General Discussion > Food & Drink
Loaf Of Bread 'As Salty As Seawater'
Clive:
I loathe having to buy supermarket bread which I have to on the rare occasions I don't have time to make my own. It's tasteless and rubbery. I always use Hovis yeast which never fails to give the bread a good rise.
Rik:
We find flour quality varies, Clive, and there's another variable which we've never identified, but which I feel may be caused by variations in chlorine level in the water (having eliminated everything else we can think of).
GillE:
--- Quote from: Rik on September 02, 2011, 18:10 ---We find flour quality varies...
--- End quote ---
It certainly does. I had this confirmed by the proprietor of Shipton Mill who answered questions at a Dan Lepard workshop I attended earlier this year. He said the quality of grains vary each year and the skill of the miller is not in milling the grain, but in buying the best combination of grain varieties to produce a consistent, good quality flour.
There are some bakers who use only filtered or spring water but Dan Lepard said he's never noticed any difference and uses whatever tap water is available.
Rik:
Interesting, Gill. We've certainly found variations between batches of flour, but then we'll get one or two in the middle of a batch which either turn into bricks or tower blocks. We've never really been able to isolate a cause, and given the rest of the ingredients are constant, water was our 'best guess' culprit.
GillE:
My guess would be your problem is with your yeast, Rik. I've been using a tin of dried yeast for my bread with a use-by date of 2013 but the last two batches of bread failed to rise properly. For my most recent bake I used a sachet of dried yeast given to me by Shipton Mill at the Dan Lepard workshop and the result was a superb loaf.
Yeast can also fail when it comes into direct contact with the salt.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version