Cedar Mountain’s Spring Bake

CedarMountain posted this recently and it looked absolutely delicious so I pretty well followed his recipe aside from reducing the hydration and adding a tiny bit more levain just to use it all up. He makes a batard and a boule but I made 3 boules out of the one batch of dough. 

Dough

80 g sifted rye (90 g of rye berries)

170 g sifted Selkirk wheat (190 g wheat berries)

750 g unbleached flour

700 g water

20 g salt

250 g levain (100% hydration)

whole wheat and bread flour to feed the levain (procedure explained below)

Add-ins #1

50 g ground sesame seeds

100 g hemp hearts

150 g boiling water

Add-ins #2

50 g chia seeds

50 g flax seeds

50 g toasted hemp seeds

250 g boiling water

A couple of days before

1. Mill rye and wheat berries. Sift out the bran and reserve the bran to feed the starter. Measure out the necessary flours and reserve. 
2. At the same time, I measured out all my seeds and reserved those as well in separate containers.
3. Remove 10 g of starter from the fridge and feed it 20 g of the bran and any left over flour from the rye and Selkirk wheat. Add whole wheat flour if needed to make up the 20 g. Add 20 g water and mix well. Continue to stir this every 12 hours and keep at room temp (73F).

The night before going to bed

1. Feed the levain 100 g of bread flour and 100 g of filtered water. Let sit at room temp overnight.

Dough making day

1. The levain should have doubled and since I wasn’t ready for it, I simply stirred it down and let it rise again.
2. Grind the sesame seeds and the hemp hearts. I did this in a bullet and had to do it in small batches as the seeds clumped. CedarMountain suggested adding a bit of the water to help get a finer grind. Add the boiling water. Mine ended up looking like soup but it did thicken a bit over time.
3. Add the boiling water to the second set of seeds and let sit for at least a couple of hours. After an hour or so, I combined both sets of seeds because I was so concerned about the soupy first mixture. That helped a lot and produced a fairly thick mixture. 
4. Autolyse the flour and the water and let sit for an hour. After the hour, add the salt and the levain. Let sit in a warm spot (82F) for a half hour and do a set of folds. 
5. Let sit another half hour and add the seed mixture to the dough. This was not fun! The best way I found to do this was to spread the dough out on a wet counter, spread the seed mixture on the dough, roll it up like a jelly roll in one direction, then rolll it up like a giant snail in the other direction, do a few more of these, squish all the dough together to force the seeds into the dough and finally, I resorted to doing French slaps and folds. This was a bit of a mess with seeds flying through the air and sticking to everything within flying distance. Thank goodness, hubby was in house cleaning mode and he kindly waited till I was done for the day and he took care of the floors (I cleaned up the counters. I am not that cruel after all.) Now I remember why I usually mix in the add-ins at the autolyse stage rather than waiting till the second fold. With one batch, you just get through it but when making 4 batches, you get to resent the dough a bit when you get to the fourth batch of dough. I will have to try making this again putting in the add-ins at the beginning and see if it makes a difference in the results.
6. Do another 2 sets of folds a half hour apart and let rise 80-90%. I didn’t know this when I was making the dough but CedarMountain let his rise 30%. I checked out my dough at 30 and 50% rise but felt that my dough was not ready so I let it go till just under doubled.
7. Flour a counter heavily as this is one wet dough! Flour the top of the dough and scrape it out on the counter. Divide into 3 equal portions (or 2 one boule and one batard as per CedarMountain) and preshape into boules. Now this was a lot of “fun”. The dough was sticky, sticky, sticky and slack. I must have done 2 or 3 reshapes before I got the dough in some semblance of a boule. Picking up the dough in the middle and letting it fold itself in half really helped give it some structure. I did that probably a couple of times before doing the preshape. I kept thinking of Trevor who says to keep your fingers moving and use a light touch. Well, this woman still ended up with major dough fingers!
8. Let rest 10-15 minutes (Cedar let his rest 30 minutes) and do a final shape. This was a quick, flip over, make into a boule and flip back. Then I lightly floured the top of the boule and twisted it round and round (like a top) until I got a decently taut skin (Pulling it towards me on the counter would just have added to the layers of dough on my hands). Then I quickly dropped them seam side down into rice/ap floured bannetons and covered them with bowl covers.
9. They went into a very cold fridge for overnight proofing. 
10. The next morning, I baked them as per my usual: Preheat pots and oven to 475F, place parchment rounds in the bottom of the pots, flip the boules seam side up on a cornmeal sprinkled counter, quickly place the boules seam side up in the pots, cover, bake for 25 minutes at 450F, remove lids and bake for further 25 minutes at 425F. The dough stiffened up nicely during the cold proofing so it wasn’t too floppy when I was placing it into the dutch ovens.

I got awesome oven rise out of these and they smell heavenly! This is a great recipe! Thanks for posting it, CedarMountain!