Tonight, I tried my hand at keto yeast "baguettes" again, but this time, I used an adjusted recipe that took out all the flaxseed and increased the amount of almond flour and oat flour to make up for the absence. The loaves came out a bit more suntanned than last time, but as you see, I learned my lesson about leaving the "butt crack" on the top of the loaf. I even scored the loaves with my scissors, as you often do with regular bread, to prevent cracking during oven spring (when the loaf expands). The results were suntanned but, overall, not burned.
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| more the effect of a shadow than a burn |
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| looks plausibly bready, like last time |
As before, the resultant bread was too chewy, but the bitter taste that got worse as I ate the bread last time was barely perceptible this time. This is a much better-tasting loaf. I'm going to do one more experiment, though—this time removing all the oat flour and using only flaxseed meal. I suspect this flaxseed-heavy bread is going to be very bitter (because I think the flaxseed is responsible for most of the bitterness), but I'm still going to risk baking up a batch just to be sure. What if the flaxseed-heavy "baguettes" taste better than this batch? That'll be confusing, but it might mean that the combination of flaxseed and oat flour is what's causing the bitterness. But I suspect the flaxseed, without the oat flour, is going to be bitter as hell. More on this soon.
Yeah, it does look plausibly bready. Glad to see the absence of a butt crack as well. But it is actually pretty unusual to score a loaf of bread with scissors--usually it's done with a single blade (a razor blade, a very sharp knife). I have done it with scissors before, but with regular bread it will generally create sharp points near the scores.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I'm aware of the use of the lame to score bread, but I've seen a few videos where the person resorts to scissors for scoring. I'll see if I can track a couple video links down for you. You're right, of course, that bakers use a lame more frequently than they use scissors; my only point is, based on what I've seen online, the use of scissors isn't rare. At least one YouTuber (Chef John? Brian Lagerstrom?) even jokes about tapping down those funny points left by the scissors.
ReplyDeleteSo! Some links.
ReplyDeleteGoogling "scoring bread with scissors" brings up a bunch of results from all over, with scissors sometimes serving as a companion for a lame, or being used alone but in a deliberately artistic/artisanal way.
- Chef John on the practicality of using scissors
- a YouTube search on "score bread with scissors"
The point here is only to say that using scissors on bread isn't rare. In fact, it's rather common. Is it what the majority of bread-makers do? No, of course not. But as Chef John says in his above-linked video, it's an easy alternative.
I think I saw a John Kirkwood video in which scissors were used in an extremely artistic way. This was less about oven spring and more about producing a certain aesthetic result. Here: it was his "hedgehog bread."