24 hour bread

Twenty-four hour bread

Usually bread makers complain that bread takes too long to make. But things look a little different in times of lockdown. Whereas we usually have trouble finding time to do things, just now it can seem like we have too much time to fill, and not enough to fill it with.

Making bread certainly takes time. But the wise man said, it doesn’t have to take your time. You can fairly easily work bread into whatever kind of timetable you happen to be working to.

In the old days, proper bakers used to prop a piece of wood over the rising dough and snooze through the night, safe in the knowledge that when the bread was sufficiently risen it would knock the wood off and wake them up. Hence the name “sleepless white” at the Handmade Bakery in Slaithwaite.

If you walk past the Barbakan deli in Manchester about 3 a.m. (probably after a late night curry) you will smell the bread baking ready for breakfast. During lockdown, they have taken the drastic step of limiting their bread offerings to just these -

At the Tartine bakery in San Francisco (where they basically have one loaf - the Tartine sourdough) the lazy bakers use the fridge to retard their dough so that they can do their work after breakfast, and the bread can be ready for tea time. Not a bad plan.

The rest of us are stuck with what Jamie Oliver would call our “3 hour bread head” on - rise, knock back, bake. In a sense this is not so very far removed from the thinking behind the dreaded Chorleywood process, which aims to reduce 3 hour bread to 60 minute bread. We want to make bread in whatever is the minimum amount of time that can do the job properly. But what does properly mean? And who decided that making bread was a 3 hour job in the first place?

Peter Gott of Sillfield Farm quite rightly questions the way our food industry works. When asked “what is the lowest price he can accept for the meat he produces?”, he says: no! The question should be “what is the highest price the customer can accept for the meat?”. That is the standard of meat he wants to produce, and even if it is not the price the customer wants to pay, it is the standard of meat the customer wants to eat.

So why not apply the same thinking to bread? Why ask “what is the minimum time I must set aside for bread making - 3 hours? 2 hours 1 hour?” That is the Chorleywood process mindset. Instead ask yourself “what is the maximum time I can spare to make the best bread I can make?”. That is the Peter Gott mindset.

The happy truth is that allowing 24 hours for bread making actually need not “waste” any more of your precious time than rushing to the oven in a couple of hours. You just spread your 20 minutes of TLC across 24 hours. If anything, it takes less effort to bake that way because you can fit in the odd 5 minutes here and there whenever you like. Say, when you put the kettle on, or let the cat out. Job done.

Far from wasting time, if you can spare it 24 hours to do its own thing, your yeast will use every minute of the time to break down your flour and develop the flavour and texture of your bread. So it’s a win-win - absolutely no pressure to get stuff done for your bread making, and a much better loaf at the end of it.

This idea first came my way when I heard Elizabeth David talking about it on the radio. It was just a throw away line really, but she said she was using very little yeast these days, and letting the dough rise very very slowly.

When you do sourdough, the golden rule is to let the dough take its time, watch what is happening, and react accordingly. All I’m saying here is try doing the same with everyday bread!

I’ve found this method so very satisfying that I don’t do it any other way now. I always start the bread off the day before baking. Some of you will have heard me say all this before, when I’ve advocated making a sponge the night before baking. So what’s the difference?

Making a sponge is a good way of allowing some of the dough to develop for a long time - maybe 12 hours The rest of the ingredients are added when you want to make your bread, and the bake continues at “normal” speed. This is really an adaptation of a sourdough technique. With sourdough you make a sponge to avoid the yeast going “over the top” and making the bread too sour.

Applying the same idea to yeasted bread is a sort of compromise, allowing some extra development, but not letting the batch get over proved.

With 24 hour bread, you avoid the danger of over proving by drastically cutting back on the amount of yeast you use. Instead of using the traditional 7g for a loaf, you will find that 1g of yeast is easily enough to make a loaf, provided it has enough time to do the job in a leisurely way.

What happens is that the tiny amount of yeast works away as normal, but you won’t see any sign at first, because there won’t be much gas produced for several hours. During the day, whenever you feel like it, you can give the dough a little work - just a couple of stretch and folds and back into the bowl. Before you go to bed, knock it back properly, because it will grow significantly overnight. Then in the morning knock it back and shape it, putting it into the basket or tin. The final rise in the tin or basket tends to take about 3 hours, but by that stage the bread will be beautifully developed and ready to bake.

If you start the whole process off at about midday, then the bread will be ready for the oven about midday the next day. You won’t be disappointed with the flavour!

I have been told that this method can result in a loaf that spreads rather than rises in the oven, so it is worth paying attention to the shaping stage, where you should be tightening the dough up as much as you can without tearing it. Bake with Jack has a good video about how to do this.

So finally, here is my recipe for a 24 hour loaf. You can vary just about anything apart from the amount of yeast!

450g strong white flour
50g Heron Corn Mill rye flour
1g (one gram) of fast action yeast
6g of salt
350g of water

Optional extras -

20g of linseeds whizzed in the coffee grinder for 2 seconds

10g of rye flakes
1 teaspoon of malt extract
A glug of olive oil 

Mix up all the ingredients well in the bowl, making sure you have no dry bits

Cover and leave in the bowl for 30 minutes
Turn out and knead for 5-10 minutes
Return to the bowl and cover
At bed time, knock back and return to the bowl
After breakfast, turn out, shape (ideally twice as in the Bake with Jack video) and put in a basket or tin for the final rise
Leave for about 3 hours till well risen
Bake in a very hot oven for 10 mins and then turn down to 200 or 180 fan for another 40 minutes
Rest on a rack till cold

Tip number 1: to avoid developing a crust on the dough, oil the bowl before putting the dough back into it. Put the dough in upside down (rough bit on top) and pull the edges of the dough into the middle and press down to tighten up the dough. Then turn the dough smooth (and oily) side up again and cover with cling film. Tuck the cling film down the sides of the dough, and it will keep the surface moist all night, even as it rises.The oil will stop the clingfilm sticking to the dough.

Tip number 2: if you use this method for wholemeal flour, especially stoneground , use a little more yeast. A quarter of a flat teaspoonful should be about 1.25g which would work fine. And you could always consider buying a pair of high-precision scales. These are accurate to 0.1g and very useful for measuring yeast and salt.

These are 2 single loaves and (on the right) a double loaf in the morning, after rising all night using the 24 hour bread method. You can see the clingfilm has come away in places on the brown loaves, but has worked particularly well on the white loaf -

With any luck your bread will turn out like this -

I've been feeding both my starters (wheat and rye) this week with a view to a weekend treat of some proper bread.

Friday was baking day minus 1, so I made up a white sponge using Dove's white, and a rye sponge using HCM rye. Each sponge started off with a spoonful of starter and a couple of spoons of flour, and roughly the same amount of water. Then I fed again a couple of times during the day, making sure that the volume of the sponge at least doubled each time.

It's worth keeping your starter innocent as long as possible, so it has never been anywhere near pesticides. Therefore an organic feeding flour is a good thing. If it has to be compromised on baking day, then at least it's only the loaf that has ever been near pesticides, and the starter has had a good life up to baking day.

I'm not too thrilled with the Dove's flour for baking with - it just seems a bit dull to me compared to Carr's, organic or not. But this is worth noticing -

Milled and sieved. So it is not roller milled, though it doesn't specifically claim to be stoneground. The bag also says produce of more than one country - make of that what you will.

My preference for white flour for baking with is Carr's over Dove's, based on taste and performance; and Dove's for feeding the starter with, as a matter of principle.

This week, what with the shops being stripped of anything bread-related, I was using Aldi's 55p strong white, as per the bread groups.

The Aldi flour certainly made bread which rose well enough, both in sourdough (at the bottom) and in my 50-50 coarse-and-white 24 hour low-yeast loaf (at the top). But the results in terms of flavour and texture were very poor compared to the Carr's.

I started off with 12 mins at 250 fan and then 40 mins at 190 fan. The white sourdough (bottom right) was really doughy, even after 50+ mins in the oven. I don't mean doughy as in underdone, but really chewy and rather claggy to be honest. It reminded me of my Mum's cobs, made with self raising flour, baking powder and too much salt. Heavenly spread with butter (or was it Stork?) hot out of the oven when we were kids, but really pretty desperate considered as bread.

The Aldi texture was not that great either, despite plenty of TLC -

The 50-50 coarse and white loaf looked considerably less like a wholemeal than the corresponding loaf I made last time using using Carr's.

I introduced a desk rest this time - a second shaping before going into the basket. This seemed to help, as all the loaves stood up pretty well. The 50-50 loaves were quite soft, and tending to spread, as Kate also reported when she tried the low-yeast 24 hour rise approach. The desk rest allows the dough to relax after an initial shaping, but then take at least some structure forward to the second shaping on the way into the basket. It still spread on the way into the oven, but leapt quite well, resulting in a reasonably well risen loaf.

But the overriding impression of this bake is that the Aldi flour is significantly below standard, and not to be recommended when we get back to having an alternative. Carr's is definitely worth an extra quid a bag, even if that means it's three times the price.

Did anybody notice the (sliced but uneaten) chollah on the table in this week's "Friday Night Dinner" on ITV? Definitely more than 3 strands. But they only had one loaf, which is not good form!

Today we took our daily piece of exercise on the railway embankment in Arnside. On the new bridge, you can see a nice set of daffs, and with the morning sun behind, you get a self portrait in silhouette to go with them.

And here's an unusual angle on the sand on the river in Arnside -

Hi everyone.

The world has been turned upside down, without a doubt. This thought has been coming back to me over the last few days, and I finally remembered why. In one of my favourite books - Handley Cross by R.S. Surtees - the hero Mr Jorrocks is supposed to be going hunting, meeting at the pub called The World Turned Upside Down. The name turns out to be a bad omen, and the day is ruined by the weather.

I particularly like the joke near the beginning of this chapter - "Vot next? as the frog said when his tail fell off".










Well, so much for huntin'. How about fishin'?

This is what social distancing looks like in Arnside -

And for those who want to get away from it all -

And if you are wanting an excuse for making sourdough - it's simple! There's no yeast to be had for love nor money.

Ciao for now.

Pete

Hi Everyone

Some of you may know that I wrote a blog 10 years ago for  A River Runs through It  a project based at Heron Corn Mill.
I looked at all the former mill sites on the River Bela and its tributaries - for instance Peasey Beck -what a lovely name on which was sited the Gunpowder works at Gatebeck. I did lots of historical research, found people who once worked in mills and those with stories and then went into schools and helped children imagine what it would have been like to live and work in a small area around your village in a very self sufficient way.
You can still access this Blog on Blogger  by searching for  the title A River Runs through It.

Back soon with some other Crumbs  ......

Welcome to the Bread of Heron blog

Hi everyone, and welcome to the BoH blog!

Just to start the ball rolling, here is some recent bread.