I've been meaning to make panettone for quite some time. The other day someone posted a link to Joe Pastry (https://joepastry.com/). He stopped contributing to the site some time ago but the site is still active. I love his approach and I was looking for a recipe that didn't require days on end of starter building. The recipe follows BBA with minor tweaks.
After what seems like forever, I finally baked yesterday. This is a Hamelman-based 50% whole grain bread with a soaker. Hard wheat, rye, spelt, and kamut comprised the whole grain. I attempted to sift for a bran levain, but the sifter stopped working. Therefore the levain was all whole grain, which at least helped somewhat.
I make a lot of Hamelman 50%-whole-grain-with-a-soaker breads. They often look quite similar but taste pretty different depending on the grains and soaker ingredients used. This time was a pleasant surprise, as the depth of flavor is more than I hoped for. The 28 hour cold final rise also helped with flavor development.
Grains: 6oz WW berries, 5 oz kamut, and 4 oz Øland landrace red wheat from Capay Mills, "a very rare wheat from Denmark, brought to the US by Claus Meyer, of NOMA fame," according to the owner, David Kaisel.
Polish Milk Rye (chleb z mlekiem) from The Rye Baker, page 309. It uses a wet rye sponge as well as commercial yeast and has 60% medium rye (home ground and sifted), 40% bread flour, eggs, milk, molasses, and caraway seeds.
It's was a fast developing dough that shaped easily with gentle handling. It's tasty and has quite a subtle flavor and would go with practically anything. I can't recall working with a dough with such low hydration (~60%) since I started making sourdough.
This is my first brioche attempt, using Hamelman's recipe with commercial yeast. I'm quite proud of it, but I'm not sure what it's really supposed to be like. I'm not sure how cakey vs. bready it's supposed to be. It certainly looks and tastes great, but I'm wondering if it's cakier than I'd like.
I knew these would likely over-proof, but I pushed it anyway.
Hamelman multigrain - 50% five whole grain, sifted with a bran levain, of course (kamut, red and white wheat, emmer, last of the sprouted spelt), with honey, a few tbs of my faux red rye malt, and a soaker containing whatever was lying around: the last of the dried Borodinsky from last winter, teff, chia, and sunflower seeds. I added lots of extra water during the mix. It's all relative when working with whole grains and a soaker, but I'd be surprised if this was under 85% hydration.
Some of you might have seen a post recently by user/morb1lee (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57650/bulk-grain-free-samples) offering samples of his wheat grain.
This is a pretty bold bake on my Hamelman 50% WW multigrain with freshly home milled kamut in place of WW. I sifted and used the hard bits in the levain. My hot soaker was a mix of durum, toasted old bread crumbs from my last batch, brown flax (left whole for a change), mixed rolled grains, and my faux red rye malt. The cold final rise was about 18 hours. I was happy that the timing worked for me to give the less bold loaf to my mother for her 81st birthday. We were both pleased with the taste.
I made a quadruple batch of the Borodinsky for half-loaf Xmas gifts. It was an ordeal that required the assistance of my wife. Stressful as it was, nothing went wrong, and the results were about as good as my maiden attempt a few weeks earlier. Scaling up is very difficult in a home kitchen, as the photos show in part. The dough had to be spooned into the loaf pans, whereas when I made a single loaf I was able to scrape it in the pan neatly in one piece. All in all, I won't be doing this again anytime soon, but I'm glad it was successful.
