Filomatic's blog

I've finally gotten around to baking from The Rye Baker.  I made red rye malt powder, so the Borodinsky Rye, which he describes as the national bread of Russia, was in my sights.  I loved the process of making the scald sponge, which (here) means making a hot soaker of coarse (freshly milled of course) rye with ground coriander and red rye malt, and then fermenting it for 3-4 hourse with the overnight sponge the next morning before mixing the final dough.  The final dough includes some molasses, the salt, more medium rye flour, some bread flour, and more red rye malt.

Acme in San Francisco makes a lot of different breads.  I often pick up their sourdough cheese rolls, and finally decided to attempt them myself.  Hamelman has a cheese bread with 60% hydration stiff levain.  It got very active and stickier than I expected, never having made a stiff levain before.  The dough itself was 60% hydration, considerably lower than I ever make.

My parents bought me a Komo mill for my 50th birthday.  These Hamelman WW multigrain loaves used 50% freshly milled whole grains on the finest setting, and included an overnight soaker of cracked wheat/cornmeal/sesame seeds.  

The crumb is as soft as sandwich bread, which is a total surprise.  All other factors were my normal routine, including adding a considerable amount of water during to mix to achieve medium looseness, 4 folds over about 3 hours (more than Hamelman calls for) and a 30 hour cold retard.

It seems like forever since I baked bread that wasn't rye.  This bake had the most explosive oven rise I have ever had, and I'm not sure why.  These were shaped oval, but almost grew round.  I used 50-50 Central Milling Artisan Baker's Craft and 85 Extraction Wheat, both malted.  I'm not sure what the equivalent percentage WW in this recipe would be.  The recipe is 75-25 bread flour to WW, so my experiment seemed low risk.

The latest in my rye series is a Hamelman 70% medium rye with 30% WW, and a sizable pumpernickel soaker.  My cracked rye was bug infested (doesn't move very quickly at the only bulk store that carries it); the pumpernickel was coarse.  San Francisco Bay Area folks, if you know of a local source, please let me know.

My first Hamelman rye bake.  Someone please explain why I waited so long to start baking Hamelman rye recipes.  This took much less time than a normal bread, with 90-minutes each of bulk and final rise, then into the oven.  I love the mild sweet sourness of the rye, complimented by my non-controversial addition of caraway seeds after shaping.  Next time I will autolyse the WW and bread flour since it didn't occur to me at the time.

I couldn't wait another day to order Tartine 3, and when I went to buy it, I found a "used like new" copy for under $12.  Must have been my day.  I made the first recipe using starter I had on hand, feeding twice daily preceding the bake, and used a young levain.  I'm not sure why the recipe calls for twice as much levain to be made as the recipe calls for.  Also, dutch ovens always burn the bottoms.

I recently had to revive my starter.  I had attempted dabrownman's stiff, sour rye build method, and I must have screwed it up somehow, because it wasn't activating well.  I also was putting it straight into levains, which I had done before with decent results, but I now prefer to do at least one build prior to making the levain.  So I resorted to rebuilding it with 2-1-1 feeds, 1-1-1 feeds, and 1-2-2 feeds until it was very active, before allowing it back in its cave (the fridge).

I finally achieved a proper, (if off-center) ear on one of the loaves, so I'm overjoyed.  I thought I made deep enough cuts into the round loaf, but apparently not.  I really enjoyed incorporating a soaker, and this dough was quite easy to work with.  The crumb seems good to me, but I welcome any criticisms.  It felt like cheating using both levain and commercial yeast, but I love the recipe.  Changes made from previous Hamelman Vermont SD bake:

This is the actually the second attempt.  The first loaves stuck to the bannetons.  Much soul searching ensued.  I have found both times that the dough is quite sticky to work with.  I made several changes this time: