flour to 1 + 1/2 cups water. 

Maths!

This flour was added by the cup. First one cup blended into the yeasty water, then the second blended into the yeasty water. A third cup was scooped, mindful that the whole cup would be 100% flour to water by weight. I am aiming for something closer to somewhere between 60% and 80%, so the entire third cup will not be added. The third cup of flour is added in increments until the desired sticky-dough consistency is attained. That turned out to be 1/2 of the third cup. See how this is done? Bakers kneading on a work surface will most likely aim for a stiffer dough, or the remaining flour will be picked up from the work surface while kneading. But in this case, all the kneading was done by machine. I stopped adding flour when my intuition told me, helped by experience and awareness of bakers percentages. The dough turned out to be perfectly sticky. 

Unattractive bubbles formed directly underneath the outer skin of the miniature loaves. These would expand wildly during baking producing something akin to an airplane hangar between the crust and the crumb, so they were punctured with a pin and deflated. The buns were painted with butter to keep the surface moist long enough to benefit from oven-rise, if there would be any before the surface caramelized, to aid in browning, and to produce an attractive sheen. Ordinarily I would have painted them with olive oil, but I intend to use the bread for something else later were olive oil is inappropriate. 

Here's what the crumb looks like.

Here's what the crumb really really looks like.

Layers. Help me out here with your arithmetics, if you will. I can see what is happening with the layers but for some odd reason I cannot seem to easily count them. * The dough is stretched into one flat layer like a pizza and folded in thirds, one third stretched and  folded over the center, the opposite end stretched and folded on top of the other two stacked thirds. So one layer becomes three narrower but not shorter layers.  * The new narrow three layers is stretched out again as if it were one layer. Then folded again as before except in the rotated position. So how many layers is it now? The end of three stretched layers is folded over the central third and placed on top = 6. The other end folded over and placed on tippy top = 9.  Am I right? This usually concludes the folding that precedes the touching-up shaping of the final loaf and establishes the shape of the loaf preceding the final proofing period before insertion into the oven. The edges can be pinched and the whole stack of layers fluffed up, puffed and shaped.  Now that all happens on a floured  surface so each fold picks up flour from the table thus becoming slightly stiffer with flour that is not kneaded into the dough as the original flour was kneaded. But all that was accounted for by starting out with a very wet dough to begin with. The idea is to end up with a wet and floppy dough to allow maximum oven-rise, but not so wet that the loaf collapses after the outer surface caramelizes. So adjustments are kept in mind during this folding, moistening the flattened surfaces before folding if needed, or allowing more flour to be picked up with each fold, in order to adjust and control the degree of floppiness of the dough layer pile before the final shaping and the final rise. There is a chance after all that the dough is still so wet or so dry that it could use more flour from the work surface or more moisture delivered by hand to flattened pre-folded layers in order to loosen an overly stiff dough or to stiffen an overly loose one. In that case, and it does happen frequently …   * The final 9 layers are stretched again as if just starting, the first fold would produce 18 layers, the second fold = 27 layers. That's a lot of layers innit? In actuality, the layers tend to meld as the stretched gluten molecules connect with adjoining gluten molecules from overlapped layers, also stretched, because it is the nature of gluten molecules to make such connections, thus obliterating the separation of layers, but only if the two surfaces are wet. If the surfaces are separated with flour, or, say, cinnamon and sugar and butter, then they tend to form distinct layers caused by the substances that separated them, here un-kneaded flour. This would cause an air pocket to form that expands by heat that is different from ordinary air pockets between meshes of gluten molecules that result in the crumb of the bread, like the swirls of a cinnamon bun are separated by flavored caramel goo.  So the moral of the Tale of the Layers is to keep the layers moist to enable gluten interconnection to produce an un-layered unified loaf. But why do all this folding anyway? It is done as a kindness to the yeast cells, to redistribute them, and to the gluten network that has begun forming in order to maintain as much as possible the little air pockets that have already begun forming. Yes, it is possible to destroy that incipient network  completely, mash it all down and press hard into one solid dough ball, and that will work too, but you will not achieve the wide open crumb that is the distinguishing hallmark of well-made artisan bread.