This loaf is a complete game changer for me. This is my first (nearly) 100% whole wheat loaf (I think!) that I have found to be delicious. I'm generally an aspirational high-percentage whole wheater - I'll often make high percent whole wheat loaves wanting to enjoy them, but ultimately finding them overpowering in flavor and sourness.
Having to work at home for the foreseeable future, I wanted to pick a new-to-me bread project. I remembered that I have around 20 lbs of rye berries (thanks to GrowNYC grains), and decided to make this a period of rye experimentation, having never made very high percent rye breads. I've been looking for recipes that call for whole rye because I don't want to sift my home milled flour.
I haven't posted any breads on here for a long time because I haven't felt like I've baked anything different enough to be worth posting. Nonetheless, I still enjoy looking at the site every once in a while, and especially seeing people's blogs about their recent bakes.
This boule is a mix of two doughs (that I also baked separately).
The purple dough was made up of this (+salt @ around 2% of flour + potato):
The intention behind this bake was to use enough barley to impart a distinct barley flavor, while having a low enough % to retain a good crumb. I made it 25% barley flour, which I milled from pearled barley from the supermarket (remainder was bread flour, except for some whole wheat in the starter). I also soaked some pearled barley overnight, and added it to the dough at 15%.
Following up on my last blog post (from a while ago!), I've finally gotten around to making a 50% home-milled whole spelt sourdough, and I was very pleased with it. As has been my past experience with spelt breads, the bread tasted of whole grain, but less so than an equivalent 50% whole wheat loaf, and I find this milder taste more appealing.
As I do for most of my sourdough bakes, I generally followed dmsnyder's instructions for San Joaquin sourdough, albeit with different flours-- the aforementioned 50% whole spelt, and 50% high-gluten flour (Glicks brand).
I recently bought a 25 lb bag of whole spelt berries, and just milled the first of it. For this bread, I used 30% whole spelt, the remainder being Wheat Montana all-purpose. The hydration is somewhere between 75 and 80%. I had to leave the house during the initial rise / folds, so I ended up letting it go for longer than usual before putting it in the fridge to retard overnight. This made the bread slightly more sour than my usual loaves, but it is still quite pleasant.
In honor of the holiday of Purim, I tried making triangular rolls with a "filling" in the middle -- halved cherry tomatoes and cracked olives. I cut the dough (Pain à l'Ancienne) roughly into triangles, and then did my best to stretch/massage them to a nice shape. They aren't very clean or uniform at all, but I'm generally pretty happy with them. It definitely feels like they are in the spirit of the day! Instead of hamantaschen, I call them hamanbroten :)
I made these loaves based on the San Joaquin recipe by dmsnyder, but I upped the whole grain content to 50% (mostly wheat, but also a significant amount of rye), and raised the hydration (by an unmeasured amount, but it ended up feeling higher than I had intended). I only cut one of the loaves so far, but as you can see, the crumb was pretty irregular. Is this a sign of a particular part of the process I can improve on? Proofing? Something else? Or is it just normal variation? It seems a little too drastic for that last option.
