hotdog

Again with the hotdogs. What is it with these hotdogs already? Well, the thing is, there is a whole package of these hotdogs and they're not going to eat themselves, you know. 

I have erred in my estimation. These hotdogs are not foot-long as I guessed yesterday. It didn't make sense for them to be 12" and the package not say so. I measured them today and turns out they are only 7.5", and that is quite a bit shorter than a foot. Hey, I am a man, okay? It's axiomatic men cannot estimate inches. 

Make your own hotdog buns! 

This dough is better for hotdogs than the dough yesterday because this dough is lighter. Its dry ingredients are only AP flour and salt. They are fashioned into bâtards (bastards in French meaning they are illegitimate baguettes) using an exceedingly wet dough of 100% hydration, that is equal amount of water to flour by weight. The weights of course being closely estimated by volume, not actually weighed. And why not actually weighed? Because it comes out the same every time, that's why, and if it is off by half an ounce one way or the other then it is no big deal anyway. 

The dough is left so wet to encourage oven-rise and wide open crumb, which we bakers value highly but you plebes often do not because apparently you feel the holes interfere with your sandwich making and because you are used to high-production commercial foam-bread that is packaged in plastic bags while still warm, which is a sin against humanity in the baker's world. 

These buns are also steamed-baked to really really encourage oven-rise and to impart a light and crispy crust which is another thing we bakers adore and you earth-bound plebes fail to fully appreciate. Again, you would do without the crunch when it comes to your sandwiches. Sandwiches. Sandwiches. Sandwiches. It's always sandwiches with you and this fills our hearts with despair. 

Then again, hotdogs are sandwiches. 

Would you care for a personal anecdote relating to bread and to crunch? Okay, goes like this: When I was a little sprog chasing birds around the yard, finding insects and snakes, swinging on the weeping willow branches like a little Tarzan, or perhaps more like a little Cheeta, I wasn't that adept, but Boy, could I ever get my feet way off the ground quite satisfactorily, and a good handful of branches assured a soft landing. Boing boing boing boing boing boing boing.  

Anyway. 

Mum would fix us a simple sandwich for there was little point in being elaborate about it for little yard monkeys like ourselves who would just pick them apart. The sandwiches would consist of Wonder Bread™, spread, and a disc of bologna. Sometimes the bologna still had the ring on it so you had to pull it off. Then run it through your little baby teeth like floss to scrape off all the bologna bits that clung to the floppy red plastic ring. There would also be a little pile of potato crisps on the plate. Naturally, I would stuff the crisps into the sandwich and smash the bread on top to hold it all together. This produced the most amazing crunchy salty sandwich, a 100% improvement over an ordinary non-crispified sandwiches. A very good sandwich would then consist of more potato crisps than bologna. So you see, I was experimenting before my shoes even reached the edge of the chair. Didn't everybody?

So this bread is better for hotdogs than yesterday's bread, although the bread yesterday was better bread altogether with its garbanzo bean powder and its whole-wheat milled right at home. I kept slicing off little pieces and having it as crostini, except I didn't even bother to toast it. Because both of these are aged overnight, they are imbued with a trace of alcohol, a barely detectible incipient fermentation but still definitely country and rustic, and much more full with rounded character than if more yeast had been used and the whole thing brought off within hours. I cannot overemphasize the effect that aging has, even the moderate aging of achingly slow proof. 

You know how books always say "let the dough rise for four hours or so in a warm place until it doubles then punch it down." Don't do that. Just don't. Use less yeast and let it rise twelve hours in a regular temperature place. Then turn it out and do not punch it down. It will deflate by itself by being turned out and no more punching is necessary. Stretch the dough in order to:

1)  initiate the shape of the loaf.

2)  familiarize yourself with what you have

3)  redistribute the yeast cells within the mass of dough

4)  exercise the gluten structure as a form of kneading

5)  adjust if necessary with either water or with flour

6)  introduce any new ingredient that you didn't want proofing overnight

7)  deflate excessively large bubbles that may or may not have formed

8)  show the dough who's boss around here

The dough is plopped down out of the heavily-oiled bowl and onto the work surface ↑↑↑↑ and stretched into a roughly rectangular shape from a circular shape. The circle of dough was thicker in the center than around the edges. Stretching the dough helped even it out, but it did not do that exactly. The result was a rough rectangle of irregular thickness. The rectangle is folded into thirds. This evened it out a bit but not completely. It was stretched by its length to help even it a bit more, but it is still irregular. So now the mass has been stretched twice. The mass is divided into fifths ↑. The fifths are also irregular. Some are larger than others, some are tighter than others. 

Each little bundle of joy ↑ is stretched again to make its short side longer. Each one is folded in thirds again and pinched along the edges to seal up the elongated dough wad. Through all of this stretching and pinching, the dough maintained its original network of interlaced glucose molecules, the matrix that has already captured air bubbles and is expected to capture them again as the live yeast continues to produce both alcohol and CO₂ as byproducts of its collective metabolism. Let's face the fact here, the air bubbles that are captured and contained by glucose matrix, so carefully constructed and maintained, is yeast farts. There. I said it. 

This term, bundle of joy, is a double entendre. I must mention the dough made last night is flavored with Oregano, a Greek compound word meaning 'mountain joy.' Why was it flavored with oregano? No good reason. Because I had it and because I am out of sage and fresh rosemary. 

The elongated folded and pinched dough wads are stretched further so their length matches the length of the hotdogs they are intended to hold ↓. 

After an hour or so, I don't know, I wasn't paying attention, the yeast cells show they've been busy again. I love those little guys, they are so irrepressible that way. They carry on just as if their doom is not eminent. 

The little bâtards are baked on high heat infused with water from above that immediately steams up the whole chamber. This continues for ten minutes until it can be seen through the window that the loaves have raised inside the oven significantly. They are baked until golden brown, and a thump indicates a certain hollowness. They are also extremely light having parted with most of its water.

One get the impression they are not all that nutritious. 

Added, hotdog bun recipe:

This approach is for a careless bread dough. Equal water to flour by weight, that is

*  2 cups AP flour

*  1 cup water

In Denver water weighs twice as much as flour, which is utterly dry. If you live in a coastal area or any non-arid environment, then the weight of your flour may vary. The weight of water of course will be the same.

* enough salt to salt-ify that amount of flour. Kosher salt is flaky, sea-salt contains more minerals and less sodium chloride, table salt is the most intense. This time I used approximately 1/3 teaspoon kosher flake salt. 

* 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon dry active yeast. 

The flour and salt is pulsed in a Cuisinart. One cup water heated to 120℉ / 49℃, the yeast added to the water with 1/2 teaspoon sugar to give it some fast food.  (Water comes out of my tap at 130℉ / 54℃,  sufficiently hot to kill yeast, but then the glass cup cools it a little so it's right on the edge of being too hot. 

This batch contained Mexican oregano, but I would have preferred sage. 

The water is added through the feed tube of the machine. Processed until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl. Process a little more, but not more than two minutes. It is very easy to over process with a Cuisinart. The dough is very sticky. 

A machine is not necessary, a plain ol' bowl is perfectly fine. No need to worry about kneading. Just stir it well until you can see the dough begin to  form those interconnected tendrils pictured above.

Turn out the sticky dough into an overly oiled bowl, cover, let sit on the counter overnight. Next day, turn out onto a work surface, stretch, divide into segments, shape into little loaves, pinch all around. Turn oven on HIGH. Allow the little loaves to relax, and to begin rising again. They need not double, as books say.  Immediately after the loaves are in the oven, either spray the oven chamber with water or drizzle water into the oven by its chimney which usually pokes out through a back burner. (I remove the heating element and use a funnel. I add water by the tablespoon every few minutes for up to ten minutes.  Another method is to have a shallow tray of hot water in the bottom of the oven filled with enough hot water to last ten minutes but then dries out so the crust can become crisp. If the tray method is used, the water should be boiling when the dough enters the oven so that steam is present immediately. The steam is vitally important to the success of this technique. You can make bread without it, but it will be ordinary bread and not amazing bread. The steam:

1) insures the dough remains moist long enough for the bubbles inside the dough to expand to their maximum size before the crust sets.

2) produces a thin skin on the dough which becomes crisp almost immediately when the water evaporates.  

Try these four  techniques combined and you will be amazed. 

1)  Start with a wet dough rather than a stiff dough

2)  Age via extended slow proof.

3)  Bake at highest heat possible.

4)  Mist the oven chamber during the initial bake, or otherwise hold in the steam  with a pot or with a clay cloche.  

If you were to pull this off for a dinner party, I guarantee you will blow everybody away. Paeans will be written in your honor and guests will sing your praises even at other people's parties that you have nothing to do with. FACT ! 

Protracted proof that relies on yeast cells multiplying themselves instead of dumping in a whole bunch of yeast to start it off and go fast,  is another form of kneading, as the yeast cells wend their way through their dough environment by budding clones of themselves onto themselves and extending like stacks of fat little worms.  So is stretching another form of kneading which you will do to the dough when the loaves are formed. So no need to be neurotic about kneading the wet sticky dough. In fact, you can get away with no kneading at all. See Jim Lahey show this technique to Mark Bitterman on YouTube for a NYT segment. Search [+NYT +no-knead bread] Not shown in the video, after Lahey stretches the dough  and folds it, the dough rests covered for about 20 minutes. I do not know why they failed to emphasize that. Lahey then drops the dough into a super-heated pot and closes it to keep in the moisture, but we are doing the same thing by spraying the whole oven chamber.  This is a common French technique for baguettes. Commercial stoves come with automatic mist-inaters (misters, or mistifiers) . So we're doing a kitchen hack to compensate.