/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>4746307
Then you have special active dry yeast. I've gone through a pound of the SAF Active Dry in the last 6 months, and adding it directly to a dough severely limits the yeast's performance. Using the SAF Instant, on the other hand, does not produce the same problem.

I can't say it makes much sense to have two different kind of yeast if they both work "exactly the same, with the same amount." Maybe you use a different brand.

>>4241796
I'm going to be honest with you. Cuts are a bitch. I'd say only 80% of my cuts actually work out. The other 20% collapse or end up not releasing enough tension during the oven spring so that the loaf cracks in some way.

Kneading before you bake is probably your biggest mistake. You want to let the seed air bubbles form during the proofing process. Keep things simple at first: knead the dough to windowpane, bulk ferment it, shape it (making sure to get lots of good surface tension in the dough), proof it until 1.5x-1.75x in size, then slash it and bake it with steam. If you want to have the cut "bloom", then you need to slash at a shallow angle to the surface of the loaf, and about 1/4" deep. If you want the cut to just open up (like my loaf at the beginning of this thread did), then you want to do a cut that is perpendicular to the surface of the loaf. Too many slashes and there won't be enough oven spring to go around to open them all up. Too few slashes and it won't be enough to relieve the stress caused by oven spring and the loaf will either be dense or will crack.

Hope that helps.

>>4096766
Here we go. Slashes turned out a bit wonky, but that's pretty par for the course.

Crumb is very nice. Wound up being quite a bit more whole wheat than I expected, so it's a little dense, but very flavorful.