Curds and Ways

Bless me, I broke the soup! Positively curdled it. How does one accomplish such a sorry state of affairs, wreck the steaming restorative, as it were? Get me a cookie to ease the pain.

When making soup on a chilly day, you need only a dairy ingredient and high heat to find out how curdling - or "breaking" - happens. Any soup that contains an egg, milk, cream or buttermilk will curdle if heated too high.

I broke a good soup just this very week. Wunderculinarian Jeanne Ambrose and her daughter, Lindsey, have a fabulous cookbook called Heartbreak Recovery Kitchen, in which they defend the right of everyone to throw a pity party now and then, in good taste, of course. If you jump into the book as I did, you'll find a recipe for Ale-Cheddar Soup With Bacon Croutons, and what could be warmer on a blustery day?

The soup called for half-and-half or milk - and for that reason, I should have held my thermometer or at least my elbow at the ready. When proteins are heated, they may coagulate to the degree that they separate from the liquid, causing that "pieces floating in a pond" look that makes a soup appear broken, or curdled. Heated eggs are particularly known for their curdling ability.

If you have a starch in the mixture, such as flour or cornstarch, that will raise the temperature at which protein coagulation happens, but you have to be careful, just the same. If a recipe calls for "simmering," many chefs agree that the temperature should not exceed 180 degrees, or well below the boiling point. If you boil the soup, you'll be sorry.

Mind the soup and keep watch. Simmer with the gentle spirit of a potions master. The soup is flavorful and aromatic, so handle with care.

Birthday Cupcake

Here's to a milestone birthday today. This red velvet cupcake is for me. I wish myself all the best as I take on another year in the baking and pastry program of a major culinary program that Julia Child attended.

I thank the delicious ladies who took me to breakfast this morning and will now cultivate ways in which to shake off the jiggery effects of too much Joe. Wish me luck, will you? I'm rattling around.

Friction Factor in Bread: Part Deux

Still hungry for more math? Let's calculate the actual friction factor of your mixing machine, instead of assuming it's 20 degrees, as I mentioned in the previous post.

Here's what you do:

1. With your thermometer, temp the room, flour and water, then add these numbers together:

room - 72
flour - 65
water - 75

72 + 65 + 75 = 212

2. Measure the temp of your dough after you've mixed it. Whatever that number is, multiply it by 3.
77 x 3 = 231

3. Subtract step 1 from step 2: 231-212 = 19

Voila! Your machine's friction factor is 19. With that number, you can then calculate how warm or cool to make your water next time you mix a yeasted dough.

Math is more delicious than I ever suspected. And I'm always suspicious with math, number one.

Friction Factor in Bread

Do you remember me saying that water temperature for dough was an important bit of breadology I learned at school? I burrowed into one of the textbooks and found a reasonable explanation of how to figure out the temperature your water should be when making bread for best results.

It goes like this:

1. Let's assume you want your final dough temperature (final meaning after it's mixed) to be 80 degrees. Why 80? Because dough that is too warm or too cool won't behave predictably and move through the 12 steps of dough production in a manner that suggests uniformity and professionalism.

So multiply 80 by 3 (assuming here that you aren't using a preferment as a starter. If you are, multiply by 4). It's a fixed rule. Use 3 in this case.

2. 80 x 3 = 240.

3. Now using your thermometer, take a temperature of the flour and the room, plus 20 degrees to allow for the friction caused by mixing (there is a way to calculate this number, but let's keep things simple for starters). Say the flour comes out to 68 and the room is 72, and the friction is 20. What should the water temperature be for your dough?

4. 68 + 72 + 20 = 160. Now subtract 160 from 240 like this: 240-160 = 80.

5. 80 degrees is the number you want your water to be before you add it to the dough.

Please don't get all analytical here and say "hey, you started with the number 80, so why not just go with 80?" Well because frankly, the room and the flour were fairly warm in this example. Suppose the room was ghastly scorching, or you had stored your flour in the fridge. You need to take those conditions into account to get the best result for your bread.

Not to preach but ingredients cost money, so why throw good money after a bad result? The equation above gets interesting when you have to make the water very cold, because it flies in the face of what you've thought all along about yeast needing a sort of balmy bath water in which to spring to life.

And speaking of yeast, keep it simple, too. In general, use no more yeast than is necessary in the recipe. Adding more yeast will not improve the flavor, quite the opposite. It will speed up fermentation, but that can be a bad thing. When it's too fast, the dough doesn't develop the depth of flavor you're looking for.

Long, slow and cool is what you want.

Feeling Half Baked

Dueling Margaritas is not always about taking the next big bite, though often that's what fascinates me. There are many outstanding food blogs out there and no shortage of tasty recipes from Bon Appetit and beyond. I have yet to discover the ingredients for outdoing the experts, so at times I just pick myself up, dust myself off and think of something else to do.

As you can see above, in one flight from the kitchen, I knitted my cowboy boots a sweater.  This craned a few necks at the rodeo in Dubois, Wyo., when they saw the "Lucky Devil" sweaters.

What do you do when you've gotta do something different?

(Photo by Skeeter Hagler)

Bread Alone

I am eating handfuls of foccacia from the freezer, and to throw in a few more "f's," I am feeling fit to be fried. That is because we have to change our longstanding email addresses and switch our ISP package. One doesn't think how connected we are to those little email addresses until they vanish. And then voila; you are spending hours cleaning house on your email folders, notifying friends and eating fistfuls of old bread that once was good about four months ago. Switching tactics from whining to wonder of everything, let me refresh with a few Twizzlers and try a different outlook.

This fall I had a marvelous and gifted Chef Instructor for the breads and viennoiserie class. Although I added several new burn to my arms - they might as well be tats - I learned incredibly good things about bread. I've always had a strong and passionate relationship with bread of all shapes and sizes - but I didn't know that in each loaf, there are secret relationships that make large differences in outcome, just like life. All bread is based on relationships between flour and everything else. Salt and yeast have a relationship; sugar and protein, butter and eggs, it goes on and on. Each ingredient affects another in such unusual ways that you could spend your whole six weeks just looking at reactions in mixing bowls, our version of the petri dish. Each of these relationships has a percentage tied to the weight of the flour.  I'm not here to explain how this works; for that you can read in Peter Reinhart's book "The Bread Baker's Apprentice." 

Just know that with the following percentages of ingredients, you can create an original bread recipe that is unique to your household:

Ingredient Levels

Flour 100%
Hydration (such as water)  65-70%
salt 1.8-2.25%
fresh yeast 1.2%
sugar 0-15%
fat 0-15%
herbs 0-1%
nuts/seeds 0-20%
dried fruit/cheese 0-20%

You're thinking Mama Mia, where are you going with this? Here's how it works in baking. Using the weight of the flour in your recipe, you can calculate how many ounces each OTHER ingredient should weigh in order for the bread to come out right. Some recipes don't have fat and sugar, herbs and nuts, and that's fine. But if you want them in your recipe, you need to add them in correct proportions for the best outcome.

One of our class projects required us to create an original recipe, using the structure of math percentages, and to use only ingredients from an approved list. I loved it. Such a challenge made you think about the relationships and how best to work them. How do you actually DO the math?

I'll tell you how. Decide the percentage of each ingredient (except the flour; it is always 100% or, if you're using more than one flour in the recipe, must add up to 100%) you want in your recipe. Base your numbers on the percentage ranges I just gave you above. Now add up all the percentage numbers in your recipe to get a total baker's percent. For example, if we used all the highest numbers from the list above, the total would come to: 229.45%.

That is your total baker's percent. Now what? Well, how many ounces of dough do you want to make? Let's just choose a number, say, 60 ounces of dough. OK, it's simple division from here. Divide 60 by the total baker's percent, 2.2945 (remember, you have to move the decimal over 2 places to the left when turning the percent number into something you can plug into a calculator). The result is: 26.15 (rounding up to the 100th place).

What does 26.15 stand for? That's the weight of the flour in your new recipe. From there, you multiply that flour weight number by each of the ingredient percentages to get your recipe weights. For example: 1.00 (100% times 26.15) = 26.15, and that's your flour weight. Now take salt at 2.25%, or .0225 x 26.15 = .59. And that is the weight of your salt in ounces. Grab a scale and you're ready to go.

Did I mention we weigh all our ingredients? Now repeat the math step, multiplying each percentage by the flour weight and fill in all your new numbers for weights. Easy, yes? If I can do it, it can be done.

Baker's percent was one of the most outstanding and useful lessons I learned - and there's another one to know about. Friction math. Yes, the impact of heat from friction on mixing dough. I always thought that the water in which you proof the yeast should be like baby's bathwater, not too warm but not too cool. Turns out this is WRONG. Sometimes the water needs to be cold!

Why, you say? Think about it: You can't do much about the air temp or the ingredient temps, but you can alter the warmth or coolness of the water you add. And if you can control the temperature of your final dough such that it falls between, say, 75 and 78 degrees, it will always perform in a predictable way that results in a good ending. To do so, you need to take into account the air temperature, flour temperature, even the temperature created in a mixing bowl by the process of mixing - the friction temperature- before you know how cool or warm the water you use should be.

I was going to try and explain how to calculate the friction factor, but you know what? Here's information on how to calculate the temperature your water should be.

Play with it. And when you're through mixing your dough, take its temperature and see where you land.

Play dough.