Mebake's blog

I wanted to bake a Rye bread from Peter Reinhart's book : Whole grain books, as a change from Hamelman's Rye recipes.

With 45 % Rye flour, and 55% whole wheat flour, the bread is very wholesome, and enriched. It contains butter, honey, caraway, and nigella seeds. The bread is leavened with the 45% Rye flour amount as Rye sour, but the final dough contains 2.25 tsp of instant yeast. The bulk fermentation and final fermentation takes from 50-60 minutes at most.

Ever since i started baking bread at home, I have been baking with rye flour quite judiciously. Rye flour sold for retail on the shelves of supermarket chains in Dubai, and the UAE in general ,is mostly exclusively Doves farm organic rye flour. The flour is quite expensive given that it is organic: US$ 3.4 per Kg. I continued baking with it for years, with beautiful results and excellent finished products, until today.

I wanted to bake a hearty Rye for many reasons. Firstly, to satisfy my Rye craving, and secondly to serve as a rye altus for further rye baking.

So, I have baked a 3-stage 80% Rye from Jeffery Hamelman’s book: BREAD, and it was high time that I bake it in my Pullman pan lookalike. The recipe calls for medium rye, and since I didn’t have any, I sifted my organic store bought Whole Rye flour. The sifting resulted in almost medium rye flour, and so I added back some of the bran to emulate medium Rye flour consistency.

I promised myself the other day, that I’ll try Mark Sinclair’s  (TFL member mcs) Potato rolls. My kids desire soft enriched white breads;  and as i watched in regret my wife’s grocery bags carrying bland/cottonty mass produced rolls, this was my chance to try out Mark’s wonderful rolls featured in his latest video.

This is a 100% whole wheat bread with corn slurry. It is an enriched bread with molasses and oil. TFL member Janet (Janetcook) has blogged about it earlier here.

I used sunflower oil, and substituted Molasses for date syrup since i didn't have any. Like janet, i used a sourdough starter (210g) instead of the yeast called for in the recipe. Furthermore, i had storbought fine cornmeal, so i cooked it to a slurry and used it after 1/2 hour.

At long last, I got around to baking David’s favorite staple bread:  His San Joaquin.

The bread was fabulous! I loved it, and I will be baking it again in the future, no doubt.  

Thanks a lot David for sharing your lovely formula :)

- Khalid

A very easy to make whole wheat bread:

This is a method I came up with, that marries two good techniques: Delayed fermentation, and the no knead technique.

Last week, I had some left over whole spelt flour, some corn meal, and some semolina in addition to a ripe Rye starter. Therefore, I decided to put them all to use in a new recipe as follows:

UPDATE** INSTRUCTIONS:

I've baked this recipe twice before, but this one i wanted to exclude the yeast and extend the bulk fermentation. Actually, this bake was sort of a controlled test that was aimed at verifying whether or not i could bake during my working weekdays, which i'am happy to say: YES, it works!

First day eve, I started feeding my starter one day to creat the levain for the next day;

Second day, when i came back from work i mixed the levain into a dough and retarded the dough after 2.5 hours;

Third day after work, i preshaped, shaped and baked.

I have recently converted my White Liquid starter into a stiff one, with a 50% whole wheat flour  - 50% AP flour flour mix. I browsed through the bread books, and found that Hamelman’s Miche point a calliere appeals to me, in addition to be a favorite of mine. Miche it was, therefore.