NEW MODERN FORMULA – SEPTEMBER 15TH

Claudia, so impressed with your loaves!

Grateful that the new formula is hitting a high note!

Thank you for your continued dedication to our bread giving mission!

Katherine

I learned to bake bread through community loaves. I’ve donated 7 times, and today I baked the most beautiful loaves to date. I admit that I’m pretty pleased with myself, but mostly I’m in awe of the process of bread making. With practice it’s getting easier, and my loaves are evolving. I tried a couple of new techniques after reading Katherine’s New Modern formula step by step tutorial. Katherine explained that our hands and fingers are sensitive to the feel of the yeast and salt being absorbed, and to the tightness that comes when adding salt. I was curious about this, so I combined my autolyse and poolish in a new way, twisting off chunks of autolyse  into the poolish, working in the yeast, then the salt, stretching and folding until I had a consistently dense mass, all evenly combined.  Then I combined the oatmeal mix and did maybe 30 minutes of slap and fold until I achieved the windowpane test. Taking more time to combine individual ingredients made me more aware of the changes happening in the dough. I could feel the grains of yeast and salt disappear.

The new loaf shaping technique is a game changer.  My loaves are round and smooth on the top. Degassing is genius, and so is rolling the dough from the top down, pressing forward against the surface of the countertop to create strength in the dough where it’s needed most: the top.

I baked my loaves for 48 minutes. 8 minutes more than usual. They’re a nice rich amber brown all over.

4 loaves cooling on my rack, sitting tall. I’ll package them up tomorrow.
I love how they turned out.

Claudia- Rainier Beach

I made 4 loaves today using the new Modern and they came out really well.  I did them the same way I did before, following the whole process to bulk, in two batches then mixing together for the bulk ferment.  The loaves came out great.  I think this formula and method was actually easier to for my smaller Kitchen Aid to handle.  It didn’t seem to heat up as much and really did a good job of mixing in everything.  Here is the proof!

“Wow!” That was my husband’s reaction when he walked into the kitchen today and saw my first batch of loaves using the New Modern Formula. The formula and the informative videos resulted in loaves that looked noticeably better than my previous attempts–and I’ve been at this for nearly a year!

Thanks for the terrific support for us bakers. Much appreciated!

I have a 6 qt kitchen aid, and was making 4 loaves. My machine really struggled too ( never did with old formula). I tried dividing the dough when my machine overheated several times, but it still struggled and overheated. If the oatmeal mixture were added during the main mixing time rather than adding at the end do you think that that would loosen the dough enough that the mixer would handle it better?
Otherwise the enddought was very nice and loaves looked good.

Ann Daaga

My Viking 7 quart mixer really struggled with this recipe.  I was unable to mix the entire batch at one time.  I’ve always been able to mix it all with the Classic recipe.  Even after very carefully weighing each and every ingredient, the dough was very thick and heavy, causing the mixer to shut down numerous times.  The loaves came out short and squatty.

I’ve been baking with the Classic recipe for over a year.  I’m going back to that next time.