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Jan. 28, 2022. 83rd bake.  3rd take on Denisa's formula.  2nd bake for the Rye Community Bake.

Her formula is here: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/67054/100-whole-grain-rye-sourdough-bread

1st take was in a regular bread pan that was too big. It used store-bought stone-ground whole rye flour, and no bread spice. https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/69634/78th-bake-01062022-100-rye

2nd take was with store-bought stone-ground whole rye flour in a Lodge cast iron loaf pan, which is smaller than the previous pan. (I would still like to increase dough amount by about 10%.) 1.5 tsp of ground toasted bread spice was used, but I could not taste it. https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/69787/82nd-bake-01242022-denisas-100-rye-take-2

This bake is using home-milled whole-grain rye flour, cracked in a 3-roller hand-cranked mill, then processed 30 seconds in a Vitamix blender. 8 ounces/226 grams is processed at a time in the blender.

I plan on doubling the ground toasted bread spice to 3 tsp (1 tablespoon.) 

Planned Formula:

Levain: 17 g rye starter, 140 g water, 140 g whole rye flour home-milled. Ferment at 70 F until doubled, which should happen before 10 hours pass.

Final dough: all the levain, 241 g water, 275 g whole rye, 5 g salt, 10 g jaggery sugar + 6 g water as seeetener, 3 tsp ground bread spice, soaked add-ins. 1 hour bulk ferment at 84 F. Pan it in Lodge 4LP cast iron loaf pan. Proof 90 minutes at 84 F.

Bake 20 min at 475 F (Highest my oven goes.) Then 40-45 minutes at 390 F, or until inside is 208 F and it "thumps" correctly.

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11:05am - Mixed 17.5 grams of cold rye starter (last fed 3 days ago), 140 g of bottled spring water, and 140 g of home-milled rye flour (whole grain, not sifted).

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Also started soaking some seed add-ins: 

• 10 g raw whole sesame seeds. 
• 10 g raw whole flax seeds. 
• 10 g dry-roasted and salted sunflower seeds. 
• 1/2 tsp whole raw fennel seeds. 
• 1/2 tsp whole raw caraway seeds. 

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Made the final dough by adding water to the levain/preferment, and added the final rye flour, the soaker addins as described above, and 3 tsp of toasted-then-ground bread spice (anise, fennel, caraway, coriander).

Then I realized that I added 275 g water instead of 241 g.  Senior moment #1. So then I added 38 g more rye flour to compensate. This worked out as it made it perfectly fit the pan when proofed.

Let bulk ferment for 1 hour.

Then I realized I forgot the sugar and the salt!  Senior moments #2 and #3. (Lesson: Write out the recipe on the log sheet.)  I didn't want to deflate the dough by re-mixing, so I let it slide. Maybe salted butter or other toppings will make up for it. Maybe the bread spice and added whole caraway and fennel will mask the lack of salt.

Loaf pan was buttered and dusted with bread flour. Dough was put in pan and proofed about 1 hour 34 minutes, which was when about 6 pin-holes showed.

Instead of steaming the oven, the top of the loaf was brushed with water, and covered with raw pumpkin seeds (pepitas). Many came loose when baking, and more came loose when wrapping/unwrapping in the towel. They were tasty.

Baked. 15 min at 475. Then 45 min at 385 in pan. Then 20 min at 385 outside of pan.

Inner loaf temp was 207 F after one hour, but it did not thump right, so I put it on some aluminum foil and baked it bare for another 20 minutes.

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After 1 hour 20 mijutes, immediately wrapped the hot loaf in a tea towel and let cool for 2 hours. Then put the wrapped loaf in a plastic bag for 36 hours. Then took loaf out of towel, set towel aside, and put the bare loaf back in the plastic bag for another ~24 hours because I had not finished up previous rye loaf.

Loaf came out of oven at 9:02 pm Friday, and was cut open Monday morning.

Center top of loaf had sunk a bit. Does this mean it was overfermented? Or an effect of cooling and water loss?

Otherwise known as South Tyrol Farmers' Bread

I made this a while ago but it wasn't entirely successful, turning out a bit "solid". The recipe calls for Austrian T960 flour which I think is the same as German T997.

The first time I made it I used home milled wholegrain rye sifted at #50. This time I had planned to use Shipton Mill T997 light rye, but it was out of stock and I was sent Doves Farm white rye as a substitute - a bit whiter, but close enough.

I now realise that it pays to take note of the rye flours used in these Austrian and German recipes. If T997 is specified and you use stoneground flour, even if sifted, you may well end up with a brick.

Anyway, this is the recipe I used: https://www.homebaking.at/suedtiroler-bauernbrot/

I tweaked the flour bill slightly and used:

• 100g Shiptons T997 (I had a bit left)
• 200g Doves Farm white rye
• 400g Lubella T550
• 100g Caputo Manitoba Oro
• 100g Millers Choice heritage wheat fresh milled, sifted #40

Apart from that I pretty much followed the recipe. I did add 20ml extra water as bassinage as the dough looked like it would easily take it.

I was concerned that the overnight levain hadn't risen much, but the pH was 3.95, so I reckoned it was good to go.

Loaves were proofed in bannetons and dusted with white rye flour prior to scoring.

I'm pleased with how this bake turned out; the crust is nice and crispy and the crumb is soft and flexible for a rye bread - and with a bit of that elusive "shiney" appearance. Much better than I recall it last time I baked it.

Lance

I had all of the best intentions of sticking to the recipe on this one but diverged. Caroline's "39% WW triple levain w/ Holy Trinity add ins Pullman Loaf" intrigued me and I had every intention to make one exactly the same, but then I thought.... well I've got some spelt sprouts growing, why don't I use those instead of the wholewheat? And when it came time to adding the ingredients I realized we'd run out of honey! And my homemade buttermilk, while lovely didn't have a sour taste, it was more like a yoghurt.

2 day old spelt sprouts

The home made buttermilk curds used had the texture and taste of yoghurt rather than the sour buttermilk taste.

So technique: the starter used was my desem starter, revived from being semi-desiccated. I used that to make two levains - white bread flour and rye. Only had 125g of spelt sprout pulp which was added to the initial mix together with 200g of bread flour (instead of the 335g Rouge de Bordeaux fresh milled). And when it came to adding bread flour later 415g of bread flour was used (instead of the 335g of T65). I've got confidence now that sprouted wheat works well in bread, but still am working on how to translate a mass of pulped sprouts into an equivalent mass of wholewheat flour when it comes to calculations. Since we were just out of honey I used 20g of golden syrup to make up for the lack of simple sugars that the 42g of honey would have given. Played it safe though as didn't know if this was a good idea, so only 20g. With hindsight, I should probably have used treacle. The dough went straight from the mixer to the loaf pan, it didn't go into a bowl first, all of the bulking happened in the pan.

Bake time was 55 minutes at 190°C (374°F) followed by an additional 5 minutes out of pan. I did cover it with foil towards the end so that the top wouldn't get too dark.

This was a very nice bread. It was lovely fresh and really nice warm with spreads. Got a bit more sour tasting after a few days. It didn't have much of a wholewheat or spelt taste. I did notice the semolina crunch when I toasted slices of it. All in all, a very easy way to make lots of tasty bread especially if you're the kind who freezes slices. The recipe did remind me a little bit of Maurizio's sandwich bread with tangzhong which has olive oil and honey in it.

-Jon

Having found a good source for solod (the fermented red rye malt), I have been baking several different rye loaves recently.  This one is a Lithuanian bread based on a recipe from Stanley Ginsberg (http://theryebaker.com/black-rye-breadjuoda-rugine-duona-lithuania/).

As I described in another post, this dough did not behave well for me when I tried mixing it with a stand mixer (per Stan's recipe), but mixing by hand works perfectly fine (along the lines of what Rus Brot does with a Borodinsky dough).  So far I have used a mix of medium rye and dark rye flour, but the next time I might go with all dark rye flour.

Here is a top view of today's bake.

This loaf is going to a friend, so I will not have a photo of the crumb, but here is one from my preceding bake of this bread.

I'm going to be on vacation and away from my starter for almost a month.  So no baking while on vacation.  So this is what I am doing to ensure my starter, John Dough is healthy and ready to go when I return.

I took the remaining 3 g of starter I had left from the last week and placed him in a bowl, to which I added 6 g of filtered water.  The starter was dissolved and then 9 g of whole rye was added and mixed until very little dry flour remained.  I allowed this to hydrated while I cleaned the tiny house (Weck Jar) that John Dough lives in.  It hadn't been cleaned since he moved in a long long time ago.  I don't usually worry about cleaning his jar because the dried starter on the sides is fully of the LAB that help reduce the chances of contamination.

Next I formed John dough into a firm ball and then flattened him into a thick disk.  Into the dried cleaned Weck jar I placed 3 g of whole rye, then John Dough and then covered it all with 4-5 g of whole rye patting it all down.  The starter was next given an hour at room temperature and then will be placed in the fridge set at 3ºC for the duration of vacation.

The low temperature, low hydration and extra whole rye should keep the microbes quite healthy while I am away.

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To learn more about concentrated lactic acid sourdough (CLAS), please see here and here. 

It must have been nearly a decade since I bravely "declared" to take up Michael's 100% spelt @ 100% hydration challenge. I haven't forgotten about it in all these years, but I haven't done anything about it either. Well, until now. 

Back then, I was confident that, with double hydration, I could easily develop the dough with my Zojirushi, even if it's at 100% hydration. I'm still sure that will work. But these days, we all know that we can achieve similar results if we give the dough some time and a few folds. So instead of intensely staring at how my Zo is mixing, I will handle the dough (and the entire bake) with a minimalist approach. 

Nowadays, the only white flour I keep is AP because I am tired of throwing away bags after bags of rancid flour. If I need any flour other than AP, I'd grind it fresh from whole grains. So I will be using fresh, whole spelt flour to take up Michael's challenge. I specifically made a spelt CLAS for this event so that my bread is truly 100% spelt. 

So Michael, here it goes:

85% fresh, whole spelt flour, ground by Vitamix

15% whole spelt CLAS

22.5% water - whole spelt CLAS

77.5% water

2.3% salt

0.3% yeast

Mix

everything in Zo until barely incorporated; ~3 mins; DT 29C

Transfer the shaggy mass to a greased plastic container. 

Bulk

30C x 150 mins

fold every 30 mins

Shape

Batard-ish

load it into a granite roaster

Proof

35C x 20 mins 

Bake

Cold oven 

Leave the lid on the roaster the whole time

Heat to 425F; ~ 24mins

425F x 45 mins (possibly can reduce 5-10 minutes next time; I'm still new to cold oven baking)

My "crème brûlée" whole spelt CLAS.  It's so dark because I forgot I was making a new CLAS and left it in the Instant Pot for days. 

A shaggy mass after a ~ 3-min mix

The dough at the end of bulk after folds at 30-min intervals

Read to prove

Baked

The tasty pancake - flavorful with a pronounced, lingering tangy aftertaste.  Crisp and slightly "smoky" due to the charred (but not burned) bottom. 

Wow. I haven't milled anything since fall 2020. The pandemic, moving during the pandemic, and life's hassles.

Milling is currently a 2 step process for me:

1. Crack the grain in a hand-crank 3-roller Shule brand mill. 
2. Run the cracked grain through a Vitamix blender for 30 seconds.

If I don't crack the grain first, the grain scratches and clouds the plastic container, takes longer to grind, and heats up more.

You can see the Shule "mill" in this other person's blog page:
https://seedforsecurity.com/blog/79
in the first photo. The Shule is the pink box on the left. And it's the mill featured in the 4th photo. Again, that page is not mine. I'm just using it as reference.

Here's the same mill at Amazon, where it goes by the name Norpro:
https://www.amazon.com/Norpro-1056-Grain-Grinder/dp/B001FB59K4

Label from bag: (purchased from www.countrylifefoods.com )

Here's the output of the 3-roller mill in a bag. I think I used setting "1." (Don't hold me to that. I won't be able to verify until the next time I mill, as I might have changed the setting when I cleaned it.) The fines and smaller particles settle to the bottom:

Here's the output of the 3-roller mill next to the whole kernals for size comparison:

Here's what passes through a #20 seive, it has been shaken so that the larger particles float to the top:

Here's a side by side comparison of what is retained in the #20 seive (on the left) with what paases through the #20 seive (on the right):

Jan. 24, 2022.  82nd bake.

Denisa's rye, take 2.  First bake for the Rye Community bake.

Her formula here:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/67054/100-whole-grain-rye-sourdough-bread

My previous bake of it here:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/69634/78th-bake-01062022-100-rye

The goal is to divide her formula by 3 and make one loaf of about 835 g.

Here's the stone-ground whole rye flour that I used for both the pre-ferment and the final dough:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/69305/

Levain:

• 17 g rye starter. 
• 140 g spring water. 
• 140 g whole rye, Malsena brand from Lithuania. 
• 8:45 am to 5:47 pm, at about 71 - 73 F. Levain doubled. Denisa had 10 hours at 70 F.

Final dough:

• All the levain. 
• 242 g bottled spring water. 
• Mixed.
• 5 g salt. 
• 1.5 tsp ground bread spice. The original formula did not call for this. (By volume, prior to toasting: 1 part anise, 1 part fennel, 2 parts caraway, 4 parts coriander. Ground after toasting.)
• 10 g jaggery, plus 6 g water, to substitute for 16 g barley malt syrup.
• Mixed. 
• 275 g whole rye, Malsena brand, mixed in at 6:00 pm.
• Covered with plastic wrap. 

So bulk is about 1 hour, as per Denisa's recipe.

7:00 pm. - Panned, in a Lodge cast iron loaf pan, part # 4LP. Inside coated with butter, and then dusted with corn meal. (Original formula called for butter with AP flour.) Re-covered with the same plastic wrap. 

Here it is immediately after panning:

8:15 pm. Took the loaf pan out of the oven. Started oven preheat to 500 F, highest it will go. Oven is off by 25 F, so 500 on the thermostat setting is 475 F actual.

I forgot to take a photo of it at the end of the proof stage.

I also forgot to put a steam pan in the oven at the beginning of pre-heat. So I applied some water to the top of the loaf, and put on a layer of raw pumpkin seeds to protect the top. 

The paper plate is 9" in diameter.

 

What can you do with brioche breads? Transform them into amazing desserts.

Last month I shared a bostock (brioche with an orange zest frangipane)

This month I share a dessert my wife remembered enjoying many times in her younger days with her sister in Japan. It's simple but the process transforms the brioche into something completely different. She had no name for this. If anyone does, let me know.

INGREDIENTS

• generous slices of brioche (especially good with fruit in it - I used my kugelhopf)
• dollop of ice cream (I used Kawartha, which uses real cream and sugar)
• salted butter (I used Emma grassfed butter imported from New Zealand)
• honey (I used real honey packaged by Bee Maid cooperative)

METHOD

1. spread butter generously on one side of brioche
2. toast brioche in oven (400f) until browned
3. plate the brioche
4. scoop ice cream onto the brioche
5. drizzle honey across brioche / ice cream
6. serve and enjoy with a fork

Recently I posted about baking the Borodinsky 1940 bread.  This bake is the Borodinsky Supreme based on the recipe in a TFL post from February 2014.

Our kitchen was 72F yesterday, and the whole process took a bit longer than in the original post.  Nonetheless the final result was pleasing (although I am still struggling with the gelatinization of cornstarch and did not get the glaze I was seeking).  Perhaps the inclusion of molasses rather than malt extract made the taste different from the Borodinsky 1940 version, but this bread seemed a little sweeter and not as sour.  I intend to bake both types of Borodinsky in the future.

Here is a view from the top.

And here is the crumb.

My wife really liked the flavor of the top crust with the coriander seeds.  Although rye is a dense bread, this loaf is springy too and not at all a brick.