For the past year and a half I’ve been trying to generate a healthy dose of steam in my extremely well vented gas oven. Steam that would be present in good volume for at least the first 15 minutes. My experimentation had mixed results. The bread tastes great, but I want the appearance be as good as the taste.
Grissini are pencil-thick bread sticks, 14 to 16-inches long, and easily made in a few hours. The dough is mixed, bulk fermented for an hour, then divided, rolled, and baked at 380F.
I tweaked Jeffrey Hamelman’s formula from Bread by using garlic infused olive oil and adding two ounces of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
"Cheese Bread" is a rather drab description of this strongly flavored bread, so I decided to give it the name of the cheese I used.
The overall formula (which includes a stiff levain) is:
Bread flour - 100%
Water - 60%
Olive oil - 5%
Salt - 1.5%
Yeast - 1% (or half that amount if you plan to retard the bread overnight)
Parmesan cheese - 20%
Inspired by Hansjoakmin's [url=http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10753/loaf-and-something-coffee][u]five-grain rye sourdough[/u][/url], I decided to try a sourdough rye. I chose Hamelman's Flaxseed bread, which is a 60 percent rye, because I've never tasted such a rye (let alone baked one). Plus, flaxseed is good for you.
My daughter’s birthday is this week and as she loves hearty, artisan breads, I decided to bake Jeffrey Hamelman’s sourdough seed bread instead of a cake.
I used King Arthur bread flour and Arrowhead Organic rye. The seeds were purchased from an organic food coop. The recipe was tweaked a bit.
Day one (of three): Assemble the liquid levain, soak the flax seeds, and toast the sunflower and sesame seeds:
Liquid levain:
4.8 oz. bread flour
6 oz. water
1 oz. mature culture
