Götz Brot - Juergens Take
Karin (hanseata) invited me to her Götz-Brot challenge, an interesting one that leaves lots of room for imagination.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/38938/challenge-fellow-bakers-bread-knight-iron-hand
Here is my take:
My idea for this Götz bread was to create something that
- could easily be made in a hotel kitchen
- uses a straightforward and flexible process
- uses ingredients that grow locally
I came up with a bread using white flour, light spelt flour,wholemeal rye and wholemeal wheat.
The crumb looks like this:
Spelt is quite abundant in the region east of Heilbronn (Badisches Frankenland).
Usually it gets harvested while the kernels are still green, and then roasted. This is called "Grünkern", is used as grains, flaked etc, and sadly it is impossible to get in England.
The taste of it is remarkable. It goes very well as meat substitute in meatballs (Grünkern-Frikadellen)! And it is also great in soups, as risotto etc.
But I don't have Grünkern, hence the spelt.
To make this bread more interesting and unique (among Germany's hundreds of breads) I added crushed fennel and dried,pulverised nettle leaves.
Here is the formula:
| Ingredient | Percent | Weight |
| Bread Flour (white) | 70 | 396.6 |
| Light Spelt Flour | 15 | 85.0 |
| Wholegrain Wheat Flour | 10 | 56.7 |
| Wholegrain Rye Flour | 5 | 28.3 |
| Nettle Leaves dried and crushed | 3 | 17.0 |
| Fennel Seeds, crushed | 1 | 5.7 |
| Salt | 2 | 11.3 |
| Yeast (instant) | 0.5 | 2.8 |
| Water | 70 | 396.6 |
| Yield | 176.5 | 1000.0 |
The process is the same as for any white yeasted direct bread. NoKnead techniques can be used, or the dough can be worked until Gluten is moderately well developed, and then proofed with one fold halfway through.
It is really a matter of taste, scheduling, and skills of the baker.
First proof will take about 2 to 3 hours at 22C. Shape in any way you wish, the dough is not sticky and suitable for all sorts of things.
Second proof will take about 1 hour.
Bake in hot oven, like any white bread. In my simple fan oven I start at 240C with steam and turn down to 210 after 15min, then baking for another 15 min (500g loaves). Please adjust as necessary.
The bread is on the rustic side and the herbs come clearly through, but the blend of Fennel and Nettle (which is also used in teabags by a big British tea company) lends itself to honey and stronger jams as well as savoury toppings.
This bread also has very good ageing characteristics.
Enjoy,
Juergen
Comments
Hallo Juergen,
This looks great, I love your scoring and I bet it's delicious!! Will need to try this!
You can get Gruenkern in England - it's labelled "Green Spelt" and there is a company called Amisa that sells it (I've only ever seen it unmilled). You should be able to find it at Planet Organic, Biona, or Healthysupplies. Out of curiosity, what bread flour do you use for your breads - I am still experimenting with Marriages, Bacheldre, Allinsons, Dove, Shipton - all "strong" so high gluten, which means playing around with some of the AP/BF mix recipes!
I have your 40/60 Rye/Spelt recipe noted, I definitely want to make that!
for your praise and the hint about green spelt! I will follow that up!
Currently I am using Shiptons No 4 for my lighter breads.
I like the Bacheldre flours - I use their wholegrain rye and "unbleached white", which is actually a high extraction flour
But i also use Marriages / Waitrose strong flours if I run out of supplies.
I also used Doves http://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/flour-and-ingredients/sack-flour/25kg-traditional-orgstrong-white-bread-flour-unbleached-and-without-ascorbic-acid/
this is a really outstanding flour, but I had some trouble with their brown rice flour, I'm back to shipton for white flour.
If you look at protein content of British "strong" flours, it's actually quite low. I use those flours all by their own.
The rye/spelt breads are very tasty - you'll have fun with them (if you like sticky dough...)
Happy Baking,
Juergen
Jürgen, that is a wonderful loaf - and such pretty scoring.
I used nettle (plus curry) in my testing how to substitute Schabzigerklee (blue fenugreek - not available in the US) for my Vinschger Paarlen (it works!). One of Andy's students used it in a bread in a young baker's competition (Faye's Award Winning Nettle Bread)
If Schlosshotel Götzenburg does not either have their chef or a local bakery make one of the bread "basket" that I'm going to present them with, they would be outright stupid.
If I were them, I would make a big deal about it, like Schlosshotel Cecilienhof did in presenting their Vollkornbrot on their breakfast buffet, including a little brochure and list of ingredients.
Karin
Thank you karin. I took some of my inspiration from Faye's bread.
I agree that places such as the schlosshotel could raise their profile with a bit more attention to local food including bread.
Breakfast rolls from china certainly don't fit in there.
My parents tell me that it is now very hard to find a bakery in their region not selling just parbaked stuff. Maybe the hotels could be trendsetters against this?
Best wishes, juergen
HI Juergen,
I alway love seeing what you bake up in your kitchen. I love your creativity and ability to blend flavors into beautiful loaves. These loaves are no exception.
I have seen nettle leaves in breads too often now not to try them in one of my loaves to see how people respond. Now I will just have to see if I can hunt some down locally.
Thanks for the post and the inspiration.
Take Care,
Janet
Janet, for your kind words. I want to experiment with this formula using freh nettles. Do they grow in Arizona?
Best wishes, juergen
I am not sure where they grow. I live in Colorado and the store that carries nettles has been out of stock for awhile with no idea when more will come in so maybe they aren't growing anywhere…
:)
I find them in the (whoops? what happened to my tool bar? it is now stacked like an obelisk) tea section in the drug store or Reformhaus, natural foods.
Pulled a lot out in my garden today, big tall ones, taller than me! Growing into my crab apple and grape vines. I carefully cut them down in pieces and let them wilt before handling them further. They do turn black in the sun so if you cut them fresh, hag inside or in shade right away to air dry. Nettle tend to grow on edges of fields, culverts, edge of woods, paths, roads, clearings, along streams and love it wherever there's lots of carbon monoxide. They are sensitive to their environment and often used as air quality indicators. I've noticed the years of Chernobyl, we had them growing here variegate. Got some irrigation ditches?
Juergen: how easy would this recipe be to convert to sourdough versus yeast? Thoughts? I bet it would be wonderful. Thanks for sharing. best, Phyllis
Should be straightforward. I would try something like 15% to 20% of prefermented flour from a wheat sourdough
example.. The knight would have loved your Götz Brot - no doubt about it. Well done and
Happy Baking
Dabrownman. An iron-rich bread for an iron hand!
Crumb looks good. Bet they are delicious.
:) If we vote, I vote for it! :)
Middle Europe here we come!
´
Dog traveling in style - cute! Have fun on your trip!
Karin
for my late reply - I have been travelling.
A great big family holiday - we rented a villa in Asturias, Spain and to my surprise it had a wood-fired oven.. I took my first steps... Great pizza, and a steep learning curve for bread :-) (No pictures)
Mini, your luggage is really cute!
Juergen
Tell us more about your fun with the oven! ...and the flours! ...and Spain!
She made the trip like a little champ. First thing Dolly did when we got home was head for the water dish and raid the bread bin. As both were empty, I got the "long look" telling me what I had to do.
Hi Mini,
We - my parents, my brother and family and us 3 - went to a tiny place outside Villaviciosa in Asturias, northern Spain, for 7 days.
Usually a wet and cold area, food is very important, it is unusually green there for Spain, and the region is most famous for its cider.
The cider is poured in a spectacular fashion, to get air bubbles in. It hits you with the first sip ...
We rented a modern mansion with WFO and a modern kitchen with NEFF appliances. (Those are the important bits, besides, it had a swimming pool, a football pitch and great views ...)
Despite lots of things to do (Jurassic museum, visiting cider factory, searching for dinosaur footsteps,
swimming in the sea ...) I managed to bake some bread for our needs and to fire up the WFO for Benjamin's birthday - he wished for pizza.
(He also wised for a raspberry charlotte - this got us all to a self-picking fruit farm nearby - those blueberries and blackcurrants were spectacular)
I didn't want to (and couldn't) turn the trip into a bread journey - there is some potential in the future ( a local tidal mill, a producer and miller of spelt nearby).
The white flour I could get hold of is the usual strong type550-like flour - "sourced from EU and Non-EU countries". But I got one bag of the local stoneground spelt, which I used to enhance my rustic breads and the pizza.
The pizza -
really was fantastic. I had no tools for breadmaking and for the WFO (they seem to use it to roast pigs).
But I improvised.
I fired the oven up to a heat where a pizza would bake in 3 minutes. Super. Then I had some 50% spelt bread ready to go in, but I had no way to determine the temperature, to clear out the embers or to equalise the oven floor - the bread got dark on the outside but was undercooked inside - oven too hot.
But it was all a first and great fun.
and your picture reminded me how to use them! Was in the area two years ago drove and walked all over the place but stayed a little more inland in the mountains. So lovely! Wonder if the cider pouring technique works to improve the taste of my local water. While dusting off the vessel, discovered I still have some Sutliff cider from Iowa.
That's quite the oven! Tossing some flour into the oven will help you judge how hot it is: how long it takes to burn up and show you the hot spots. I think "dino" had the same happy expression on his face when he made the prints in mud. Aah! The Bay of Biscay! Lemon and orange trees everywhere! :)