Reinhart's WW Straun: Q on cooking grains for soaker?
Hi!
tl;dr: For larger or harder grains that need to be 'cooked' before use to reduce hardness, how do you account for the absorbed moisture in the final soaker?
Long version:
I'm very new to baking and bread (less than a month), and have been slowly learning the basics, but have found the books by Reinhart and Forkish exceptionally helpful guideposts.
After some success with Reinhart's Neapolitan pizza recipe, and some dutch oven based white breads from Forkish, I really wanted to try a whole grain bread. My first attempt was Reinhart's Whole Wheat Straun recipe, simply because it seemed like an accessible and appetising place to start, but I think I mess up the soaker with cooked grains.
Running through the recipe tonight, I found myself confused by the 170g of grain that should be added to the soaker. The recipe says they can be cooked or uncooked, and includes a long list of grain, but the only grains I had on hand where a mix of hard grains for rice that I'm sure need to be cooked before they can be used (unless you want to break your teeth on them). The book suggests a 2.5:1 ratio of water to most grains when cooking, but from experience with these rice grains I used 3:1 until the water was absorbed, and then measured out 170g of the cooked grains. 3:1 might have been a mistake, but I'm happy to learn from experience good or bad.
Unfortunately, this gave me an extremely runny soaker which doesn't match the photo in the book AT ALL, which makes sense since the 150g of water and 75g of grain will necessarily add a LOT of extra hydration to the soaker (in addition to the 170g of milk). That's well over 100% hydration for the soaker!
It seems like I made a big mistake, but based on the book it isn't clear how to account for the additional hydration when cooking grains, it just says something along the lines of that it's perfectly valid to add 170g of cooked or uncooked grains, with no mention of hydration in the cooked variety.
How should the grains be cooked in a soaker without destroying the balance of solids and liquids??? Should I have cooked the grains in the milk in the soaker, for example? That might have been smarter in retrospect, although I'm not sure simmering the milk would affect anything, or how well the grains would absorb the more complex liquid?
This is my very first whole wheat loaf, and my very first time cooking bread with grains, and there seems to be some information that everyone is assumed to know reading the book that I'm missing. :(
If anyone can share some insight on cooking grains for whole wheat bread, and keeping the right hydration level, I'd be very grateful. I'm eager to learn, and happy to get my hands dirty, but it's a shame to waste good flour and grains needlessly. :(
I think the short answer is that you don't need to soak grains that have already been cooked. When I make one of Reinhart's Struan recipes (from "artisan breads every day"), I measure out cooked brown rice as part of the recipe, for example.
Some recipes will give you volumes or weights of cooked or soaked grains; others will give you dry weight for the grains and also the weight or volume of the soaking water. Both are to be incorporated into the final recipe. Personally I prefer to pre-cook or pre-soak the grains then measure them into the final dough, once the water has either all been absorbed or I have drained the excess. That allows me to adjust the hydration of the final dough by feel when mixing.
A further confusion arises because some grains should be soaked in boiling water, while others can use warm or cool water, and the amount of water absorbed differs. So, if one used cool water for, say, cracked wheat, while another used boiling water and a third boiled the wheat in the same amount of water for 20 minutes, absorption would obviously differ and the texture of your 'soaker' would change.
I think the intent of a soaker is to end up with soft grains that can easily be chewed, and which won't rob your final bread dough of moisture during the fermentation stage, but which also don't add a lot of extra hydration to the dough. Make sense?
Thanks for the reply. I think part of the problem is ignorance as to which grains should be boiled, soaked in cold water, etc., being quite new to this. It wouldn't have occurred to me to use cooked rice, for example, although I have about a dozen varieties in the pantry. Any suggestions are more than welcome and appreciated.
Are there any easy to source grains that can simply be soaked overnight at room temperature in a water or milk soaker that you would recommend for a beginner? I realize grain choice is a matter of taste, but to have clearly defined taste preferences here you need to start sampling things somewhere as well. :)
The first attempt at this recipe was a failure for a couple reasons, but since I have a 25KG bag of Caputo Integrale here (http://caputoflour.com/portfolio_item/integrale-whole-wheat/) and it won't stay fresh forever, I'm motivated to keep trying. I did really like the taste of the flour, failure or not, and as much as I love white bread I'd like to find a viable home baked healthier alternative some days of the week.
Well, there are so many kinds to try! Generally if the grains are whole or cracked hard grains like oats, wheat or rye, or other large hard grains or seeds like rice, quinoa or millet, you would probably want to soak and/or boil them, same way you would if you were going to eat them. Smaller or finer grains (or more finely milled) can probably be covered with boiling water then left overnight. Things like cornmeal, smaller seeds (flax in particular) or any flaked grains (rolled oats, spelt flakes, etc.) can probably be left to soak at room temperature for various periods of time until they are tender enough and have absorbed all the water they are going to absorb.
I think you'll learn over time if a soaker feels too 'wet'. Sometimes the numbers (using baker's percentage) don't seem to make sense when you add up all the liquid and divide by all the flour; that's because some add-ins act like flour (absorbing water to different degrees) and some don't. Cooked grains aren't usually going to absorb more liquid and so shouldn't be included in either the flour or the water numbers when calculating hydration. Confusing? Yes. :)
Also, of course, as you use more whole grain flours in your baking, the required level of hydration will change (usually you need more liquid the higher the proportion of whole grain flour you are using. But just keep practicing; the results are usually edible at least!
Thanks for taking the time (again) to respond with some useful information. I'm going to try the same recipe again this week and hopefully the results will be a bit better this time around, learning from previous mistakes.
Some other users here seem to have some similar questions with this specific recipe, and there is some useful info here to follow up on for me as well, and hopefully for anyone else who comes across this post with a similar question: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/33907/reinharts-multigrain-struan-whole-grain-breads
I'll post the results here from the second attempt in the off chance it proves useful to anyone else.
I hadn't seen David's post on the WGB version of Struan before. The version I make is from "artisan breads every day". It's mostly unbleached bread flour and the add-ins are dry cornmeal, rolled oats, cooked brown rice and wheat (or oat) bran. I think there's also some whole wheat flour in there. Regardless, there is no soaker to confuse the issue!