OK, Fortune makes fabulous 32″ rolling pins to foster her pasta urges… Do I get points for making four new couches for bringing along loaves of rising bread? Oh yeah – yard and a half of nice basic duck aka canvas, a little bit of pressing, a little ripping, some very simple edge finishing and voila – let the little loaves lounge comfortably.

By ripping the fabric hunk into quarters, I got four nice fat rectangles that are a little bigger than my original “pastry cloth” come couche which turns out to be the same size as my bigger tea towels. Now I’m ready to make more than one batch of bread at a time, no prob.

I can learn a lot of things from books and pictures. I can learn some things by comparing internet sites. Every once in awhile though I wish for a human being style teacher.

As luck would have it, I turned on the little kitchen TV just as Julia Child was introducing Lauren Groveman to make pumpernickel bread (segment one of that show). OK, there were all the normal players — molasses, instant coffee, chocolate and an unusual addition – prune filling! I enjoyed watching Ms. Groveman mix the dough by hand and knead it vigorously. I was amazed to see her really bang the heck out of it at the end of the first rise. After a little more working the dough, she rolled the dough into a flat rectangular-ish shape and started to shape the dough. She was quite forceful in tamping the roll onto itself as it became a loaf shape. Rather baguette-shaping-like as Julia pointed out. But then, the surprise!

Ms. Groveman pushed her hand deep into the end of the loaf. Think that you have formed a tube by rolling up the dough, there’s actually room to put your fingers inside the center of that roll. She then elongated the ends of the tube. Folding the “ears” she formed, she crimped and tamped them into the under surface of the loaf.

Holy cow! Now THAT was a useful thing to see. She explained that the dough really needs to be told what to do, and you want to prevent those big air pockets from forming where the dough ends come together. AH HA!

I’ve often wished I could take a bread baking class, say at King Arthur… ok, I’d probably flip out if I could take a class with St. H, but what I really want to learn is how to shape loaves and deal with that part of it. And that probably is best learned by watching an experienced set of hands do their thing.

And now for something completely different. My brain is a little fried due to a bunch of different reasons but I wanted to use up the last of my yeast so I could put the whole new package of yeast in its container. Ummm does that sound like a weird reason to make bread? Not really.

Anyway, for some reason I decided I’d make Pinewoods camp dark bread. Years ago I’d begged the recipe from the camp cook, but it made 25-30 loaves. I tinkered with it, noted that it was way sticky, but as I recall it made decent bread. As I see now, strangely the recipe is in cups and measures rather than weight. Hmmmmm, well I should be able to fix that if I weigh things as I make it this time. And, I thought, I could also deal with sticky dough now as I couldn’t back then.

So it began. I took my cut-down version and put it together, measuring out the volume and weighing it. That went along ok. The dough is white, rye and whole wheat flours so it’s pretty heavy compared to the weekly ciabatta. I let “pearl” the kitchenaid do her thing and the dough came together. It wasn’t as sticky as I recalled, but predictably it was pretty dense.

I tucked it into the microwave with the door ajar to let the light warm it. It rose amply in 90 minutes, so I shaped it and put it back to rise again. Not bad in another hour so I fired up the oven, hotter than I had noted in the past. The original recipe didn’t come with much baking instructions so I know I was winging that part.

While it was baking (this time with a properly steamed oven and with one loaf being slashed pre-bake) I sat down with St. H to figure out how the baker’s percentages worked out. Fascinating. First off, in typing up the cut back version I had left out one ingredient all-together. I made up for it today by adding just a splash more water for hydration! But other than that, the percentages were just about spot on. By this I mean that the cut back version was very close to what I estimated the total recipe to be using the numbers I had. Cool.

Now I have to wait for it to cool a bit so I can see what the inside looks like. Understandably, the slashed loaf is more relaxed and folky looking. The un-slashed loaf is round and tidy.

St. H comments that when you do the numbers you can see at a glance if the proportions of the recipe are reasonable. Totally, and with the molasses that I deleted accidentally, the total hydration was great for a nice dough. So until next time…

Update: No big stretch to imagine that without the molasses the bread was, um…., not the best tasting! Not horrific and not as bad as I thought it would be but certainly not the yummy bread of my memory. Try try again.