Teff, walnut, rye sprouts and nut butter sourdough loaves

Some breads just make me dream of what they taste like. For example, Lin's recent teff walnut and rye loaves. And in a good way they stimulate the creative juices as well as the Pavlovian ones! I'd already had some rye kernels in my sprouter and so I started thinking and dreaming and planning my own loaves and thought maybe some super oily nut butter with pecan and macadamia nuts and of course I've been loving teff in my porridge so the teff flour was calling to me in my dreams as well. The end result was this creation, as much fun for the creativity of it as for finding out what a loaf like this would taste like.

The plan was to incorporate rye from the sprouts, and also I've become a fan of a long and salted autolyse which seemed like it might work here too. An extended salted autolyse is something I like to do overnight, as described say by Trevor J Wilson as a "pre-mix method" and which Peter Reinhard calls a "soaker". I do think it is probably wise to keep the dough in the fridge overnight to prevent proteolysis of the gluten, and keeping it salted is good for tight gluten and preventing spontaneous fermentation.

There is an advantage/disadvantage to starting with a cold dough - when you mix your levain in the morning into the cold autolysed dough it takes many hours before the temperature of the combined dough has even reached a level when fermentation can resume. If, like me, you have a busy day, you can mix and then you have plenty of time before you need to attend to the dough again and in this way it is possible to have a busy day without compromising the quality of the bread.

The idea of including teff flour in the levain was appealing to me (my starter loves it!); and to delay the mix-in of the nut butter to the morning together with this teff levain made the most sense - as it meant that the gluten in the saltolysed dough was able to form without the complications of the oils and gluten-free teff in the dough matrix. Note that the sprouted rye pulp was incorporated into the autolyse dough upfront though. Sprouts were a little more developed than I would have liked, but it is an inconvenience of the sprouting method that they're never ready when you want to bake! The vital wheat gluten (VWG) in this loaf was increased a little to compensate for the sprouts.

The time from initially mixing the levain into the cold long autolysed/saltolysed dough until baking was an eye-popping 11.5 hours. But, you've got to think that half the time it was too cold, and it spent long intervals undisturbed with a lid on that kept it cool.

Brought the one loaf to share at a friend's house and it was a hit, especially since when we ate it it was still warm enough to melt butter. Lovely softness to the crumb and the crust from the nut butter which was 50% pecan and 50% macadamia and which brought in a lovely aroma to the bread. Could feel a slight grittiness to the crumb from the teff and didn't really notice anything particularly "rye" about these breads. Glad that I didn't include cranberries with the walnuts as the walnuts on their own were just right to me.

A lovely, somewhat unconventional and complicated bread that was delicious and fed my body as well as this bread baking hobby!

-Jon