Russian bread, not an old GOST recipe, but rus brot reverse engineered it from the ingredient list: https://youtu.be/1Vwf3TzPTYU
Original formula: https://fgbc.dk/1696
Here is the formula, using a mix of light and whole rye flour available to me, instead of medium rye: https://fgbc.dk/1667
I ran out of bread (taking a break over the holidays) and needed a loaf to go with soup so I was looking for something simple. I love Spelt with porridge so this was it.
Recipe
Makes 3 loaves
Porridge
100 g large rolled oats
200 g water
45 g honey
40 g butter
Dough
700 g strong bakers unbleached flour
300 g freshly milled wholegrain Spelt flour
50 g freshly ground flax seeds
700 g water
23 g salt
30 g yogurt
Having returned from holiday with a spare pre-mixed Ziploc bag of Abe’s VSSD loaf ingredients, I decided to use them with Anis Bouabsa’s baguette method to see what they produced. Main changes were upping VSSD’s hydration to +78% and, as the baguette’s 24-hour retard method yielded no dough expansion, I added a further 12-hour, overnight ferment at room temperature (the norm for VSSD), which only offered a meagre ~10% increase in volume. The VSSD stiff starter was about 3 weeks old.
This is Hamelman’s Five-Grain Levain. I used the same grains as per the formula; cracked rye, flaxseeds (sold here as linseed), Sunflower seeds and oats. I made the cracked rye by milling the rye very coarsely, then sifting with a 40# mesh sieve.
I recalculated for a 750-gram dough (to suit my banneton) and have included the formula below.
I mixed the final build of the levain about 5 pm the day before and made the soaker at the same time. The levain and at its peak by 7 am the next morning.
In order to bring out much more miso flavour I used my red miso and increased it to 10%.
Total Flour 494 g
Bread Flour 88.5% 437 g
Whole Wheat 11.5% 57 g all in levain
Total Water 387.5 g 78.5% hydration
Levain 115 g
Miso 49 g 10%
Salt 7.5 g
Overnight Levain build 1:6:6
The holidays are playing all kinds of tricks with my baking schedule and thinking, so here is another salvaged near-flop.
My girlfriend's brother has been staying with us over the holidays, and when he was leaving yesterday I wanted to gift him a loaf of bread to take with him. But of course I didn't manage to plan it properly, and only could set up the very simple sourdough dough the night before, and spend minimal amount of hands-on time on it yesterday during the day.
I decided to make one of my favorite Community Bake recipes again and made two of the Hamelman Five Grain loaves using cracked rye, oats, sesame seeds, pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I used a mix of bread flour, hard red winter wheat, and rye. I also upped the hydration a bit. I tried to develop the gluten before adding the soaker, but then the large volume of soaker made it hard to I corporate.
Maggie Glezer's book, "A Blessing of Bread," is a wonderful collection of Jewish baking from around the world along with a sort of ethnography of baking in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. This book has, by my count, about 40 recipes for challah, the bread particularly associated with the Jewish sabbath. But the author also identifies the challah recipe she makes for her own family. As with most of her recipes, she provides both a commercially yeasted and a sourdough version (without saying which her family prefers).
I did a lot of holiday baking this year, and part of that was gifting out bread. I made milk bread and potato bread.
This is the most even my milk bread has looked. I always weight each section, but this time, I was more careful about shaping the dough into rectangles before rolling them up, and that really helped.
