This was hectic. Baked 12 loaves (2 of each type) and 3.5kg of granola for the bachelor's party that the husband was organizing. Prepped the levains all in the morning before I left for work (cycled to the train station in record time), and started mixing dough the moment I was home at 8 pm. Was done baking 10 loaves at 3:30 am, and then had to bake the oat loaves at 8 am as they need a much longer rise.
Loaf is exceptionally tasty. Really deep flavour with very little sourness, excellent complex crust. Smoky, earthy and smooth. Definitely my best rye bread so far.
I wanted to try making a 60% rye (whole and medium 50/50) that was flavourful, not too sour, and had most of the rye in the pre-ferment so that the grains were more broken down (for flavour, but also digestibility), and BF and proof would be relatively fast, about 5 hours or so, with some sort of rise in the oven.
I was pleasantly surprised by this loaf. This is a 40% whole einkorn loaf, hydration 70%, with some barley malt syrup mixed in and poppy seeds on the crust. All the einkorn is in the overnight levain. The high PFF makes this a fast bread to bake on the same day as mixing - I mixed it at 8:30 am, baked it at 12:30, and (don't frown) ate it at 2 pm with carrot lentil soup.
A friend recently asked if I could try making some semolina loaves. He missed them after his vacation in Italy and sent me references to the Matera bread.
After reading a couple of posts here, I ventured on my first loaf.
First loaf - Complete failure
I started off with what seemed to be a standard recipe. 500g semola rimacinata, 100g 70% hydration starter, 350g water, 1.5% salt.
BF took 7 hours without dough degradation but also without much gluten development. I did a final proof of about an hour and then shaped it before putting it into the oven.
This is a follow-up to Precaud's interesting post on enhancing oatiness. And my, what a journey. I love my oats, and have lots of experience making them for granola, incorporating a portion into my bread and so forth, but at a high percentage, oats do very funny things.
This is a follow-up bake to my 90% hydration ciabatta minis using different levain proportions. From that experiment I became more confident of using up to 50% rye levain in my dough, so I decided to apply it to this bake.
The goal is an everyday family loaf that has 1) good flavour; 2) extremely subdued sour tang; 3) is not too dense; 4) does not require much mixing; and 5) has most of the whole grains in the pre-ferment for easier digestion (husband suffers).
These little things are very good. I first had them in a fancy restaurant in Antwerp after multiple courses of little plates. Didn't care much for the plates, the bread was lacklustre, the dessert nothing to write home about, but the canele that came with the coffee, damn that was good.
Since then I've been trying to make them that good. Crunchy and caramelized on the outside, soft and custardy on the inside. It's a really spectacular sweet thing.
Good results today.
For 15 of them:
