1849 Gold Rush Sprouted 12 Grain Sourdough Fruit Cake III
This week I was going to try to explain Lucy’s plan to save all of us from the Sun going naturally smoking hot in 500,000 years and toasting us into wishing we were pop tarts instead of lazy. But, things happen, and we are off on another totally different track. Let’s face it 500,000 years is a ways off so we can concentrate on something else a little more pressing.... like human caused, global warming – even if it is totally fake or not.
No that’s not it either, even though it is more pressing like fake documents being used to work illegally the USA by stealing someone else’s identity to do so ..
No….but it is a fact that I was reminded twice by other Fresh Lofians this past week, that it is time to make this year’s Holiday Fruit Cake so it can get properly snockered by the time the holidays roll around and cause extreme global warming just for the baking of such snockerd things.
Now is the time to consider getting your own experienced, German, Baking Apprentice 2nd Class because mine put the fruits to snockering a year ago and you could have had it done for you too :-)
Once the levain is built, in this case a sprouted 12 grain one with a bit of 9 week retarded starter, over one 12 hour stage, the recipe gets real simple – a basic measure, dump and stir – no gluten development and a 6 hour sort of proof in the ceramic baking dish before baking off at 300 F for 2 hours. It smelled terrific as it baked but what cake full of snockerd fruit doesn’t .
This is the 3rd integration of Holiday Fruit Cakes baked in the style of the Gold Rush Days in San Francisco in 1849. Some are sweeter or less so, some have less snockered fruit, some are not 100% whole grain like this one. One of them will change you mind about fruit cake if you were one to shun the stuff in the past. Home made makes all the differenceWe have to wait on the crumb shot for as long as i can stand it...
Well we made it overnight and few hours. But then collapsed into a Fruit. Cake Coma! Delicious!
| Build 1 | Total | % |
Rye Sour - 9 Weeks Retarded | 5 | 5 | 3.24% |
Sprouted 24% Extraction 12 Grain | 37 | 37 | 23.95% |
Yeast Water | 37 | 37 | 23.95% |
Total | 79 | 79 | 51.13% |
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Levain % of Total | 7.25% |
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Dough Flour |
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Multi-grain Whole Grain Mix | 115 | 74.43% |
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Dough Flour | 115 | 74.43% |
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Salt | 3 | 1.94% |
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Water in SD / YW Levains | 40 | 25.57% |
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Dough Hydration | 34.35% |
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Total Flour | 155 | 100.00% |
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Water | 40 | 25.57% |
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T. Dough Hydration | 25.57% |
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Hydration w/ Adds | 59.79% |
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Total Weight | 1,090 |
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Add - Ins |
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Butter | 100 | 64.72% |
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Molasses | 15 | 9.71% |
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Egg (2) | 100 | 64.72% |
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Snockered Fruits | 350 | 226.54% |
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Chopped Pecans & Walnuts | 100 | 64.72% |
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Chocolate Chips | 100 | 64.72% |
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Brown Sugar | 88 | 56.96% |
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Total | 853 | 552.10% |
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3/4 tsp of 7 spice mix includes: Cardamom |
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Ginger. mace, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cloves |
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Sprouted Multi-grain Mix include: spelt, rye, Kamut, farro, wheat, oat | |||
Pima Club, Sonora White, oat, Einkorn, Emmer. Barley, Desert Durum | |||
Lucy says to have that nearly as good salad with that fine green chili, chicken, chipotle quesadilla.
Comments
in Dachshunds. I am used to bigger dogs, plus it has always seemed to me that the little devils were perfectly built for tripping over. However, if I found a Dachshund that could bake like your Lucy, the big dogs might be packing their bags. Thank you for another great post! Embth
apprentices if you can teach them Swedish and knife fighting which, no matter how unlikely, really do go together like peas in a pod with bread baking. I like the smaller dogs better because they live much, much longer and are healthier than the big ones for some reason and you have more time to train them to do more stuff like typing blogs and baking bread to blog about. Plus they won't try to eat you while you are sleeping
Hard for a big dog to learn that in such a short time that they have to shine. Lucy is special though and, I suppose, deserves not to be tortured as much as she is.by a baking master that she considers a total doofus :-) So. maybe she is smarter than average Doxie and an over achiever for a breed that is bred to be as stupid as possible - a little dog that wants to go down a dark hole in the ground and drag out a nasty badger is missing something in the bread pan.if you ask me,,,,,,, no matter how good a Swedish knife fighter they are!. Smart dogs just won't do that.
I say train the big dogs to bake bread and hope they don'l end up wanting eat you instead. Give a fruit cake a go too. The apprentices will love it as much or more than the master for sure.. Glad you liked the post.
Happy Baking
My two German shepherds are familiar with English, German and Italian. When I fire up the outdoor oven, they station themselves nearby….guarding the oven against ravens and foxes, and disposing of unwanted crusts and dropped pepperoni. Don't know how I'd make pizza without them. Today's project is puff pastry to freeze for use during the upcoming holidays. The dogs are sleeping since I refuse to let them chew on the rolling pin. I make Panetonne which is the nearest I have come to fruit cake….but yours does look wonderful.
My big dogs do their best work on long walks in the woods. I am notified of other creatures that have left tracks…sometimes visible to me, sometimes only detectable by their superior sense of smell. I wish they could use crayons to show me what they smell. However, I have learned to heed their advice when they pointedly tell me not to continue on the trail.
We will look forward to reading more about Lucy's plans to save the world….and her Halloween baking projects. Happy Fall baking to you both…embth
so smart, protective, trainable, have lovely dispositions and so wanting to be helpful. Totally different than a Doxie in every way. Maybe a German Shepard playmate would be a great fit for Lucy since opposites are suppose to attract.
my dogs see great potential here. Lucy could go into the varmint's burrow and flush it out for the waiting shepherds to give it grace. Now they think a Doxie would be a fine addition to the family! : )
Thanks for sharing this. So back in the days fruit cakes were leavened by yeast? Have you found this recipe from a vintage cookbook? Wow! Very interesting.
Do you plan to feed it until eating day? OR... Make another one and feed it until next year like what Lucy did for the snockered fruits?
Nice post again!
were leavened by barm scraped off the top pf fermenting beer since that was the leaven of choice for breads and such back then. Commercial yeast and chemical leavens were not to be found for a while yet,, But since was SF in 1849, i'm guessing the leaven of choice was sourdough. This one is for eating and we will make a version 4 after Thanksgiving. Here is a quick history of fruit cakes
http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Cakes/Fruitcake.htm
Glad you liked it Pal and happy baking
Are you sure that you weren't already sampling the fruits for potency when you constructed the running commentary?
I don't know how folks like you and Ian can come up with all of these iterations.
But a legit question - after three or may even four distinct grains added to a mix, what is the value of throwing in everything but the kitchen sink? What do they contribute to the final product that fewer grains don't or can't?
BTW my pooch is well on her way to 13 and I still haven't a clue about what she thinks most of the time. The majority of the day she remains curled up in the corner on her bed either observing us or ignoring us. The exception is that she's Juanita-on-the-spot within seconds of hearing the bread knife come in contact with the loaf. Opportunistic little beasts.
from being toast - that will make your day:-)
The whole thing about multi grains in breads came about for all kinds of reasons. Why have a paltry 1 or 3 grain bread when you can have a 5 ,7 9, 11,13 or 15 grain one since more is a marketing better. Pretty soon we will have a dozen blades on a disposable razor for the same reason when we used think 1 was plenty:-) These MG breads go back centuries with Ezekiel bread being in the old testament..
I do it for 2 reasons. A 12 grain bread tastes very different than a 3 grain one and a sprouted 12 grain is more different still. Different grains together, even if a small number, say 5, taste different than other 5 grain breads - for example a flax, millet, amaranth, black rice and buckwheat bread tastes different than rye, wheat, spelt, Kamut and oat bread. Secondly, it is a great way to get of :Lucy's small bits and pieces of grains she has squirreled away in her pantry for no reason other than they are too small to use otherwise.
Lucy is a floozy ...so coming up with outrageous stuff including her bread recipes, are pretty easy for her. She looks at it like she sees the variety of stuff found in the universe. There are very few laws that govern the world but the variety they produce is nearly infinite. Same with bread. There are very few rules but the variety they can produce is nearly limitless.. So once you know the rules, expand your ingredient list and learn the various methods your bread horizons expand a bit .....like the expanding universe - you just have stay out of the auto parts store when looking for ingredients.
Our furry friends, if not excellent baking apprentices, are still the best food tasters known to man.....so amount of sleeping or ignoring you can get in the way of that.
Glad you liked the post. i'm thinking about having a piece of fruit cake for breakfast so the crumb shot will follow soon
Happy baking .
It looks so good!! You have reminded me to start prepping my fruit cake and stolen for this year
i have never heard of a fruit cake with levain! That's something I'm gonna try on. So the spring is mainly from the leavain?
We bake stollen for Thanksgiving and eat it at Christmas just like fruit cake which is baked 3 weeks earlier. It is always panettone for New Years - they all have the same fruits and booze in it:-)
They were making fruit cake since at least Roman but probably Greek and Egyptian times too. No chemical leaven or commercial yeast back then so you have barm and SD.
This bread is so dense, liquid like with not much flour in it so there isn't much spring. if there is then there is something really wrong:-)
You will love this Fruit Cake even thought eh sprung has long sprung:-)
Happy Fruit bread Baking CeciC
Both the fruitcake and that killer Quesadilla! WOW! Lucky will be the recipient of either. Lucy just keeps them coming :)
Hi from Max, Lexi and the gang. I'm leaving for China on Monday for a couple of weeks so won't be able to bake anything but look forward to your posts to keep me going.
Ian
this morning....gets you in the Holiday Spirit. Hard to stop eating it. Your onion, durum, SJSD you posted today looks really nice. Don't eat too much Dim Sum like I do while you are gone - another thing that is hard to say no too.:-)
Lucy send her best to her east coast buddies
Safe travels Ian
Safe journeyings from everyone here chez Casa Witty :-)
So far so good. This one is a long one, 2 weeks! Miss my furry pack and of course the wife already :).
Snoozing away in some whisky in one of my kitchen cupboards, ready to sneak into lebkuchen... Am not baking a fruitcake this year as I still have a large chunk of last year's lurking in a tin. Thing is, if you marinate it in enough umm, booze, it'll keep almost indefinitely...
OK, that's without legislating for the parental unit sneaking the odd slice behind one's back :-p
Christmas baking is pretty eclectic here chez Casa Witty, and a bit of everything is sneaked in, from mince pies and lebkuchen to panettone, speculaas, makowiec and, on New Year's Day, waffles.
I can't train my cats to bake bread... Instead, they sit there supervising and critiquing my technique...
Interesting bake as always DBM :-) Bests here to you and Lucy :-)
beef shank properly fermented in it, sitting in the freezer.just waiting for Thanksgiving and Christmas. As luck would have it, I'm the only one besides Lucy that appreciates a real mince meat pie around here and we don't go around telling anyone we have one...... just in case they might like it too.and want a slice.
Johnny Carson used to say there is really only 1 fruit cake in the whole world and it just gets passed around to everyone who doesn't want it!
Glad you liked it and happy holiday baking Reynard.
Sourdough fruitcake and proper mincemeat. Perfect! Lucky you live so far away. You and Lucy wouldn't even get a sniff of those mince pies if I was around.
is slowly being forgotten with the exception of sourdough bread which has seen a real resurgence since PR first book on it in the 90's. Making mince meat is one of them. I wouldn't even know what real mince meat pie should taste like without my Grandma Doershlaht making ti the real way when I was kid - still the best mince pie i ever had too -but mine is getting better every year:-) I am so upset that the mice meat you buy in a jar today has no meat in it and tastes nothing like real mince meat.- it is just sweet goo with all the meaty savory missing.. Sour pickles are another one. You have to make your own if you want them it seems - and who wouldn't! David Snyder published a sour pickle recipe on TFL not long ago.
Glad you liked the post and happy baking.
We cook meat with fruit regularly... Things like duck and orange, or pork with apple and prunes, spiced lamb with apricots and dates, gammon with pineapple and yes, turkey (or chicken) with cranberry. So meat in a mince pie shouldn't be something weird. Admittedly though, it's something I've not tried. Mainly because beef mince here chez Casa Witty tends to end up dancing a tango with tomatoes and red wine in the slow cooker to make spaghetti sauce.
All that's typically left of meat in mincemeat these days is the beef suet, and even now it's usually the vegetarian stuff. Way back when, the dried fruit and spices (both expensive luxuries) were used to flavour the meat (which was often a bit off), but food fashions change. I think the Victorians have a lot to do with that...
I can get US confectionery here in the UK, and it's noticeably sweeter than the equivalent products here - which for my tastes are already too sweet. I'd imagine the same is true of the jars of mincemeat. In any case, I usually make my own, which is spicy and fruity, but not especially sweet.