Rye with Caraway seeds with 125% hydration all rye levain. After a few vagabond months, I'm stationed back home until the summer comes around. Just back from my now annual Spring pilgrimage to the Central Valley in CA for a week with old friends and I headed, once more, down to Fresno for another delightful afternoon with David Snyder and his wife.
Back home for a first bake I decided to wrangle a few changes to the rye with caraway seeds @100% hydration mixed levain I made last year. Recently I've been enjoying baking with the Jeffrey Hamelman inspired 125% all rye levain. And so I changed out the other levain for this one and made appropriate flour adjustments otherwise. I also swapped out AP flour for Bread flour, a change that may have resulted in a lesser oven spring.
A far cry from anything other than good. However the notation was made and next time I'll revert back to AP again. I may well stick with this wetter and "rye-er" levain. The overall hydration of this dough is 73.5%. I should note that this bread gets a cornstarch glaze before and after the bake.
But my favorite part of all of this, and the reason for the post at all, is that even with some alterations to the components, there is a consistency that is clear. One of my personal cornerstones in this hobby is to be consistent in output from bake to bake.
Here is the bake from July, 2016:
And here is today's bake:
350g x3 baguetes
615g x 1 batard
alan
Crumb: vertical and horizontal...
Here is the formula pared down to 1000g. This is an offshoot of an offshoot, with the baseline formula rooted in David Snyder's SJSD, from there to my prior effort, and now to this one.
(I add 15% to the levain build amounts to account for levain lost the sides of bowls, tools, etc. during the build.)
| Rye w/Caraway, 125% hydration rye levain | |||||||||
| alfanso | |||||||||
| Total Flour | |||||||||
| Prefermented | 15.00% | ||||||||
| Total Dough Weight (g) | 1000 | Rye | 100% | ||||||
| Total Formula | Liquid Levain | Final Dough | |||||||
| Ingredients | % | Grams | % | Grams | Ingredients | Grams | |||
| Total Flour | 100.00% | 562.4 | 100% | 84.4 | Final Flour | 478.1 | |||
| Bread Flour | 75.00% | 421.8 | 0% | 0.0 | Bread Flour | 421.8 | |||
| WW | 5.00% | 28.1 | 0% | 0.0 | WW | 28.1 | |||
| Rye | 20.00% | 112.5 | 100% | 84.4 | Rye | 28.1 | |||
| Water | 73.50% | 413.4 | 125% | 105.5 | Water | 307.9 | |||
| Salt | 2.00% | 11.2 | Salt | 11.2 | |||||
| Caraway Seeds | 2.30% | 12.9 | Caraway Seeds | 12.9 | |||||
| 60% Starter | 2.25% | 12.7 | 15% | 12.7 | |||||
| Levain | 189.8 | ||||||||
| Totals | 177.80% | 1000.0 | 240% | 202.5 | 1000.0 | ||||
| 2 stage liquid levain build @125% hydration | |||||||||
| Stage 1 | |||||||||
| Rye | 48.5 | ||||||||
| Water | 60.6 | ||||||||
| Starter | 12.7 | ||||||||
| Stage 2 | |||||||||
| Rye | 48.5 | ||||||||
| Water | 60.6 | ||||||||
| Total | 230.9 | ||||||||
DAY 1:
- Mix liquid levain. Ferment at room temp covered, until at least doubled in volume. (6-8 hours or more). Less starter and more flour and water can be used to get the same total weight.
DAY 2:
- Dissolve levain in water, add flours and mix. Cover and autolyse for 30 minutes.
- Add salt and mix to incorporate. 300 French Folds split into 150FFs/5 min rest/150FFs. Dough will be quite sticky throughout FFs.
- Transfer to a clean, lightly oiled bowl and cover.
- Add caraway seeds to dough during first Letter Fold.
- In 80dF kitchen - Bulk ferment for 80 minutes with 4 Letter Folds every 20 minutes, then refrigerate. Dough will smooth out and lose stickiness with LFs.
- Total retard for at least 10 hours. Dough can be divided same day or next day, it just doesn't matter.
DAY 3:
- Divide, pre-shape and shape as desired. 10 minute rest between pre-shape and shape.
- Onto couche, cover couche in plastic bag and back to retard for x hours more. Dough will require minimal to modest flour, at most, on couche.
- An hour before baking, pre-heat oven to 500ºF, with baking deck and lava rock pan* in place. Sylvia’s steaming towel into oven 15 minutes before the bake. *or other steaming device.
- Prepare cornstarch glaze: whisk 2/3 TBS w/1/8 cup water and mix into ½ cup boiling water, whisk until smooth and incorporated. Do not discard as it will be used again after the bake completes.
- Apply 1st coat of glaze to dough on baking peel.
- Bake at 480ºF ~13 minutes with steam (2 cups very hot water on lava rocks), separate & rotate 180 front to back. After rotating bake for ~13 minutes additional (or more) for baguettes or 17 minutes additional (or more) for batards. Vent two minutes.
- Reapply cornstarch glaze to completed bread while still hot. Sprinkle on more caraway seeds across the top of bread. Optionally seal the seeds with a final slather of the glaze.
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A day with the master let yousstep you game another notch. AP is the flour for baguettes and the French would use a less protein flour than our AP flour. Love that glaze. Makes the bread glisten in the artificial light just right. Had to be fun seeing David again.
Well done and happy baking Don Baggs. Just typing Donn Baggs makes me smile
My friend drove me down again, and he fits into the doughier parts of conversation as he was a bagel baker for a number of years at a place called Holey Bagel in S.F. All in all we spent ~7 hours chatting away about anything and everything, and way less about bread than other topics. Nobody seemed to covertly check their watch or exhibit gaping yawns either.
The bread flour was just a stab at changing a "something else", but I will return to AP on the next go round.
thanks, alan
You are still the king of the most beautiful loaves photographed on TFL! Definitely food porn for the rest of us!
Been keeping a modestly low profile these past few months, but still baking while at home between stints away. I've been trying to get these pictures submitted to be a centerfold spread in Playbread magazine, but can't seem to find their web address. Do you have it? While the bread goes in my mouth, comments like yours want to go to my head. So far my wife and dog keep me in check... And as I've mentioned before, I'm more of a Roy than a roi ;-)
alan
Consistency? I can spot your loaves from a mile away, so perhaps yes. You're using a rye sourdough in place of levain? Do you have a short bulk and final rise time? I'm interested to hear more about your process, and see the crumb.
Yes, it is a rye levain, and pretty wet at that. I had been using the Hamelman 125% bread flour levain for a while and then started to experiment with a rye version of it. This just seemed like a natural fit for a bread like this. The formula and crumb pics have been added, and it should be pretty explanatory. Otherwise, ask away!
alan
Great looking bake Alan as usual. Like the 2 step glaze and will have to try that.
So where's the second build for the starter? I'm assuming it day 1 after the first build, right?
The glaze? I so far have only used it on these "Jewish Deli Rye" types of breads. Yes, I know it isn't the traditional Greenstein kind of rye.
2nd build? Yes it is missing from the Method now that you mention it (drat!). I've been using this 125% hydration levain so regularly now that I just make more than I need by two hundred or so grams, use what I need and then just refrigerate the rest for a next build. it is simple to just add some multiples of 100 parts for the rye and 125 parts for the water without getting too wrapped up in the specifics. For example I refreshed it just before my West Coast swing and again on my return, about a 10 day gap. This dough was made with that very refresh.
Being high hydration, it probably has a healthy life span of only maybe two weeks, so if I don't use it soon enough, I just do another build in between uses and keep the goop refrigerated, as I mention above. In fact it is pretty rare that I ever use a levain straight from build to incorporation in a mix. Almost always, I finish a build/refresh and just sock it away in the refrigerator.
This meshes with my mantra of me controlling the schedule rather than the other way around. I'll add the cold, or cooled, levain to fairly warm water at mix time. The levain warms up, the water cools down, and they meet somewhere in the middle (muddle?). Hasn't seemed to be an issue so far.
thanks, alan
Gotcha...that's kind of what I figured. Don't worry, I was going to use eggs in my last bake and even it had written down in the title but at game time decided against it. Unfortunately when I was writing the directions up I forgot that I left out the eggs and had them in my instructions. Someone actually bothered to read my instructions (hard to believe :)) and asked how many eggs to add!
Regards,
Ian
in process and in delicious results!
What is most impressive is that it is your personal dough-handling skills that enable such an open and airy crumb with that amount of rye and that "low" of a hydration. That takes a lot of dedication to creating the muscle memory and "auto-bake" to not just fluke in to that result but be able to replicate it each and every time.
Even though you are being humbly quiet here on the boards, and not always sharing your beauteous baking and photography, I do hope that you're still having a whole lot of fun with the bake (since it isn't really worth it if it isn't fun anymore).
Cheers and keep having fun (and let us know if you manage to contact Playbread)!
Laurie
And with each ensuing LF I am less aggressive until the final LF is a tad less than the "kid's glove" treatment. But trust when I say that I am probably one of the least anal practitioners imaginable - even if alan is an anagram (as in someone's error made in a group email at work had the effect of a laugh-a-thon one time. As far as work went, the shoe did fit!).
I'm still cautious during pre-shape as early errors have a way of biting us down the road, and are harder to recover from. It is during shaping that I probably could exhibit a bit more pressure restraint. However, the results have a way of negating that small deficit.
If there is anything that I am good at, it is following the methodology and direction rather doing goofy off-the-cuff stuff.
It's fun not just prepping and baking, giving a lot of it away and gorging on the bread itself, but also sharing the craft with compatriot bakers here on TFL. Not to mention that my dog is a strong advocate for me continuing with this hobby, as plenty winds up finding its way into her snout.
thanks, alan
I think that I learned this from a David Snyder post two years ago. You'll need a towel, paper or otherwise, moistened and lain out flat. And a tray with the seeds spread evenly across it. Once the dough is shaped and ready for the couche (or whatever you use), rock the dough face-down back and forth across the towel. Then do the same with the dough in the seeded tray. Now, I proof/retard my dough seam side down, meaning the unseeded side down. I'll guess that it wouldn't make much difference for this who do seam side up. And that's it.
A caution is that the wetted dough will pick up a lot of seeds so if you don't want to completely cover the dough with seeds, you will need to figure out how to have less in the tray. For me, I like the entire surface covered in sesame seeds, so no problem there, but I made the mistake of doing it with caraway seeds, and it resulted in a vicious helmet of caraways for the batard. For the baguettes, they opened up wide enough that it was okay.
As far as scoring goes, no general problems. However two cautions: the blade will likely dull sooner if you score a lot of dough, but that will still take a time to happen. The greater caution is that the weight of the seeds, however slight, will weigh down the flap that you cut when scoring the dough. The heavier flap will likely not be as compliant at opening during the steaming phase. So you may wish to cut a bit more severe angle when scoring dough with a lot of seeds on the surface.
Give it a go, it is a really easy step to add for the results.