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Houston, we have bacteria!
The latest batch of baguettes smells sour to me. The flavor is mild, but even so it’s as strong as my old raisin starter ever was, even after I’d let the barm go for 3 days so the acids built up (although, in truth, the pH never dropped below 4, so it can’t have been too bad).
The new loaves continue to have the crackly crust and irregular, open, chewy crumb as the first two batches. Is this a trend, or just an early end to the flavor-building process ?
I reread Monica Spiller’s barm-bread recipe and was reminded that high-acid doughs can create loaves of diminished aspect. That is, the acids soften the gluten so much that the bread doesn’t rise as it should. I don’t see evidence of that here, although I admit my loaves aren’t as tall as I’d like, in general.
The obvious answer to that question is to use higher-gluten flour, but the tradeoff there is bread that gets completely hard after a day, like, I don’t know, dessicated shoe soles, or something.
Of course if you bake bread nearly every day anyway, your definition of “stale” begins to be a little different than most.
Stumbled across a cache of 1996 Mazzoco Zin today. We try not to keep Zins that long; in fact what’s most exciting about this is that it implies that there’s a cache of the 1997 just behind it.
1997 Zin… Mmmmm.
My Journal software provides these features:
For a change of pace we went to the local pub to see if we’d like the band. As it turns out, we did, but that’s not why I’m writing.
A man at the bar had impressive hair, straight and black, down past his belt. He nursed a beer, but was occupied doing card tricks on a fuzzy red placemat. I thought, in passing, that maybe the bar handed out cards and fuzzy red placemats, to accompany the dice cups that are certainly more popular.
The tricks were as impressive as the hair — one-handed cutting, fanning the deck, spreading the cards across the placemat and flipping them all over like dominoes. I admit I stared briefly. What the hell; he was a showman.
Later he took a table with a woman who he’d clearly just met. His attention was nearly evenly divided between the conversation and the cards. The cards won. At one point he’d put the deck back into the box, but within 60 seconds he was shuffling and dealing again. I glanced over from time to time and was wowed repeatedly. At one point he’d done a two-story fanning trick; at another time he held the deck, split into two stacks like a ‘V’, and by jiggling his hand the cards would fall evenly into two piles. A third time, I kid you not, I glanced over to see flames coming out of his hands. What’s up with that?
He left soon after that. I was amused at the sight of him carefully rolling up the fuzzy red placemat — not bar property after all.
The second batch with the new starter came out of the oven a few hours ago. The crust was amazing, a record-setting crust, a crust about which books might be written: crisp and crackly over a chewy crumb, just like bakery bread never is. The flavor was, ahh, hell. It was bland.
Peter Reinhart writes that new starters take a few weeks to develop their “full complexity of flavor.” So I’m going to hang out and bake bland bread for a few weeks in hopes that Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus brevis take residence in this frothing slop that smells, I must admit, like an unkempt locker room.
