I knew it. When I was at the store the other day, I said to myself that I'd get flour when I make my "real " grocery trip... certainly not now. I was only picking up a few things. So finally I got around to making my next loaf, and sure enough, I only had just over a cup of flour.
As Oliver Hardy would say to Stan Laurel, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into." I need bread. I'm tired of eating potatoes and rice for my starch component. I can't make a ham sandwich on crackers or potato slabs (I mean, I could). I have been experimenting with my bread recipe, tweaking it for lean times such as these. Do I really need 4 cups of flour? Can I make up for a reduction in diastatic power with something else or get by without it?
Well, I had gotten some mixed sorghum-rice-millet flour a while back to cut into my bread recipes, knocking down the gluten for lifestyle-level changes to my diet. I still had about 5 cups of it left. I've already tried cornmeal, and it was okay, but I'm still tweaking the recipe, so that should speak for itself. The last time I cut other flour in, the bread had a certain graininess about it. Well, guess what? I forgot about that. So 3 cups plus 1 cup of regular wheat flour, plus the other ingredients I'm adjusting... coconut oil, salt, yeast, milk, sugar, and water, and I notice how flaky and dry my dough looks. Notice I didn't say dough ball. I never got a dough ball.
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Diastatic is a term you'll hear around beer makers who really know the processes and potential of ingredients in crafting beer. I worked in a supply shop, and occasionally encountered these people. They'd come in with their wonderfully organized notebooks or ask me to download a recipe file from their app. They'd ask about the diastatic of our Vienna vs Munich, how they were shooting for an enzymatic conversion of a certain percentage, and usually had jobs as chemists, programmers, scientists, or accountants. I'd try to keep up but question everything I thought I knew about making anything.
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| Why don't I just buy the things I need? |
Loosely speaking, that enzymatic conversion power is what helps gives bread the rise, its softness and fluffiness. The enzymes in flour convert starches into sugar, which in turn feeds yeast, and the yeast consumes this sugar as food, and its byproducts are mostly carbon dioxide with a little alcohol. And yes, this same Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast is the same used to make products whose alcohol concentrations are intended to be up to about 11%. Can you get drunk on bread? Of course... if you're willing to eat 70 slices.
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I should mention I'm writing this in real time. Usually I do something, then write about it later, typically only the successes and the not-so-crushingly-embarrassing failures. I usually have to add up to 2 tablespoons more water when making dough. It is extremely important to not add "extra water" all at once when making dough. It can go from powdery stiff to pudding soupy all at once, and not even be pliant and stretchy for more than a few seconds. Then adding more flour to get it back pliant can throw the ratio to other ingredients off sync. I digress.
I touched it. The dough that never balled. It wasn't particularly sticky like bread dough should be, but instead like... I don't know if you've ever read about sand casting molten metal, but the texture and resiliency was akin to greensand. How very appetizing. I have read (also) about making bread in times of short supplies, and barring the other things that were not food, breadcrumbs and old bread came to mind. Apparently, leftover yeast and bread starches and sugars remain in bread, and yeast can be resuscitated. There's fascinating experiments where people have baked and brewed with yeast collected from the insides of old brewing and cooking vessels. I mean old! As in several thousands of years old. Of course, they had to make a starter. It wasn't as simple as scraping the insides and going to town.
I have storebought breadcrumbs, and then I have homemade breadcrumbs. My grandmother would collect the heels of several loaves in a tin pan in her (unlit) oven over several weeks. A curious child, I was always in the kitchen, exploring. I'd open the oven, and I was never corrected or questioned, and I would see the curled edges of the dried heels. The heels would get sandpaper rough and dry as bone. No mold would ever dare grow on such a barren, dry landscape. And when there was enough to make a couple cups or whenever she needed it, into the food processor they would go, aka, crumb-o-matic.
Like any other yeast bread, this needed time to rise. Time. More time than usual. Ordinarily I make a loaf of bread in 3 hours flat. I can plan my day around it. This animal, however, took longer. Because it was so weird in texture, I gave it longer to rise to what looked acceptable, i.e., I was not going to wait any longer. But I had to leave, so I put it in the fridge to slow fermentation. I didn't get back to it until the next day (red flag alert). Because I worried the texture might be more dense and crumbly (I'm already planning croutons or a savory bread pudding because I fear this may flop), I wanted to get the mixing paddle out the bottom of the pan before baking. There goes my rise. At this time I noticed just how grainy the texture really was. I needed to soften this up. Of all the things I read about, I opted to mash a couple of (peeled) red potatoes, half a cup or so of breadcrumbs, and a couple teaspoons of cornstarch in milk and fold that mixture into the dough. It improved, marginally.
 Time to commence |
After rising again (and a noticeable sour aroma -- did I just do a really hip thing and make half-gluten sourdough??), I set the machine for a 1 hour bake time. Another disclosure, I'm using a Sunbeam bread machine. It makes cleanup so much easier and it doesn't heat up the house in use. I'm sold. And now we wait. It smells pretty good.
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