Garlic Knots

Easily serves 4 and more

Ingredients:
     400 grams flour (all purpose is fine)
     240 grams water (room temperature)
      25 grams olive oil
       8 grams salt
       8 grams sugar
       2 grams yeast

Preparation:
   
Place all ingredients in the TM bowl and process @ speed 5 for 3 seconds.




Process at knead speed for 3 minutes



Divide into 2 equal parts




Shape into balls






Store each in a container with oil for an hour





Use or place in the refridgerator.

Discussion:

I thought I'd start a thread on bread baking and share some of what I've learned over the years.  The recipe above is just a tool to use for the discussion, but it works too.  It's sitting out in my kitchen now, and I'll bake it later.....

First, I thought I'd go over baker's math.  With baker's math, you make a formula instead of a recipe.  The foundation is that the flours you use equal 100% and the other ingredients are percentages of the flour's weight.  So, in the "recipe" above, the flour is 400 grams which is 100%. 

Liquids are considered "hydration" and the percentage can vary from bread to bread.  Most "artisan" breads are higher percentages, that, in turn, result in more and larger holes.  A dryer bread is more dense.  The percentage is usually between 60% and 80% of the weight of the flour.  In the recipe above, if you add the liquids,  (the water 240 grams and the oil 25 grams) you'll see that it is about a 2/3 ratio (actually 66%) which is on the more dense side.  I make a LOT of breads in the 80% range by hand, but find that a machine is too harsh on them, making it more like a batter than a dough. 

Salt is an important ingredient that helps control the yeast.  Usually it's about 2% of the flour weight.  This works out exactly in our example.

Sugar is optional, and there is no percentage to talk about.  Just be aware, the more sugar you add, the darker your crust will be as it caramelizes, and there is risk of premature burning.

When you add oil (or butter, or any other fat) to a dough, as we have done above, it is considered an "enriched" dough.  I find that the oil in this particular dough tenderizes it.

Yeast is a little more difficult.  It is generally 1% of the flour's weight, but that was based on cake yeast.  With the more common yeasts the math is a bit more difficult.  For the new instant yeasts, you use about 1/3 of the cake yeast weight.  So, the actual math would mean we need 1.333 grams in the recipe above.  I rounded up to 2 grams. That still seems like a small amount.  Remember, we don't want to taste the yeast, but do want to taste the results of the yeast on the flour and sugars.  We need to give the yeast time to work to develop those flavors.  If you add too much yeast, it will rise quickly, but will taste of yeast and not the results of fermentation.

So, we have a basic formula of 100% flour, 60-80% hydration, 2% salt and .33% yeast.  My baguettes are just that with an 80% hydration, so a recipe would be 100 grams of flour, 80 grams of water, 2 grams of salt and .33 grams yeast for a very small loaf   Note that we add those figures to equal 182.33% (for the baguette dough and 168.33% for our garlic knots).  This may be strange, but we'll work backwards in a minute and this number will be very important.

There is another term called DDW which stands for desired dough weight.  This s the total amount of dough we wish to make.  My precision in the dough knot recipe was lost as I was converting back and forth to the metric system, but I was looking for two .75 pound dough balls or a total of 1.5 pounds (approximately 680 grams).  So.... I'm searching for a final weight of 680 grams.  And I know that with the formula I want to use, 680 grams should equal my 168.33 %.   If I divide the 680 by 1.6833 I get 404 grams for 100% or the weight of the flour.  I rounded that to 400 grams for easier math and weighing.  If I multiply the 400 grams by our 66 percent hydration, we will see that we need (rounded) 265 grams of liquids.  In our recipe, I split that between 240 grams of water and 25 grams of oil.  Two percent of the flour weight is exactly 8 grams. and .33 percent of the weight is 1.3 grams for the yeast (like I said earlier, I rounded up for the yeast for other reasons beyond this discussion.  If you add 400 + 240 + 25 + 8 + 8 + 2, you see that we have 681 grams, almost right on target   Using baker's math I can expand the formula to whatever ddw I need.

I'm going to take a break for lunch and put some of the garlic knots into the oven....  I'll reply to this post to continue the discussion and recipe.

"punnet"

Is that what we would call a pint?  That would be a volume measure of .45 liter.

Hi.  Nice to meet you Dorothy.

Wait!  Corn flour is not corn starch?  It's regular flour?

Yep, here too.  Just never heard the term "Rice Bubbles"

ROLF.  Many, MANY years ago, when I was in Grad School, and still learning to cook, I made a tuna noodle casserole, and added the pasta directly to the cooking tuna, in a crock pot.  The pasta essentially dissolved into a pasty yucky mess.  Now, every time I see a recipe that cooks the noodles in the final product, I remember back to that nasty attempt....

I'll give this a try and report back.... but don't be surprised if I leave the macaroni out   Thanks a bunch.

Think I finally worked out my recipe for US style rice pudding.  This is probably sweeter than you guys are used to.... just reduce the sugar a bit   You can find the recipe HERE

Hi Cathy, nice to meet you.  As you can tell from my web site, I love baking bread.  What kind of problems are you having;  maybe I can help you.

I have this habit of making really BIG recipes, usually 4 loaves or more, and I really have to cut back.  Maybe I'll use that as an excuse to reduce and convert some of my recipes over to the TM.