(Posts tagged bread)

@bbcwhereareyou

As someone who's had to bake gluten free for several years, watching ppl do shit like this with regular bread feels like literal space age magic to me. Gluten free dough is a consumptive Victorian child who must be coddled and wrapped in silk and prayed over night and day if he stands half a chance of making it to adulthood as anything but a slab of featureless rice mush, and regular bread bakers are out here making whole ass sculptures and quilts and shit. Screw riches and eternal youth, baby, if the devil was real i'd sell my soul in a heartbeat just to be able to rip apart one of these loaves like a feral hog. If you're intestinally capable of digesting gluten I need you to do something for me right now and close your eyes and spend a moment treasuring this fact. and then go and deep-throat a baguette in my honor

what people think turning the oven to 600 degrees for 10 minutes will do

ok sure, fine, bread and pastry fancam

This was gonna be a comment but it got too long.

So looking at the process, the steaming is completely incidental to the main cooking - it's the final step and I'm… genuinely not sure what it's doing. You do not steam baked goods at the end because it turns the crust rubbery.

I think what Senshi is actually doing is closer to baking - the vessel that far from the fire is as close to indirect heat as you're going to manage without an oven. I think what the writer means by "steaming," because we don't see him add any water to the pot neither in, is just letting the bread finish "baking" in the vessel. To get the finished product I think you actually want a dutch oven here.

And sure enough, if you google "campfire dutch oven bread" you get a very credible approximation of Senshi's final loaf.

You'd have to tweak it for a home oven and getting the "buns", but that process should yield you what you're looking for.

The extra bit of confusion is that the anime calls for "strong flour" in the English subs, which doesn't appear in the English dub, nor any scanlations I can find. That's broadly "bread flour" (as I'm sure you know, I'm just explaining for others), but the inconsistency is interesting. I'm also not convinced that bread flour is best for this.

If anyone has access to the original manga, they could check if Senshi says "強力粉" (strong/bread flour) or report what version of "粉" he uses.

okay so disclaimer that I'm not a professional baker first but:

gave me an incredibly close visual representation of senshi's camp bread, and the new place I've moved into has a small backyard and one of the household's miniature bbq seems to be back there.

It's winter right now but I could theoretically get some charcoal briquettes and do this as close as possible to the anime bread without having to light actual fires.

the next issue is this:

vs

now, it's not the yeast adjustment that has me, since I know by vibes at this point how to raise starters and levains to make up for volume and bacterial culture differences.

it's the milk and eggs.

one of the defining things about rolls, I find, is the softness that milk and butter add. senshi's recipe barely has any fat in it other than the olive oil from the fire trap, so I'd be losing a lot of softness. His recipe doesn't have egg either, so I'd be losing structure.

in addition to that, the liquid:flour ratio is very different. Roll recipes usually have around a 1:3 liquid to flour ratio (eg 0.5Cwater+1.5Cmilk:6C flour). I don't know what hydration level Senshi's starter is at but it looks pretty 1:1 from the comic and anime, meaning that his has around TWICE the liquid in it proportionally, since 160:250 is abouuut 1:1.5

......

you see THIS IS WHY I WAS HOPING SOME SUBREDDITOR FIGURED IT OUT FOR ME

I JUST DROPPED EVERYTHING TO DO M A T H

I sense an opportunity to pass on one of the greatest lessons my Scoutmaster taught me!

Counting coals for Dutch ovens is the normal method, but it's also really inconsistent! Different size lumps or briquettes, coals getting smaller as they burn down, etc! So here's what you should do instead: Rings!

Basically make a ring around the perimeter of your Dutch oven under the bottom, and then put the listed number of rings on the top! You'll get much more consistent heat, and better cooking results!!

This blog post goes into additional detail if you want it!

were doing this folks were making this happen

also I know @bitternest irl so we're gonna have a proper go at trying to get close to senshi bread as possible without fucking up its structure some time this week fingers crossed

Okay so, prelimnary-POC-that-I-didn't-think-would-work: done.

It, uh. Worked.

I legit cobbled this recipe together out of three separate ones, so there's a lot of room to improve, but here it is:

Ingredients

• bread flour: 250g
• water: 160ml
• yeast: 1 standard packet
• sugar: 30g
• salt: 3.25g
• olive oil: 35g

Steps (notice: if you don't have a stand mixer, I'm sorry, I'm useless at kneading and haven't done so manually in over a decade):

1. Warm water to 110F.
2. Whisk the warm water, yeast, and 15g of sugar together in the bowl of your stand mixer. Cover and allow to sit for 5 minutes.
3. Whisk remaining dry ingredients together in a bowl
4. Add half the dry ingredients to your now-bloomed yeast mixture
5. Using a dough hook, beat/mix ingredients together for 30 seconds
6. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, then add remaining dry ingredients and olive oil
7. Set your standmixer to knead, and let it knead for 5 minutes
8. Dough is done if it springs back if poked lightly, or passes the widowpane test
9. Cover bowl and let it rise for 1 hour (1st proof)
10. Oil up your dutch oven
11. Punch the dough down and form evenly sized balls. Place them equidistant from each other in the dutch oven
12. Cover dutch oven, leave to rise for another hour (can probably go for 2 hours here) (2nd proof)
13. Preheat oven to 350F
14. Place dutch oven, covered with its lid, in the oven for 1 hour, removing the lid for the last 10m (could probably stretch to 15m for more colour)
15. Remove from oven and let cool
16. Eat!

I think the double proof did the majority of the legwork here. The dutch oven is good for getting good steam early on, which is important for crust development and airiness, but there's no way in hell it would turn out this light and fluffy without a 2nd proof.

If others want to try variations, go nuts. Tomorrow I'll post the version of this made by a baker buddy using tangzhong, which was a "breakthrough" realization before this fucking recipe just... worked?!?!

Anyways, happy baking

wholly shit, TRULY

Update: two breads from this recipe (one with a sprinkling of red pepper flakes on top because i’m FANCY