Bread Adventure - Baguettes

Baguettes are great for breakfast or for sandwich.
Home testing 1 & 2 produced dense texture; but today, it turned out just the way I would like.
These test baguettes contain Starter that has been cultured for 10 days.  This particular Starter do contain 15 g of fresh yeast and is meant for Sourdough Multi-grain Bread.  Since I have been babysitting it for 10 days, and 360 g of it needs to be discarded, I decided to use it as pre-ferment dough called for the Baguettes.  Since I don't want too much of one type of bread getting stocked up in my freezer, I made them into round sandwich bread... might have qualified as Boule, if the size is at least 8 in.  But this one is brushed with olive oil and topped with poppy seed.

Previous Baguettes testings.  The outer crust is softer texture than today's.  Lots of spraying and steaming added to its result, but Baguettes only require 2 seconds of steam.  So, I did too much work for these, but now I know how to produce the crust that is soft:

Bread Adventure - Sourdough

In baking, I find baking bread the most challenging.  The yeast, the kneading time, the dough texture-smooth, elastic, enough salt?, steam injection, baking temperatures, all constitutes your final Bread.  Can you eat it? or use it as a paper weight.  With a lots of help from some of the baker blogsites and baking pracitce, I bake twice a  week at home, I think I am finally getting to know the personality of the ingredients involved.  Just like Canneles de Bordeaux or any other French recipes thus far I've tested, the ingredients are very basic, but the outcome of the product is determined by the baker's knowledge and experience with the process, techniques, and heat.

My breads use both home made natural Starter and or pre-ferment with dry yeast.
Baking Adventure Notes:
1.   When the home made Starter (natural grape juice as agent), the Starter dough helps form a very creamy and sticky dough when mixed with the main dough ingredients.
The natural Starter has enough power to ferment the dough the 1st time, very well, however, it seems to fail at the subsequent proofing.  The dough would sit there motionless after hours or even after a day.
This is a science that I will leave for other bread expert blogger http://www.breadcetera.com/
until further testing, . .  
2.  When the home made Starter is mixed with main dough that contain yeast, the dough proofing at 2nd rise is stabilized.
3.  Overall, my 325 watt Kitchen Aid Artisan mixer is no match to our classroom's commercial mixer.  I finally let my mixer just knead till the true window pane - see through membrane is formed, 20 - 25 min vs 8 - 12 min.
4.  Not enough salt will cause not enough browning.  Not enough kneading will cause dense texture.

Sourdough with Poolish -

Sourdough - Long - not enough oven spring, . . .not enough kneading . . .
(The scoring is not to the traditional.)

Sourdough made with home made Starter -

PONCHIK, Your PONCHIK, Then, There is My PONCHIK

April came and gone as quickly as some of the April's windiest nights that blew across my back yard.  It reminded me of the movie The Wizard of Oz.  Surely the next morning, I find my garden objects got moved from one end of the garden to the other end.  But with those winds and rain, all the new plants arrived and thriving.  They really like the extra nutrients the rain brought.  There are more blossoms on the pear and Fuji apple trees; dwarf lemon and lime trees this year got more blossoms than any other year.  The cherimoya tree looks like it took a hit from some of the cold windy nights in April, and top half of the tree seems dead with new leaves at the bottom trunk.  I hope it will survive its 4th year.  In April, I also discovered a very curious pastry called PONCHIK.  It was being sold at tiny bakery - Europe Deli, inside this Koreana Plaza market on Olsen Drive, Rancho Cordova, California.   From the outside appearance of the bakery, only with two glass displays - one for hot and one for cold items, look a bit  ... not so attractive.  But I thought I would try something new - since our baking class team is now assigned to the BREAD lab.  At the first bite, I fell in love with this Russian. . . Armenian PONCHIK, the store owner's husband calls it.  And I can say, "I love PONCHIK."  It has such a chewy and puffy light dough that I ate every bite with delight.  So, as usual, I started to look for some PONCHIK recipe information on the Internet.  There weren't much sites with PONCHIK recipe, but I understood it as the "doughnuts" similar to many other countries'. My friend thought it tastes like the Chinese YAU ZSA GUEI (morning fried doughnut in the form of long .... just imagine your pet dog's snack in the shape of the dog bone, then, imagine it as a long fried dough, about 12 inches long-usually eaten as part of the breakfast with soy milk.)  But PONCHIK is different.  Hope you will have a chance to find a bakery to taste the PONCHIK or make your own.  I found a recipe from one of the web site.  The instruction is incomplete in the procedures, but I improvised.  It turned out great.  Need some improvement on how to enclose the cream without making too much ruffled edges, but here is my photo journal of My PONCHIK.

And here is the mine on the left and Bakery's to the right.

For visiting bloggers to my site, for your convenience, here is the copy of the Ponchik recipe that I used.  Please visit this bloggers for question you have with her recipe.  If you have question with my Ponchik, please feel free to leave me comments.   As I have pointed out, the recipe procedure seems to be 'incomplete'.

PONCHIK

http://mypersiankitchen.com/persian-pirashki/

Yeast 1pkg,

Warm Water 1 cup,

Sugar 1tbs,

Salt 1/2 tsp,

Oil 3 tbs,

Yogurt 1 cup,

Eggs 2

Flour 2-3 cups

Combine first 3 ingredients and let rest for 5 minutes.

Then add next 4 and combine them well.

Add the flour 1 cup at the time, and mix well, you might need more or less flour. Knead for few minutes (The dough should be smooth and not sticking to your hand) and let rest for an hour.

**My 2 cents:  The dough is very wet.  Keep working with it.  Flour your hands and work surface and knead to elastic smooth dough.
Different technique to work with wet dough that require to form into smooth elastic dough:
1.  I have also seen a technique when the dough is very wet to spray the work surface with vegalene, then, flour the top of the dough, then knead.  Of course, the demonstrating chef is a master baker, but I think it's worth practicing.
2.  Also, the technique of Lift and Slap down from shoulder height quickly in repeated motion in Japanese style sweet buns dough preparation seem to work with wet dough also.  The repeated quick motion of the lift and slap down of the dough on the work surface with barely any addition of flour on the work surface will eventually cause the gluten to develop.  It will take about 10 min.  For every 2 min of lift and slap down, give 1 minute of kneading, then repeat the process again three more times.  Try it!  you will have fun! You will have a great workout.
Then, Spray a large bowl lightly with vegalene or vegetable oil and the top of the dough and cover with saran wrap.  Let rise in warm place till double in size.

Roll out.  Shape and fry.  
***I am puzzled with the filling.  It seems that some baker bloggers are saying that they fill the dough with the mixture, then, fry the PONCHIK.  I am going to test it, and see how it would turn out.