Advanced Bread and Pastry

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1. semi-extrinsicSep 2018
   To the downvoters: please review e.g. Ch. 6: "Flour Technology and Dough Conditioners" of Michel Suas' classic textbook "Advanced Bread and Pastry". Or check the Technical Data Sheet of your local flour producer, you will find i.a. niacin, iron in some complex, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin and folic acid additives.
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2. SyzygiesMay 2018
   I wouldn't call this "An engineer's guide". It's a lay guide written by a German using metric. If one wants an engineering level of scientific expertise, look at "Advanced Bread and Pastry" by Michel Suas.

   For example, we grind our own flour, sieving out the bran but including fresh germ, for a spectacular difference in flavor. However, bread flour needs to be aged, or else the loaves will fail to rise properly. However, aging home-ground flour will turn it rancid and grey. The search keyword for this issue is "green flour". Suas has a solution: Add 30 parts per million of ascorbic acid, as a dough conditioner.

   How does one reliably add such a small quantity of ascorbic acid, in a commercial bakery or at home? A true engineering problem. Thoroughly mix ascorbic acid 1:20 with white flour. Now take some of that mixture, and thoroughly mix it 1:20 with white flour. One now has a 1:440 mixture one can actually weigh.

   This made all the difference in the world in my sourdough bread baking.

   We grind using a Wolfgang Mock KoMo Classic Grain Mill, and sieve using a #25 Gilson 12in Round Test Sieve in an 8 quart Vollrath steel bowl. We hydrolyse overnight; an hour is just genuflecting. We add 350g of water for steam, as popularized by Thomas Keller; a few spritzes of a spray bottle is an ineffective 10g of water.

   To convert that much water to steam takes a lot of mass. Indoors, we use a Vollrath Company 68369 Bake/Roast Pan filled with several spools of stainless steel chain. I plan to add pieces of aluminum plate to increase the mass further. Outdoors, in a Komodo Kamado ceramic charcoal cooker, we use a giant cast iron skillet with the handle sawed off, also filled with chain. I use a slab of ice outdoors, to buy time.

   It takes 80 calories to thaw a gram of ice, 100 calories to bring that gram to the boiling point, and a whopping 540 calories to then turn that gram of water to steam. By weight, steel holds about 13% as much heat energy as water. These numbers explain why one needs so much metal to boil the water, and why it hardly matters whether the water starts out as ice or hot water.

   For example, to turn 350g of cold water into steam, using metal heated to 450 F (132 C above boiling) takes about 28 pounds of metal. To turn ice into steam (giving one a slower fuse) takes about 32 pounds of metal.

   What does the steam do? It isn't simply keeping the crust damp, or one would far more easily spritz the dough. (In grade school a teacher tried to tell us that candle wax slowed down the burning wick; similar skepticism is called for here.) The dough is the only thing in the oven cold enough to condense steam back to water. The energy used to turn water to steam is delivered to the bread as the steam turns back to water. Physics abounds in conservation principles, and this is one: The energy has to go somewhere. As a thought experiment, imagine bashing the bread with a baseball bat, with all your force. Then imagine spritzing with a plant mister. Trust your intuition; which is more force? As a second thought experiment, imagine spritzing your bare hand and sticking it into the hot oven for a few seconds. Now imagine sticking in your bare hand as you turn 350g of water into steam. In which scenario do you then imagine a visit to the emergency room?

   Scale matters.

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