JonJ's blog

Sourlotti by Abby has a great way for making an 'oat porridge' bread that has worked out well for me before. I think it might be the amount of butter in the soaker preparation that makes it work so much better for me? In any case, for this loaf I decided to eschew the butter and replace it with coconut oil which has been working very nicely for me as a substitute for butter in other recipes too like hamburger rolls.

Danni3ll3 made a bread with sprouted quinoa which was on my mind lately, and while I was prepping this bread I decided to use the white quinoa that I'd started soaking the night before for sprouting in this bread as well, even though it was intended originally for something else. The quinoa seeds didn't get much of an opportunity to sprout, and the stiff quinoa paste that I made out of them seemed flavourless, with only the merest sweet taste. This is what the quinoa paste looked like (basically soaked white quinoa seeds that had been moistened as if to sprout them, but only for 16 hours, and then ground in the food processor. Quite a stiff consistency. I added it together with the levain to the mix with the autolysed dough:

It was a bit bold to use that in this bread, in addition to the oat and flax soaker for which quite a lot is added - about 200g of that soaker was added by lamination to each loaf! But, miraculously it seemed to work out and the dough managed to hold all the extras in it.

Its hard to judge the hydration with these things - nominally a 93% hydration but a lot of that water is locked into the oats/flax in the soaker. And these loaves needed a long bake - 60 mins in total, because of the oat soaker. I squashed the one loaf a little trying to turn it 20 minutes in (when removing the steam trays). It was still very wet, even at that time and shouldn't have been touched.

The bread was nice to eat, and I did find myself choosing it over some of my other frozen loaves for quite a few days after. I would say though that it was fairly mild to the taste - the quinoa and oats didn't bring in as much flavour when compared to a bread like the 5 grain levain which I was mentally comparing it to. I do like the quinoa paste though and will probably try it again - it seemed to bake up nicely, and maybe next time I won't be so impatient and even give the quinoa a chance to sprout.

Derek and Gavin have been baking very interesting breads with (sweet) lupin flour lately. The promise and attraction of these breads is, to put it in Derek's words, "..taste delicious not too overpowering very light in mouth and stomach afterwards..." and "completely devoured in no time!".

So, it was with these thoughts in mind that I made the impulse purchase of a bag of pigeon pea flour and found myself making a sourdough bread with it when I got home from the shops. The bag itself recommended using the flour for baking biscuits and crepes or pancakes. And I found a paper that said that "the bread from 10% pigeon pea flour blend with 2–3% vital gluten and 0.5% SSL had high loaf volume and loaf quality" so went for approximately that amount in the final dough:

When mixing the dough there was a clear pea (vegetable) smell to the dough. Dough was a nice pale yellow colour, which carried through to an attractive golden appearance in both the crust and crumb of the final loaves. When the bread was first cut, I noticed only the very smallest amount some of that 'off' pea smell taste (far less than when working the dough), but that taste note was lost the next day when the sourdough flavour of the bread developed. The starter used was about 2-3 hours past peak (and it did have a small refresher feed, but nevertheless, the sourdough tang was present in the taste).

I'm not completely convinced that pea flour brought all that much to these breads other than the lovely yellow colour, and possibly an improved protein composition. Nevertheless, I've got plans to use it again, perhaps at 5% in a loaf together with semolina to bring out a strong yellow colour.

• Method:
  
      1 h 15m autolyse
  
      Added levain using the dough hook for 1 minutes only (load shedding kicked in and had to stop there).  Completed this with 50 slap and folds
  
      30 minutes later added salt and bassinage of 52g of water that had been held back
  
      15 minutes later an additional 10 slap and folds to bring the dough together after the bassinage
  
      At 2 hours after adding levain, gave it a coil fold
  
      At 3 hours after adding levain pre-shaped into rounds
  
      20 minutes later final shape
  
      30 minutes later into fridge
  
      (next day, 9.5 hours later) remove from fridge while oven heats (for 45 minutes)
  
      Into freezer for 15 minutes
  
      Bake on baking steel together - 220°C for 20 minutes with steam, then 23 minutes without steam at 200°C.

Psyllium husk is usually used in gluten-free or keto style breads where the gel that it forms can act as a binder and helps the loaf to retain its structure without slumping.

For a long time now, I've tried using psyllium husk together with my lower protein flours (around 11.5%) to see if I could make a better bread with these weaker flours and the results have been usually somewhat unclear.

So this post is my attempt to describe in one place some things that I've learnt, both good and bad, about the use of psyllium husk in baking in a non-gluten-free context.

The thing is, you don't need to add psyllium to a wheat bread. The benefit really is that it is a simple way that allows you to dramatically increase the hydration without risk of the dough slumping or baking a flat loaf. The dough becomes super easy to handle, the flow/rheology changes, and the dough holds shape. The crumb retains more moisture to it as well.

What are psyllium wheat breads like, is there an improvement? Initially I was adding around 2g of psyllium husk per approximately 500g of flour, and for these breads the results were unclear. The dough became much easier to handle, but beyond that it was difficult to pinpoint exactly if this was beneficial to the final bread.

Lately I've been reading gluten free recipes that use about ten times as much, around 20g of psyllium. And so I moved up to 20g of psyllium, and whilst it made a beautiful wheat bread with 20g of psyllium, with a beautiful shape, in some ways the crumb looked a lot like those pictures you see of gluten free breads, a little too homogeneous, somewhat unnatural, and not at all like what you expect:

The unnatural looking crumb is visible in the photo above; it must be said though the texture of the bread was quite lovely, soft to the touch and without any noticeable taste change. The shape was good, almost as if the bread was formed in a mould. For this bread the psyllium gel was added at the same time as the levain to the autolysed dough using the dough hook, and the hydration was 87%.

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In another, later experiment I reduced the amount of psyllium down to 6g, and wanted to compare adding a psyllium gel versus adding water by bassinage.

The loaf on the left used bassinage to increase the hydration to 75%;  the loaf on the right used Psyllium gel as the way of increasing hydration to 83% (the initial dough had a hydration of 70%, and was divided in half).

Note the Psyllium loaf had 'snail trails' on the surface, or deposits left on the surface from the gel. It also spread at the score rather than lifting the crust to make an ear, and had a softer crust and moister crumb, although the bassinage loaf had a nicer chew. Besides that they were fairly similar breads. The effort to add the psyllium gel addition by hand is a lot easier than bassinage is.

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Finally, psyllium has its uses to help with recovery from an over hydrated dough - I had issues with my scale and inadvertently mixed up a dough at a hydration of about 86% which was way too high for the flour used. To recover, I added 5g of psyllium husk into the dough, which stabilized it enough to continue to shaping and it kept its shape without slumping when it came out of the banneton. There were lumps from the psyllium, so the dough was not smooth when worked by hand, but this did not seem to carry through after baking.

Once again there is no ear, and there is an unusual upright shape and way in which the loaf opens up. Interestingly, for this bread, the crumb was noticeably moister even one or two days after baking and quite nice to eat.

Roosterkoek (or roosterbrood) are a traditional bread or bread rolls cooked over the braai (BBQ). The name is Afrikaans for rooster ("grilled")  plus either koek ("cake") or brood ("bread"). They are usually eaten piping hot together with the meat.

Many of the recipes are fairly similar and usually include sugar and oil in the dough. Where I differ a little is I like to give mine a little bit of shaping and bake them as pull apart rolls. Also, I'm not a great fan of them if they're cooked directly over the coals, which is the traditional way.

My method is to mix all the ingredients except the oil, with a Danish dough whisk, usually I mix the yeast, water, and sugar together and then add the flour and sugar to that. Then olive oil is kneaded into the dough after about 20 minutes. About 40 minutes after the initial mix the dough is weighed and divided into 9 balls that are shaped into rolls and placed on the dutch oven lid. About 1h15m - 1h30m after the initial mix they have normally puffed up enough to be baked. I like to bake 20 minutes on the cast iron base in the Weber with coals to the side and parchment underneath. Might turn it every 5 minutes so that it bakes evenly.

The lovely thing about them is that not only are they enjoyable to eat, they're also super convenient. If you forget to buy rolls. Or have run out of potatoes, they'll still be there for you.

Last week Natalya Syanova of Natasha's Baking posted a short video of a babka with a cream cheese filling that I just had to make. The filling she used was made with cream cheese, an egg yolk,  sugar and vanilla, so you can imagine the resulting flavour, and she also use a brioche base for it to ensure a super soft and pillowy texture.

Instead of using her brioche recipe though, I used a Tangzhong one from Bread by Elise.

The resulting bread is delicious and so soft, although my guilt-o-meter is off the charts when I think of the cholesterol in it.

baked.jpeg

The crumb is super soft and shreddable with small pieces of cream cheese fat embedded in it and only the very thinnest layer of filling visible in the final bread. I might be inclined to use a more conventional babka dough if I was to repeat as the brioche dough kind of collapsed a little under its own weight while cooling.

And next time I'll chill the cream cheese filling so that it doesn't ooze out during the roll up step of the babka shaping!

texture.jpeg

Benny's 100% wholewheat Hokkaido recipe is the recipe that just keeps on giving, and I keep on seeing miraculous loaves coming from the oven even as the recipe is tweaked and stretched which really surprises someone like me who is used to the experience of failed experiments when things are pushed too far.

One thing about this recipe that you need to be warned about is to not try and bake it late at night because the smell of the loaves as they are baking is so intense that if you're like me you'll want to then stay awake for long enough to let it cool enough to try a slice.

Previously I'd made a dairy free version of the recipe but wanted to stretch it further to see if I could make it without eggs while still making a nice bread. Also, the previous bread used a 'plant butter' that was really just a margarine with good marketing and I wanted to try something better.

In this bread, 14g ground linseeds plus an additional 42g of almond milk were used to replace the 56g of egg that was originally in the recipe. And, this time around I had quite a nice 'vegan butter' which was much less like a factory margarine (see pic, the ingredients were listed as olive oil, coconut oil, soy milk, apple cider vinegar, salt and lecithin).

But the most special ingredient was this bag of Manitoba wholemeal flour that was milled in Israel and baked in South Africa:

A truly international bread.

The one downside to leaving out eggs is that I couldn't get the topping to stick properly. I tried painting the top with melted vegan butter and then sticking the seeds on, which sort of worked, but eggs or something like whey would have given much better stickiness.

I'm not a vegan myself, so tried out slices with the vegan spread and with butter. I must tell you, you can't really beat butter can you, but at least I had something to offer my vegan friend!

The bread itself turned out lovely. I certainly preferred it flavour and texture wise to my previous dairy-free one, but I'm not sure if this was because the vegan butter I used was superior to marge. To be fair, I've only ever made these wholewheat Hokkaido breads with a certain local type of flour, so a large part of what makes this one special is the flour used which seemed to also be finely milled never mind the high protein and great flavour, and I need to try make a bread with this flour that includes all of the dairy and eggs while I still have some left!

Maurizio Leo has quite a nice "Stout country recipe" on his web site, although he has promised an improved version for some years (as he did note that the bread could be better with more beer in the recipe).

I've tried making a few beer breads, with say an IPA or a weiss, did make one too with a local stout but I've always found that beer brings a tightness to the crumb and the flavour has been underwhelming although the stout one wasn't too bad. There was a standing joke with a friend that you'd have to prise my Guiness from my dead hands before I used it in a bread, and yet - here I am, still breathing, writing about using Guiness in a bread.

For these breads I used an entire large (440ml) can of Guiness, and since the can included the famous widget, perhaps the extra froth from nitrogen made a difference, or who knows fermentation is just better with nitrogen. The formula listed is based on using more beer, just as Maurizio suggested, and it worked out nicely.

The boule got 40 more minutes final proof at room temp (stopped the bâtard earlier because the banneton was already at the top, not the best reason for stopping earlier I guess).

These are larger than my normal loaves since it had - 1kg flour plus 250g levain for the two loaves. And baked the bâtard a little darker than I would have liked (was engrossed in a work meeting at the time).

Method wise it was a bit of a mixture of methods. I stuck to the quantities from The Perfect Loaf, more or less, with adjustments for the extra beer of the full can. However, the method used was a little different, mostly because the recipes from The Perfect Loaf have a LOT of stretch and folds, and I usually don't manage them all, but did manage 5 here over the first 3 hours. Also, it had an all in one initial mix with both the starter and salt being added up front. Both loaves were pre-shaped. The bâtard only had linseeds for the topping, but for the boule I was more generous with linseeds, sun flower seeds and black sesame.

Overall these were lovelier breads than I expected. The flavours were lovely, the loaves were larger than my usual and a pleasure to eat.

This was an experiment to see what happens if Benny's 100% WW Hokkaido is done without dairy. The method was fairly faithful to the original recipe with a direct substitution of 'plant butter' for the butter and commercial almond milk in place of milk, even in the tangzhong.

Egg was still retained, I need to give some thought of what I'd replace the egg with (aquafaba?) if this bread is to be made completely vegan. Will probably try another experiment without egg one day, any egg substitution recommendations?

It's interesting, it made a good bread. The taste is a little sweeter, with more of a vanilla edge to it, this probably comes from the almond milk that I used. In fact, I think I prefer the flavour, it goes better with the wholewheat and scent of the wholewheat.

However, somewhat unsurprisingly, the texture of this bread made with butter was better, it didn't 'ball up' in my mouth in the same way, although this difference is still somewhat minor and I only noticed it because I was looking for it. The 'plant butter' that I used is really a fancy margarine, with good marketing, and although suitable for baking, it didn't contain as much avocado (1%), olive (1%) and coconut fat (6.5%) as the pictures on the packaging suggest. In fact, I'm also thinking of trying this one as well with one of the new breed of vegan butters I've seen around lately, those that are high in coconut oil and that include a large amount of nuts like cashew.

-Jon

Kefir yoghurt has been a supplement to my breakfast for many years now, but I wasn't aware that the kefir culture could be used to leaven bread until Abe mentioned it in a comment here. I don't make a typical kefir, as what I make is very thick and like a yoghurt, I use a lot of "grains" (really gelatinous colonies of microorganisms and casein) and leave it in the milk at room temperature until the curd and whey separate (about 3 days at this time of the year) before straining the yoghurt out. What I make is more like a Finnish viili with a texture somewhat similar to 'slimy or perhaps velvety' commercial yoghurt.
 

The yoghurt is acidic and makes your mouth pucker, but I'm so used to eating it now that regular yoghurt now tastes unusual.

To make the levain I simply mixed bread flour and strained kefir in equal parts, and left it out overnight in a container:

Disappointingly, it didn't show noticeable bubbles or growth after only one night. Then it went back into the fridge. And got another night out on the counter the following night. This is what it looked like before using and after having spent two nights out on the counter - some bubbles, but not as dramatic as the yeast water preferments, so in the final dough it was used together with some of my stiff desem starter that I had available, as I wanted to ensure the bake would leaven. Next time though, I will trust the kefir levain more and use it as the sole levain.



The complete dough (barring salt) was mixed and left to sit for 30 minutes, then mixed on slow with the dough hook for 10 minutes, then given a 30 minute rest, and finally the salt was added with some bassinage water bringing the hydration to around 70% (assuming yoghurt is about 85% water). It was then given a lamination and placed in the proofer.

With the two preferments, the fermentation was very rapid. I assume the rapidity means that the kefir levain was raising the dough in concert with the regular sourdough levain. After lamination, it took only a further 30 minutes before it had risen by about a third, so it was immediately shaped and then baked an hour and a half later. At the time of baking the aliquot had reached about 200% - so triple the original volume!



The bread got a little stuck in the banneton and getting it from the banneton to the dutch oven was challenging, which explains the irregular shape!

There was an interesting yoghurt-like aroma in the air while it was baking; and the sour tang from the kefir itself is noticeable in the taste of the final bread.



What is most interesting about this bread is the very unusual crumb texture, soft and a little silky or like a tangzhong bread and spongy mouth feel to it. I am wondering if it is from the fats in the bread (it is different to the breads I've made with buttermilk or oil or milk), or if this is something similar to what the CLAS people get.

The salt flavour was more noticeable too, although the usual amount of salt was used.

Definitely will make it again as I liked the bread, but I also want to see how repeatable this bake is and want to find out what it will be like when the kefir levain is the only levain.

-Jon

Should have made this one sooner. Benny has hit on something really lovely here with 100% WW Hokkaido milk breads, and the recipe is simply superb.

This bake was done by following his 2.0 version of the recipe as his later versions seemed to show that a small amount vital wheat gluten was a good thing.

As always there are some deviations. Obviously my flour was different. I used a 'sprouted' hard-white wholemeal flour for this bread. Normally that flour is a little bland and doesn't make much of a crust, but it actually was perfect for this recipe and is actually the locally grown flour with the highest protein that I can find.

Another thing is that my usual sourdough starter seems to be a little bit of a delayed bloomer sometimes on sugary doughs. When I looked at the sweet stiff levain there was growth after 12 or 13 hours, but nothing like Benny showed in his pics:

So, I got a little nervous that this one would just take forever and did substitute 10g of the full-cream milk with some yeast water to act as insurance (taken from the sediment at the bottom of the jar, which I believe to be more potent). I did also keep back 20g of the milk as per the recommendation. I do think that culturing a sweet stiff levain for a few days before the next bake might be prudent for getting a starter that is already acclimatized to enriched doughs.

The other thing is that most of the common loaf pans in my part of the world are broad and flat rather than the classical "Pullman" shape. I do have a Zenker pan which is a little like the Pullman, but that is one huge pan! So, I opted for one of my medium sized pans that is a little broader and fatter - 24cm X 7cm X 13cm, just a touch smaller in volume than Benny's recipe, but I didn't scale down the recipe and kept it the same.

The new video from Benny with the shaping is what finally planted the idea in my mind that I need to make the bread. Shaping was fun, although I did struggle to make 4 identical rolls, as usual could get 3 the same, but the 4th, well, there is always one. And maybe with some experience I'll eventually be able to roll them up so that the centres of the rolls don't stick out on the ends. But the rolls were super tight and strong and could feel that they were ready to give good oven spring when they went into the pan.

When it came to the final proof, I did find that the bread was looking quite ready for baking at about 4 hours after shaping, judging by the aliquot jar:

I could have gone an extra hour (to 5 hours), as the aliquot jar after baking looked like this after baking, but was worried about overflowing the pan spectacularly and still got great oven spring:

There's a chance that the YW gave this a speedier ferment, also, I think using a sprouted flour might have given some boost.

The amazing thing about this bread is I couldn't believe it was 100% whole grain, it is super soft and doesn't have that astringent whole wheat taste that you can sometimes get. Using a hard white flour was a good choice, it turned out, although I probably will throw in some red wheat next time, or try another wholewheat altogether just to see the difference. The smell after baking was particularly intoxicating and the kids and I just hovered near the kitchen waiting long enough for it to cool down to taste. Super bread and super recipe, highly recommended.

-Jon