Mouse Bread

Mouse Rye Bread

What's in the name?

In the first Star Wars movie ever released, A New Hope, there is a scene where Chewbacca is led through the halls of the Death Star wearing handcuffs, and he roars at a little nameless robot that has since come to be known as a 'Mouse Droid'.  The Mouse Droid apparently becomes frightened of the Wookie and scoots away.   As the invented universe of Star Wars grew, these scuttering little Droids became known as MSE-6 Droids, or colloquially, Mouse Droids.  Some are walkers, and some are rollers.

MSE-6 Droid, aka "mouse droid"

 I remember watching this scene in the theatre for the first time, and recall how the kids around me all laughed: imagine a galaxy far, far away where little robots could 'feel' scared.  To the littlest kids around me, it was a sight-gag, a moment of hilarity, perhaps a relief from their own tensions and fears during a dramatic turn in the movie.  But I was not laughing, I was intrigued.  We had already seen robots in the movie that seemed to express emotions (C3-PO was always whining about something), but these were complex machines that had been specifically designed to interact with humanoids.  So what was so absurd about the Mouse Droid feeling frightened of the wookie?

Could simple machines experience emotions like fear?  If so, there must be some way to program them to have feelings.  Intuitively we suspect that artificial emotions would be even more difficult to build into a machine than artificial intelligence.  Already we can program machines that can beat some of the best human minds in chess; but have we even begun to consider how to program machines that will emote?  Without the ability to feel, though, I suspect that no machine will ever pass a Turing test.  Humans can detect in an instant the sincere emotional quality of those around them.

More recently, I have been intrigued with some current theories as to how and why our own human emotions evolved.  Long before I was ever a nurse, I was interested in affective states.  Why do our emotions exist?  What are the primal emotions?  Why do we empathize with those around us who are experiencing rich emotive states?  These are questions that I obsess about, since in my everyday work world, I am generally in the midst of some of the more powerful named emotions -- love, anger, grief.  Pain itself has long been considered an emotion, and it carried the argument for Darwin's 1872 text "The Expression of the Emotions".  A large part of my job is spent circumventing the human machinery of pain with narcotics synthesized from the elements in the vegetable kingdom; many plants contain narcotic substances, and you have to ask "why?"  What possible reason could there be for a plant to contain a substance that will dull the pain of an animal or human that ingests it?  Somehow it adds to the plant's survivability.  Is it a pure defense mechanism on the part of the plant, meant to harm us?  Or is it another of those examples found everywhere along the chain of living organisms where cooperation and symbiosis has found a place?

Even as we are slowly beginning to understand the physical basis for pain and feelings, and as we begin to manipulate them with medicines, there is a point where, as a nurse, I can only surrender to feeling.  It turns out that one of my best tools is emotive, empathic, and sharing the grief of my patients and their families as the moment of death nears.  But since mirror neurons exist, what is this constant involvement with grief doing to me?  I don't know.

no wheels

Blogs are where one digresses.  Let's move on.  As for naming a bread after the mouse droid:  I just think that when I turn one bread tin over top of another to bake a bread with steam, or even just to let it rise on the counter, the double tins remind me of the Mouse Droid.  Sure, the name I've given to this bread is nerdy and obscure.  But I bet that the Lucas Arts people came up with the mouse droid in the first place by placing a baking tin upside down on the chassis of a remote controlled car.


What's in the bread?

I had the thought that Rye Dough isn't really kneadable.  So if you are not going to knead it (and therefore if you are going to bake it in a tin), why not take the hydration higher -- in fact, much, much higher?  Eventually my question became: Why can't you, in fact, take the hydration of a rye dough to 100%?

Before I left for vacation I asked my wife to get me 'the largest bag of rye flour she could find, at Arva Flour Mills.  That was a mistake, I guess.  I thought she might get me the 5kg bag, instead of the 2kg bag, but instead she brought home this industrial strength 100kg bag that I didn't even know existed.

So what to do with all this rye flour?

First off, I decided to make myself a 100% rye sourdough.  A TBSP of the wheat wild yeasts, was added to rye flour and water for a couple of nights and voila, I had one going nicely.

With the rye sourdough I was making daily, I decided to try baking a 100% rye loaf.

First Try

My first attempt was a disaster, and I wasn't entirely sure why.  I didn't know whether it deflated because it was at 100% hydration, or if it fell because I took the lid off to look at it before I put it into the oven, or if it fell because it wasn't baked long enough, or at too-low a temperature, or if it fell because I wasn't gentle enough when moving it to the oven?

Second Try

So I baked the exact same thing again (well, this time I didn't add the rye kernels that I had soaked), and I didn't look at the dough, and I was as gentle as possible in moving it to the oven; I also tried baking it a bit longer and slightly hotter.

If it failed again, I would know: 100% hydration for rye bread is not going to work!

 

Results: yes, it caved in a bit.  Which leads me to suspect that a 100% hydration is not going to work with a straight rye dough.  But the 375 degree heat, and the 80 minute baking time helped to bake the loaf fairly well.  A couple of the edges are even a bit dark.


Both of these loaves are extremely sour tasting.  That has its place, of course.  Sometimes I crave a sour bread now.  But most people would not accept the taste of these loaves.  There is another problem: they are far too moist, even a day or two after baking.  They require further toasting to hold up, and the knife drags through them.  This is far more like cake consistency and appearance than bread: but the sour taste will quickly tell you that this is no cake.


Third Try

In this loaf, I used some whole wheat flour at 100% alongside the rye, thinking that it might provide more structure for the loaf.   I kept the rye to 60%, the whole wheat to 40%, the hydration at 100%, the salt at 2%.  I also added about 250g of soaked rye kernels.

I mixed everything up on the 8th and refrigerated the doughs separately.  It wasn't until a couple of days later that I mixed it all together.  And once I had it in the pan, I only let it sit about 90 minutes before baking it.  I really didn't want it to rise too much, since I had filled the pan to the top and didn't want it to overflow.  Besides, the less fermentation the better, since it would simply become too sour again.

That is a lot of changes, so whatever happened was really not going to prove anything.

This loaf tastes a lot more acceptable, but it is still extremely moist inside and requires toasting to use, even though it baked for 85 minutes, the last 15 minutes of which the top of the Mouse Droid was off.

The soaked rye kernels are noticeably flavourful, but this bread doesn't taste half as good as Nils Schöner's Applejuice Soaked Rye bread.

And because of that I will leave off baking these experimental, high-hydration rye "mouse" breads and turn back to Schöner's excellent bread book, "Brot", for my next rye breads.

Notes to Myself

• Return to Schöner's book 'Brot' for tips on Rye.  Consider baking your way through his book!  The breads I have tried have turned out well, and are well appreciated by others.  The ones I have not tried look great.  It will save you some experimental woe if you follow a few recipes...
• Save some of these sour mouse breads for altus.  Just let them stale and add some, for example, to Nils' "Peasant Bread".

Mildred Orton's Simplest.RyeBread.Recipe.Ever.

Mildred Orton's Straight Dough Rye Bread

Mildred Orton's whole grain bread recipes continue to astonish me.  I skipped over the next-in-the-book, the Cottage Loaf.  I will be making that one, but the next recipe after that one intrigued me more.

I had a look at her Rye Bread recipe, and was intrigued with how simple it appeared.  No preferments.  No sourdoughs.  No long rise.  No overnight dough.  Nothing strange to alter the pH.  This rye bread recipe was the antithesis of just about every rye bread recipe I had ever seen.

The surprises continued when I read the instructions.  She expects me to knead this 100% rye dough?  She doesn't have me put it in a tin?  I can bake it free-form, with steam, on an oven stone?  Unbelievable!

The surprises continued even more when I weighed the ingredients:

Ingredient	baker's%	Weight
Scalded Milk	103%	498g
Shortening	2.28%	11g
Salt	1.45%	7g
Yeast	3.5%	17g
Water	12%	58g
Sifted Rye Flour	100%	482g

Now, a few words about my measuring of the rye flour.  Mildred would have you sift the rye flour in order to measure it, and then to sift it again when you put it in the (lukewarm) scalded milk mixture.  I only sifted one cup of the rye flour when I was measuring it, and I got 107g.  I merely multiplied that weight by 4 1/2 to get the amount of rye flour that her recipe calls for.  But notice what you get, when you do that: You have a rye bread that, with the milk and water added together, is 114.7% hydrated.  Whoa!  And tell me again, Mildred, how you expect me to knead this?  Without wheat flour?  And you expect me to shape it?  Without a putty knife?

Frankly, I just could not believe it.  And that is when I imagined Mildred standing behind me in a thought bubble, as wise as Yoda, saying, "You fail because you do not believe."

Because I did not believe, I dumped my measured rye flour back into the bin and started over, not sifting it as I measured it.  And this time, because of the settling of the flour into my measuring cups, the weight of the (unsifted) rye flour was 583g.  Now if you take this value as 100%, your hydration value falls to a mere 85%.  Even that, I thought, is going to be extremely challenging to knead and shape.  I mean, we are talking 100% RYE FLOUR.

Method

Scald the milk, with the shortening.

Proof the yeast in the lukewarm water.

As the milk warms to scalding temperatures, the shortening begins to release its fat into the solution.  Take it off the heat and stir in some salt.  Then let it cool to lukewarm (I transferred it to a larger bowl for mixing while it cooled).  More fat seems to surface while the milk cools.

Add the yeast to the milk solution once it is sufficiently lukewarm.

Even though Mildred's recipe is wonderfully succinct, it contains a lot of description as to what the dough mixture is supposed to be like, as you add the sifted rye flour to the scalded milk mixture:   "Add enough to make a stiff but sticky dough, still moist enough to stir with a spoon," she tells us; and "Stir for 4-5 minutes as if you are folding in beaten egg whites."

I sifted the rye flour into the mixture a little bit at a time, until I felt that the spoon had a fair bit of resistance.  I felt that by adding more flour, the dough would become too thick to stir.  So I quit adding it.  

And I measured how much I had left over.  

It was 108g.

Darn near to a sifted cup.

The dough is left in a warm place for a couple of hours, until it is "light".  There is no mention here about doubling.  But it certainly does expand.

Now, after the bulk fermentation stage, you are supposed to dump it out on a floured surface and knead it.  I floured my surface with a fair bit of rye, because she expects you to knead it until it is "springy", and I kept encountering a dough that I would describe with the adjective "gooey".  I added more and more flour to the counter top, and bit-by-bit, lo and behold, it did indeed begin to get "springy".  

I continued to knead (mostly with the scraper, using it to fold the dough over and over on itself) until the dough actually felt like dough and not the same old familiar putty-textured rye slop or glop.  And when I finished, I realized I had added … wait for it...

… guess how much flour?

About a cup.

Needless to say, my admiration for Mildred Orton went up one hundred fold.  I don't know how she did it, but with this recipe, with these ingredients, by golly, it works.  She is a Jedi Master of Whole Grain Bread.  I couldn't be more impressed if I had seen her raise a broken X-wing starfighter out of a swamp with a wave of her hand.

The baking time is quite long (an hour and a half) and with far too much extra time on my hands
 (and with the greatest respect) I made this Mildred Orton as Yoda Picture for this blog.

Now I believe.  

Depending on how you measure it, here are the baker's percentages for the dough I put together.

Ingredient	baker's%	Weight
Scalded Milk	85%	498g
Shortening	1.88%	11g
Salt	1.2%	7g
Yeast	2.9%	17g
Water	9.9%	58g
Sifted Rye Flour	100%	583g

Now the dough proofs, and doubles.  It was doubled in one hour, but I preheated the oven and stone for 30 minutes after that, so the dough may have actually been a little overproofed.

The final surprises: I was amazed that this rye dough stayed firm when I placed it on the stone from the basket, and scored it.  Baking it at such a low temperature did flatten it out a bit, but not nearly as much as some other high hydration rye breads I've baked.  How did she do that?

Clearly, The Force is strong with this one.

But what about the taste?

Perfectly acceptable.  It is mild flavoured.  I prefer a sourdough rye, a sourdough brings out far more nuances in a rye bread.  But this is nice.  It would complement cheese, or jam.  Plain or toasted.  It's good.

I must admit that I did not wait until the next day to slice this open.  I needed bread today, and I got bread today.  I figured, Mildred has broken all the other "rules" with this rye loaf, why not see if it can be sliced as soon as it is entirely cool, instead of waiting til the next day like you are 'supposed to'.  And this loaf, about 6 hours after I made it, is incredibly moist.  The crust is moist, the crumb is moist -- without being the slightest bit gooey.  

Good girl, Mildred.

Notes to Myself

• Believe Mildred Orton. She knows whereof she speaks.
• What effect does the shortening have on the whole? When scalding the milk, the blob of shortening does not melt except with lots of stirring. Only when leaving it sit until lukewarm after the scalding does the milk show a lot of fat globules on the surface. What does this doe to the milk? How does it help the structure of the dough, how does it provide that little bit of extra support that the rye dough requires? I don't like using shortening, because of the trans-fats. But I just can't imagine anything else that would perform similarly. Would an egg, for example, provide some fat that would help a bread and give it a certain amount of firmness? Her description says that the dough gets stirred/folded like you are adding egg whites. What if you DID add egg whites -- instead of the shortening? How the shortening, the small amount that gets added, is so absolutely vital to this bread is quite a mystery to me.
• In the next few days I'm going to be trying other grains (triticale, spelt) in bread. If those recipes (a mere 68% hydration) don't work out, I'm going to try this recipe with them. This recipe is simple enough that it can make a very good bread in a single rise, with a very high hydration.
• You are using too much yeast.  One packet of yeast (I noticed later when I went to the supermarket to buy something else) is not 17g, but is 8g.  Next time, bake this with 8g of yeast.
• What if you used sourdough instead of yeast?  Sure, a longer rising time might be the result.  Or not.  But I am sure that the flavour -- good as it is -- would improve.

Sourdough Discard No-Knead Rye and Whole Wheat Breads

Long winter shadows cast by my bread, cooling by the window.

 Here we go again with a bread that I've made several times.  It is a way to use up some of my old sourdough starters.  I generally keep my discards, and then when I haven't anything else pending, I'll use them up in a bread.  This is based on the CIA bread that I once tried.  But every time I try it, I tweak something.  This time, I thought I'd add some rye kernels.

The reasoning behind this bread is that a starter discard has already developed lots of flavour, similar to a sourdough build or a biga that you might otherwise make for a bread.  Sure, it might be a little more sour than most people like, but there is certainly going to be some interesting character in the taste.  You may not be able to count on the yeast in it to raise the dough, so you add some.

The method is easy, even if every time I do it I have a different amount of starter discard.  First, I measure the sourdough starter.

The Rye
The rye starter I had was only 327g.  Consider that to be 92.7% of the total flour weight.  You can thus figure out how much flour you'll add by using this formula:

Total flour = n00 / 92.7

In this case, n=327.  So 32700 / 92.7 =  353g.
My total flour will be 353g.

Now I have in the past used 70 percent rye, 30 percent whole wheat here; but often enough I've just made a 100% rye with it, and that's what I wanted today too.

Once you have figured out the weight of the total flour, you can easily find the rest of the ingredients:

    •    Yeast is 0.8% of the total flour: 3g
    •    Salt is 2% of the total flour: 7g
    •    Water is 85.4% of the total flour 301g
    •    You can also add bread spice, about 5g for every 1000g of flour.  I used 4g here.

And in this case, I decided to add some boiled rye kernels. 

    •    One cup of rye kernels weighed 190g before boiling

The last time I boiled some rye kernels, I kept them at a rolling boil for 45 minutes.  My wife suggested that it would be more energy efficient, quicker, and less bother if I used a pressure cooker.  She showed me how to use it.  I tossed in 1 cup of rye kernels with 3 cups of water, and set the pressure cooker on medium heat.

Now, I've said in the past that our whirlpool stove and oven is one of the worst appliances we have ever owned, and the company's record in servicing and standing behind the product is crap.  We have never had good luck with this stove.  The elements turn on and off for no apparent reason, and a pot of water won't boil quickly.  A pot of tea can take forever.  So this pressure cooker, although it only took 20 minutes to cook the rye kernels, took at least 20 minutes to get the steam up to its cooking pressure.  At that point, you turn it down to low, and the 20 minutes of actual cooking is done at the lowest energy setting.  But I had no great belief that the elements, which turned on and off like a traffic light, were keeping the pressure up. 

I think that the kernels were a little undercooked, but I thought that I was now wasting time, so I just tossed them in the dough.  They wouldn't be as good as the ones that are soaked overnight in apple juice anyway.  I just needed something rye to fill out my rye dough, which was a little skimpy.

The Whole Wheat
I also made a 100% whole wheat bread with some starter, too.  Here, I used:

    •    632g whole wheat sourdough
    •    682g whole wheat flour
    •    5g yeast
    •    14g salt
    •    582g water
    •    4g bread spice

I added no extra boiled grains to this whole wheat dough.

Both doughs were put in my long thin pans, and set in a warm place on the mantel under a box for an hour. 

The rye is ready to be baked when it develops some surface cracks.  Perhaps I waited a bit too long.

I mixed a few spoonfuls of plain yogurt and some poppy seeds, and just before baking, I brushed the mixture on the top.  I was going to be baking these breads for a long time at a high temperature, and I didn't want the tops to burn.  Just before placing the tins in the oven, I docked the loaves deeply with a thin poker in several places.

Then they were placed in the oven at 450 degrees F.  I intended to keep them there for 65 minutes, and perhaps 15 minutes more out of the tin in a cooling oven. 

And I left to walk the dog.  My wife had careful instructions to remove the tins, if we were for some reason delayed.

When I returned an hour later, I could smell the sourdough and yogurt tops of the loaves burning.  I opted to take them from the oven at 60 minutes, and to forget about any further baking.  The tops, with the poppy seeds, looked dark and interesting, but I felt the loaves had been baked enough.

I waited until the next morning to cut into the loaves.  The whole wheat is crusty, but holds together for thin slicing.  Curiously, the crust does not taste at all burnt.  Unfortunately, the loaf is rather tasteless over all.  I was hoping for a bit of sourdough taste here, but it really is not that pronounced.

The rye loaf is still a bit gummy in the interior.  Rye dough retains its moisture far longer than wheat will.  It could be that the gumminess comes chiefly from the boiled rye kernels which are still largely intact in the crumb.  But I feel that the rye loaf could have withstood an extra bit of time in the oven, too.  Still, the top crust has had enough time in the oven.  Despite the yogurt on top, any extra time might have just have burned it beyond using.  The poppy seeds have been exposed to the high heat at this point, and the burning smells I encountered when I returned from my walk were probably caused from them more than from the loaf.

Notes to Myself

• Try this next time with some cooked rice that has been soaked in tomato juice.  That idea has been kicking around the back of your mind long enough.
• The poppy seed and yogurt gives an interesting texture to the top, but it reminds me of cake more than bread.   
• Try adding some boiling water to some grain that will release its gums -- e.g some cracked rye or cracked wheat, or even some boiled oats -- a combination of grains that when it meets boiled water, will form a paste that can be brushed on.
• The whole wheat bread is done at 60 minutes; the rye bread could use an extra 10-20 minutes at least: but cover the top with foil so it doesn't burn during the final 15 minutes.