Einkorn Sourdough

Profile picture for user Danni3ll3

Since I was on a roll making bread, I thought I would make a simple loaf with just flour and no add-ins. The plan was to have a couple of these loaves as testers for baking in the portable pizza oven that one of my brothers made for us.

So here goes:

  1. Autolyse 575 g of water with 30 g local yogurt, 550 g unbleached no additives flour, 300 g fresh milled einkorn, and 102 g Robin Hood Multigrain Best for Bread flour. I let that sit for a couple of hours.
  2. Then I added 22 g of salt and 266 g of a four stage levain (80% hydration), as well as 50 g of water.
  3. I did four sets of folds 20 to 30 minutes apart and then let rise till double. That took about 6 hours since I did part of the fermenting on the counter and part in the oven with the door cracked open.
  4. I divided it into 3 loaves, let rest for a while and then put into baskets. 
  5. The loaves proofed overnight in the fridge.
  6. The next day, I baked one of them as per usual... heat oven to 475 F with pots in, load pots, lower heat to 450 F, bake 25 minutes, remove lids, drop heat to 425 F and bake a further 20-25 minutes.

The other two I tried to bake in the pizza oven. This is a steel oven with two cavities. One where you build the fire, and the chamber above where we normally cook pizza. Hubby lined the upper part with fire brick and my brother built a sleeve that would keep the smoke off the bread. Hubby was not in the mood to do this but fired up the oven anyhow. He then informed me that he didn't have enough wood to keep this going for very long. The oven was at 600 F and even though I knew it was too hot, I slid the loaves onto the firebricks. We put the cover back to keep the heat in and I went back in the house to mind the loaves that were cooking in the oven. Well, less than 20 minutes go by and hubby comes to tell me that he is smelling burnt bread. It was burnt alright! It looked like a lump of charcoal! I cut it open and was actually surprised that it was actually cooked even though it didn't rise very much and the crumb wasn't all that bad after all.

So just for laughs, here are some picts:

You can see how badly the one loaf got burned. The other has parts of it that are rescuable (is that a word?).

I cut into it while still warm so the crumb is a bit smooshed.

This is the bottom of the second loaf.

This is the pizza oven.

Perfect for Charlie Brown!

Interesting oven.  Let us know how the pizza comes out with this.  I'm sure you can get it right for bread too with a little practice.

There is a space at the back of the top chamber that allows the heat and smoke to go over the pizzas and up the chimney. They cook in 5 minutes or less when the oven is really hot- it can easily reach 800F. Pizzas end up with a delicious smoky flavour!

The smoke and soot is why my brother had to build a sleeve to cover the cooking chamber for bread baking. It allows the smoke to pass between the sleeve's roof and the ceiling of the chamber, keeping the bread free of soot. At least, that is the idea. In this trial, no way to tell if soot landed on the bread! Ha ha!

steel WFO to bake them in and at 550 F they still took 8 minutes to bake!  I just cut off the burnt parts of the bread I made in my temporary brick WFO and it was delicious and bet this bread would be the same.

The oven baked Einkorn bread looks grand .  Well done and happy baking Danni

The oven-baked bread looks lovely, and I bet it tasted great too. I had to laugh at the 'meteorites' though; they look very much like the first time I tried to bake bread in a cast-iron pot in my wood stove. I also didn't realize it was quite so hot and left the bread for a bit too long before checking on it. After cracking the 1/4 inch black charcoal shell, I did find bread inside, but the smoky taste was a bit much. :) You can find it on my blog somewhere.

aren't also looking so appealing.  But I love the texture on this one.  I've never baked with einkorn, so I don't know if that type of crust is typical or not.

Just an opinion here, but I think that you went a shade too dark on the other breads posted here.  Just back off a hair or two next time!  Thanks for posting them.  It shows that we all have some warts every now and then.

PS rescuable is indeed a defined derivative adjective of rescue.  Unless you meant to refer to resuscitate, in which case you are dead wrong ;-) .

alan