Spelt and Light Rye loaves for Others' Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Loaves for Family

Good, Better, Best:
Let us never rest
Until our good is better
And our better best.

• My Grandmother, who will be 102 yrs old this year
  (reciting a rhyme she learned in public school)

Here are a couple of everyday breads made with my wild yeast.  I haven't used commercial yeast in quite a while now.  Why not?  Well, pick any one of several reasons: (1) I have the sourdough, so I might as well use it, (2) wild yeast tastes better, (3) it is healthier for me.

As usual, I am basing this spelt loaf on the Tartine technique, although you will look in vain for the recipe in the Tartine Bread book.  I think the Rye bread is actually the Rye Bread recipe from Tartine; it uses all purpose flour, and my intention is to give it away.  It is Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend.  Of course, I have to work, but my wife is meeting with my son, and so I hope he gets one of these loaves to take home with him.  Since it has rye in it, it theoretically should keep slightly longer.

My wife wanted a slice for her lunch, so I've had a look at the crumb.  Her verdict: no good for honey.

A. The Spelt Loaf

• 200g starter, made with spelt
• 650g water + 50g water later
• 200g barley flour
• 600g spelt flour
• 200g ww flour
• 20g salt

B. The Rye Loaf

• 630g ap flour
• 200g ww flour
• 170g rye flour
• 700g water + 100g water later
• 100g cracked wheat
• 20g salt

I have been wondering if my bread baking is getting any better.  How do you compare the bread you are eating now to the bread you ate a week ago, a month ago, a year ago?  Yet the mind has the faculty of discrimination: we can place two images beside each other and choose the best of the two, whether that image is a literal photographic image, or an imagined image or a memory of an actual loaf.  We can compare.  And like everything else in the real world, we must choose.

Skip the rest of this if you just want the usual bread info.  There's not much more bread info from here on in.  It is all segue to 'Back to Bread'.


Political Scale: a quick lesson
Many years ago, when he was very young, I offered to my young son a quick and dirty explanation of the linear scale that popular media uses to differentiate political parties.  We often hear the terms "Right wing policies" or "On some issues he leans to the Left".  This scale is not taught in school, evidently.  We pick it up by osmosis because everybody uses it.  But it really isn't all that useful, as it tends to gloss the reality, which is complicated.  Nevertheless, it can certainly show you when and where the media has become overly simplistic.  On the eve of another Provincial Election, I am reminded of this scale again.  With three main political parties in Canada (Conservatives, Liberals, and the New Democratic Party), this scale has become a sort of short-hand:

<------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
                                      |                                |                                |
                                         NDP                    Liberal                Conservative

As I told my son about this scale, I also gave him a little family history lesson.  His mother's family came from Germany, and to understand why they came to Canada, one had to know something of German politics and how it affected everyday life there.  Just prior to the advent of the second world war, Germany was still reeling under the weight of reparation payments following the first world war.  In an attempt to alleviate the plight of the ordinary people, the German populace used their democracy to try everything they could think of: right wing, left wing, and everything in between.  When the conservative parties were not far enough right, they looked to fascists; when the union parties were not far enough left, they looked to communists.  The ideological rifts that occurred plunged the world into another world war, and physically divided the entire country for more than a generation.

And the recent history of Canadian politics can also be written on this simplistic linear scale: in the 80's and early 90's, the conservative government of Brian Mulroney moved toward the liberal centre of the scale, squeezing the liberals and achieving successive majority governments for the conservative party.  Unfortunately, this alienated some of the long-time members of the conservative party, who actually splintered off from the main conservative political party and formed their own "Reform" party, particularly in the west.  When the Liberal party came back even stronger and pushed the conservative party back toward the right, the old conservative party was crushed and obliterated.  The current conservative party is built largely on the ashes of Mulroney's legacy, with a good smattering of Reform.  But they have grown stronger again, largely due to the lack of leadership of the Liberals.

In practice, most people in Canada are not card-carrying members of any one political party.  They like some things about the NDP: for example, our universal health care (an idea that came from the heart of Tommy Douglas, one in a long line of excellent NDP leaders that Canadians love but do not elect to the highest position (the latest being Jack Layton, may he Rest In Peace.)).  But they also like the basic idea of the conservative parties -- that is, keep ownership private, and keep the government out of our business.  What this means is, most people are liberal in practice: we like our services, we just don't want to be the ones who pay for it.  It's not always the most realistic choice, but we do tend to gravitate toward the middle, like a bell curve.

We call ourselves a democracy, but we don't get a personal vote on every issue.  We really have to choose a single person to represent us in government, and they are always affiliated with a political party, and we take a lot of baggage we don't necessarily want, along with the personality.

But I really don't want to talk so much about politics and my oversimplification of it.  what I really wanted to talk about was the idea of a scale.

ESAS
In palliative care in Canada, we regularly use a scale that was developed in Edmonton to assess the needs of our patients.  The Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS) would have a person assign a number, between 0 an 10, to some symptom or quality in their life.  When first introduced to this scale, many people have difficulty wrapping their head around the concept.  Rarely do we ever associate a quantity (the number you are asked to choose) with a quality (usually something fairly nebulous and not well-defined, like a subjective feeling).  For example, right now, try this:  on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being the best possible quality of life, and 10 being the worst quality of life, where would your quality of life fall on this number line?

Many things affect your quality of life.  If I asked this right after you stubbed your toe, you might, between hopping around holding your foot and cursing, give your life a quality rating of 7, or 8.  Or if I asked this of you just before you nodded off to sleep after the greatest sex of your life, you might mumble 1, or 2 (it wouldn't be 0, because I would be pissing you off, annoying you about assigning a number when you really just want to fall asleep in the rainbow afterglow...).

ESAS attempts to measure a lot of different symptoms that always seem to pop up in end-of-life care:  pain, tiredness, nausea, depression, anxiety, drowsiness, appetite, wellbeing, shortness of breath, and other.  The "Other" category is for patients to define their own category that is important to them.  You can then use these scales to plot any given symptom or category at any given time, to see the changes that have occurred using a chart like this.  Obviously if a person categorizes their pain at a 3 or greater, we have to make an intervention, and deal with it.

On the other hand, I am concerned about the over-use of such scales, because I believe that placing attention on pain certainly ensures that pain will be experienced.  A study has been done that suggests talking about pain increases pain.  In other words, when I ask a patient if they are experiencing pain, they experience it...so how do I assess them, if as we are taught in nursing school, 'pain is what the patient says it is'?

Quantified Self Scales
Every since I have skim-read Douglas Hubbarrd's book "How to Measure Anything - finding the value of 'intangibles' in business", I have been interested in scales that quantify what are essentially subjective qualities.

I have been a closet follower now for some time of the Quantified Self website, interested in how people put together their independent self-studies, and curious as to what sorts of things they are interested in.  A lot of fascinating people are using tools they have invented that are similar to ESAS, in order to examine quantitatively how they feel about various things.  Just a few recent examples:

Ari Meisel - curing the incurable through self-experimentation
Ari cured himself of Crohn's disease by self-monitoring of his experiments related to diet and fitness.  In this short video of his talk he casually mentions a ton of computerized tracker devices and software that he tried.

Robin Barooah - "I am broken, or I can learn"
Robin used a much simpler binary process of attending to what he ate and how it made him feel three hours later, and ended up losing 45 pounds.  It was apparently enough to place the attention on how he felt (energized or lethargic?) to awaken the unconscious mind to deal with the issues of his weight.

Roger Craig "Knowledge Tracking"
Using a lot of web-based tools he wrote himself, using text-mining, a Jeopardy Q-A database, and various mathematical tools to improve his answering ability, Roger went on the Jeopardy show and kicked ass.

There are tons of other examples.  Check them out.


Emotional Connoisseur
My friend and I have had a recent conversation about how he and his wife trained their girls to describe their emotional life with a rich vocabulary.  Their intention was to provide the girls with a more refined ability to experience their emotions, by more carefully naming the affective states.  You teach a child the parts of the body by pointing to their "head and shoulders, knees and toes"; but as they grow, they may need to learn more exacting terms for the body parts: scapula, uvula, antecubital.
But what about our emotions?  Mostly we learn the basic terms, and you know when you feel sad, happy, angry.  To quote my friend:

A person, after all, who understands that something can be moving, touching, poignant, bittersweet, crushing, haunting, unsettling, depressing, etc., could have a richer, deeper experience in life, say, that someone whose only word to describe these things is "sad."  A person who understands that something might be exhilarating, liberating, joyous, triumphant, empowering, satisfying, etc., etc., could have a richer experience in life than someone whose only word for these things is "good."

And that brought to mind this short comic by xkcd, which suggests that we can become connoisseurs of almost anything.

See the original cartoon on xkcd

Randall Munroe, the cartoonist of xkcd always includes a "hover message" -- if you hover the mouse over the cartoon, an editorial line shows briefly.  The editorial line for this cartoon says, "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit."

I was thinking about that, and about how some of our perceived scales are actually naturally logarithmic.  Take a look at this video (Vi and Sal Explore How We Think About Scale/ How Humans Perceive Nonlinearity) that I found to understand what I mean.

Before Freud, no one paid any attention to the unconscious mind.  Things seem to be invisible to us until we can name them -- whether it be the recently discovered (?but still unconfirmed) neutrino that travels at hyperlight speeds, or the rarest emotion that humans can experience (Lets call it Self Actualization, after Maslow, even if that is not exactly or merely an affective state).

The point I am making: what is going on, really, deeply, wholly, inside of us, or outside of us, that we are not aware of?  How do we name it, how do we quantify it, how do we study it?

 
Back to Bread
I have, for the past couple of years, been blogging about every single bread I've made.  Some have been absolute disasters, some have been very good indeed.  I think I've been getting a bit better at baking bread, but this is a very difficult thing to measure as it involves a whole lot of different metrics, not to mention different types of bread for different purposes.  I probably would have to develop my own personal "bread tracking scale," for my own personal use.  But what should I be tracking?  The more data, the more one can play with the numbers; but too much data, and all you get is noise, and you can't really make sense of it. 

There are things that you would expect that would be on such a scale:  grain, hydration, ferment, taste, crust, crumb, aroma, healthfulness, shelf-life, appearance, shape, etc.

Still, it makes sense that I should be elevating my experience of bread to the same level of language as the connoisseur of wines.  Things like mouthfeel, aftertaste, the layers of flavour -- these are all things that can be named, scaled, refined.  What other things are measurable?

Notes to Myself

• Learn what scales already exist for the description of bread, and dough, and flours. Probably this has already been done. What about the rules of every fall fair where people enter their bread to be judged? What are the criteria? This should give you an idea of how judging is done.
• Do you have enough info on each bread that you have blogged about to determine which bread you have made is the best?

ww, rye and flaxmeal bread

ww, rye and flaxmeal bread

Here is a Tartine-style bread, that is made with 70% whole wheat, 30% rye, with some extra flaxmeal tossed in (about 0.5%).  The crust also has some flaxmeal.  The hydration of the bread is 80%.  Flax seed is seeing a surge of interest lately with the new nutritional finding of the importance of Omega-3 fatty acids in our diet.  Flax needs to be ground into flour or meal though, to get the benefit of its nutrition, or the tiny seeds will pass through the intestines without unpacking its goodness.  Here I've just added the meal into a regular whole wheat and rye bread to see what it would taste like.

Genetically Modified Flax Anyone?
Once again I would like to draw everyone's attention to Genetically Modified Objects in our food supply.  The wiki on flax describes a GM flax called Triffid, which was grown in Canada (as late as 2001), although never commercially, and it is no longer grown.  Nevertheless, some of this GM flax still somehow finds its way into the flax that is targeted for export.  This causes problems for the flax industry when European importers reject it out of hand.

Wheat growers and marketing boards should heed the lesson.  And so far, they have.  But we are continuously bombarded with news that various groups are interested in trials of GM wheat.  I try to follow some of the arguments for and against transgenic wheat and report on it in the transgenic wheat wiki, in what I hope is a balanced way.  Because I have personally heavily edited that page, I have become interested in any GM food that is introduced into our food supply.  Currently in Canada we have GM rape and soy (without much fanfare and not nearly enough discussion, I must say). I personally would like our wheat to remain uncontaminated by GMO.  On the other hand, I am not opposed to continuing some contained experimentation on GM wheat.  I really think that we have to learn far more about it before releasing it into our food chain or into our environment, though.  And we won't learn much about it without experimentation.

I think it would be a good idea to learn what there is currently in wheat (likely as a result of Norman Borlaug's influence) that has caused the increase in wheat allergies over the last few decades.  There may even be a way to get rid of it with transgenic methods! Would that be a good thing?  Hmm.

If something as small as the difference between Omega-3 and Omega-6 oils can make such a big difference in our health, and we've only just learned about it, what else do we not yet know about, in terms of human nutrition?  We're still just scratching the surface and learning about what is safe and what is not.

Incidentally, have a look at this interesting TED video: Robyn O'brien (author of "The Unhealthy Truth") gives a TED talk in Texas.  While she doesn't specifically mention wheat, she does target milk and corn and soy as foods that have had their proteins tinkered with, and are likely causing increased allergies and maybe even cancers.  With California currently proposing labeling laws for GMO in our food, her concerns and story as a mother are noteworthy.  Who wouldn't want to know what they are eating?  Who is behind the move NOT to label GMO foods?  I am on the side that says more information is a good thing.  Even if labeling is not legislated, if producers of GM foods really are proud of what they are doing, and think it is good for the consumer, they would label it even without legislation.  The fact that they want to sneak it by the consumer shows me that they simply don't have the health and welfare of the consumer at heart.  And if the government bows to the pressure of the industry instead of sticking up for the consumer, they too should be held accountable.  We need to know what we're eating.  Whatever Californians decide, the rest of the continent will soon follow.  Lobbyists already have a web site (that is where I found the Robyn O'Brien video).

While I can't prove it, nevertheless I believe that the bread I make myself is safer and healthier than the processed and well-traveled bread that I can buy.  Here is a link to the page that I sometimes fiddle with, that deals with some of the nutrition findings and questions about grains in our diet.  Someday I should clean it up, elaborate it and give some footnotes.

Crust:

Crumb:

Bread Results
The top of the loaf, coated with a bit of the flax meal, gives it a glittery sheen that reminds me of mica.  Curious.

This bread stales quickly.  It is slightly bitter, which not everyone is going to like.  If you like coffee, you can probably get used to this bread (what I mean is, it is bitter the way coffee can be bitter).  For everyday use, I think I would add some honey or malt to this bread in the future.

Notes to Myself

• Laura Dolson has some interesting tidbits of info on flax meal.
• The Flax Council of Canada has some good info on flax meal on their website.  They say that Flaxmeal is okay to use, up to 10 months from the grinding, without the oils turning rancid or a breakdown of the omega-3s. Hmmm. 
• Add honey or malt to a whole wheat and rye dough containing flaxmeal to make it slightly less bitter.

Sex Bread Better than Viagra for Prolonged Erections

Whole Wheat, Rye and Maca Root Bread
(and another variation on the Tartine Semolina, in the foreground)

SEX BREAD!

If you've ever read my breadblog before, no doubt you are now looking to see if I've finally decided to monetize it.  Nope.  Still doing this for just for fun.  But the headline, "Sex Bread" is sort of a spoof on the kind of thing you might see in blogs that try to draw in people (usually on stupid, inane pretexts).  But the fact is, this bread might just improve your sex life.

The other day I picked up some cream-coloured Peruvian Maca Root flour at a Bulk Food Store.   This organic root is supposedly dried and pulverized by an ancient and traditional process.  You add it to things you cook or bake, and it is supposed to provide nutrition and stamina -- for when you go hiking in the Peruvian Andes.  You might need it if you're taking the trek to Machu Picchu.

The Mists of Machu Picchu

But there are other mountains that we need to climb, personal mountains.  For example, I have it on good source (the people who sell it as supplements!) that maca root enhances sexual performance and relieves symptoms of menopause.

But the jump-on-the-bandwagon websites will warn you that the alkaloids in the root act like human hormones, so too much might disrupt thyroid function or even interfere with libido.  Other sites warn about possible side-effects of tachycardia, hyperthyroidism, headaches, heartburn, mood swings, or hot flashes.

So how much should you take?  One website suggests 450mg supplements 3x/day with food (1.35g).  I have about 150g in 2 loaves of bread, so lets say 75g per loaf. If there are 20 slices of bread in these small loaves, and if the maca is more or less evenly distributed, there should be less than 4g per slice.  If I eat 4 slices a day, and if the claims that it is a natural viagra are correct, well then I should be walking erect.

But the Wiki on Maca downplays the dangers of higher doses.  The root is eaten by Peruvians as it has been for years, the same way we eat turnip (i.e. usually we cook it before we eat it, and it is ubiquitous in our diet but not as much of a staple as, say, potatoes are).  And I suspect the Peruvians are similarly sexy as the rest of us, with or without the root.


Maca Root Powder Bread
The stuff smells very interesting and unique, and you get a sense, when you are dumping it in the bowl with the other flours, that it is very healthy.  There is something in it that has novelty: imagine the novelty experienced when someone from western Europe first inhaled the aroma of coffee beans, or cocoa.  It is not exactly that strong: it is gentler like carob.  But there is something interesting about it.  I don't smell butterscotch, like some people have imagined.

The maca root flour is creamy-coloured, compared to the rye and the whole wheat flours
and the scent is uniquely interesting

The dough was tightly elastic, and perhaps a bit too dry to properly fold

The breads came out singing, and the scent was fascinating

To be more accurate about what I used: I only had 158g of Maca Root Flour; I used 700g of whole wheat, and the rest was rye flour (142g).  The rest of the ingredients (water, salt) are the same as any 75% hydrated Tartine Loaf.

A Variation on Tartine Semolina Bread
As for the Semolina bread, I've tried this once before and it didn't work, because I was using Semolina wheat hearts and not true flour.  I still had some of those semolina wheat hearts, however, so I used it again.  300g of AP flour, 700g of semolina cream of wheat, and then I added 200g of whole wheat until it felt better.  I didn't follow the rest of the instructions for the Semolina loaf (roasted seeds in the dough), but I did sprinkle a few fennel seeds on top while it was proofing.

The semolina, sitting in an island in the middle of some sourdough-inoculated water

One of the Semolina breads, singing, fresh from the oven, giving off a scent of fennel seed

All the proofed dough baskets were retarded overnight in the fridge for approximately eight hours, and were baked within 30 minutes of taking them from the cold.

Results

The Maca Loaf's Crumb
Both loaves taste great.  The maca root loaf has a most unique scent that is hard to place, but strangely familiar.  I asked my wife if she could identify the scent.  "Wood," she said.  "But a good wood: like mahogany."  I don't know if I'd agree with that (and please, no jokes about my wood), but the smell is redolent of a recent happy memory, and there is a sort of elegance to the recollection.  Describing a scent is extraordinarily difficult.
 

My brother-in-law was visiting, and I asked him to smell the bread and tell me what he thought the scent was.  His face took on a puzzled look.  The smell was familiar, he said, like what one would put in a rye bread.  "I don't know what it is," he said, "but I know I don't like it."  I think that he was somehow identifying it with caraway, but of course there is no caraway in it.


The Semolina Bread's Crumb

The Semolina bread's crust is crackly crisp, and I cut into this loaf while it was still smoking hot.  My wife likes it, but feels the need to toast this bread twice: she feels the crumb is too moist.  I like it, and it reminds me of a crunchy Italian loaf, or a crusty baguette.  My wife likes the fact that I didn't overdo the fennel seeds.  She would not have liked them in the dough, but they are acceptable on the crust. 

I am eating both breads with goat cheese and ripe tomatoes from my garden.  Wonderful!

Notes to Myself

• The maca root and whole wheat dough was difficult to fold, so the hydration could have been substantially increased.  It was such a tight little ball of dough! 
• The crust and crumb of both loaves turned out excellent: the maca root loaf is a lot more supple than the pictures would indicate.  Both loaves toast nicely.
• Mostly I can eat bread and then fall asleep from post-prandial narcolepsy, or carb loading.  But imagine a loaf of bread where this doesn't happen.  Instead, you eat the bread and feel horny, and your energy level goes up, and your stamina increases.  Kind of the reverse of 'the munchies,' the snacking hunger that one supposedly gets after smoking marijuana.  Imagine a maca root loaf where you eat the bread and get hyped up on exorphins in whole wheat and the natural viagra of maca, and then just want to jump into bed with the nearest warm body. 
  
  It's like an aphrodisiac bread.
  
  Well, we can dream, can't we?

Tartine country loaf revisited and a 50% ww-rye loaf

In palliative care, we generally try to ascertain a person's values before making any recommendations for treatment.  A person's goals, fears, desires (and the family and culture's values) all play a role in placing a person on a scale that ranges from aggressive treatment for disease (with the goal of prolonging life at the cost of all else), and the other end of the scale which accepts death and attends to comfort (sometimes even at the cost of life's prolongation).  The one in the driver's seat, supposedly, is the person him or herself.  The person's values determine our options for treatment.  What we are trying to determine is Quality of Life.  And it turns out that QOL, like pain, is simply what the person says it is.

The scale is never an all-or-nothing line in the sand.  Persons with disease frequently start out at one point on the line, and as their illness progresses, their position on the line may change. 

No illness or person is that simple, of course.  None of us are so one-dimensional.  Multifactorial analysis must take place, and since we are humanists, it rarely if ever gets done with mathematical precision.  We use our gut, our intuition, our inclinations that seldom get so concrete that we can put them into words.

What does this have to do with bread?

A short while ago, Sweetberry commented on one of my blogs and stated matter-of-factly their priorities in making bread: (1) healthfulness, (2) taste, and (3) presentation.  While it is nice to have all three in a single loaf, if you could take only one or two with you to a desert island, these priorities might be correct.  Bakers (think Peter Reinhart, for example) sometimes put (2) taste before (1) health, but they have a traditional reason for this: if people do not like a baker's product, they will not buy it, and if they do not buy it, the baker goes out of business.  I think that is why Reinhart says "taste is king".  A bread might be the healthiest bread in the world, but if it tastes like yuck, no one is going to eat it, so the healthiness doesn't matter anyway.  And similarly, if a loaf is not pretty, people are not going to be attracted to it to try it.  So even these three named values have complex interactions that are difficult in practice to keep straight.  And what are the unnamed values, inherent in making your own bread?  Grasping for words, I'll list:

• the smell of the house after a successful bake; 
• the exorphin rush of a melt-in-your-mouth stinging hot crumb; 
• the spine-straightening sense you get when you finally know you can do it yourself, feed yourself; 
• the satiation felt even several hours following a slice of hearty bread that says "I am content: I require nothing more." 
  
  All of these (and more) add to my QOL.

While it is important for sustaining my body, mind, and emotions, making bread for me is not a matter of life-and-death (unlike my day job).  Oh, I know: like any junkie, addicted to his exorphin rush, I like to say "I can take it or leave it.  I can walk away at any time."  But I know it is not entirely true now.  I don't think I can stop making bread.

Today:
just a couple of ordinary Tartine country bread loaves for my sweetie.  I bumped the hydration to 78%, and even that small difference made them a little sloppy for me to handle.

And since I liked the last rye bread I made, for today's rye bread I tired bumping the rye flour content to 50% while increasing the hydration to 85%.  This fermented quickly, and probably should have been baked at the 3 hour mark instead of the 4 hour mark, of proofing.  The dough started to become unstable, and I had some difficulty getting it into the dutch oven.  That is why these 50% rye loaves became slightly misshapen.

Some sloppy Tartine Country Loaves in back, some ugly 50% Rye loaves in front.  Grapes too.

I ate one and put one in the fridge for when I get too busy to bake.  It could happen. 

Results

The Tartine Country Loaf is the same as it ever was.  For some reason, these loaves turned out a little blonder than I remember.  That's okay, I don't have to eat them.  They are for my sweeter, who prefers a paler loaf.

The rye tastes okay, but the one I made the other day with less rye was superior in taste as well as appearance.  This one was a bit more sour, probably a result of that extra hour of proofing that it didn't require.

Ugly, misshapen 50% Rye loaf

I'll eat it anyway, with thanks.

Still a good tasting bread.  Healthy, tastes okay, looks only so-so.  I have achieved what I value most more or less -- In that order.  But there were other benefits in doing it all myself.  Even if I did burn my arm when moving the 500 degree F Dutch Ovens in and out of the oven.

QOL.  You can taste the difference.

Notes to Myself

• Keep the rye flour content less than 50%, for best taste.
• Watch your proofing times. If the dough is ready at 3 hours, don't leave it an extra hour or you will only increase the sour content and the gluten will begging to break down.

Barley-Rye-WW-AP loaf, and a Whole Wheat Bread with 17% Rye

In the wake of my second millet loaf disaster, I decided to steer clear of millet flour for a while.  Today's Tartine-style loaf started out with 170g of rye flour, but to that I added 200g of Barley flour, 200g of ww flour, and the rest was AP flour.  My wife is seeing an acupuncturist for her sciatica, and he advised her to eat barley.  These loaves were originally for her.

I needed to make more rye bread for me too, since the rye breads I made the other day were being given away.  This was almost the actual Tartine Rye Recipe, at 170g of Rye flour; but for this loaf, I used 830g of Whole Wheat, used the whole wheat starter, brought the hydration to 85% and dusted it with a combination of rye meal and rice flour.

First time ever I used my wicker baskets with a tartine-style loaf and no couche liner.  I dusted heavily, but I still worried it would stick.  They did not.

The loaves were retarded overnight in the fridge, and baked in the morning.
Forcing Bread
My folks came by for a short visit.  We gave them some fresh eggs from our backyard chickens, and I asked them if they also wanted to take home some fresh bread, too.  I had these 4 loaves on the counter, and another 2 or 3 in the cupboards.  My wife was actually a little frustrated that we had so much bread on hand, and I just kept making more.

"You want some bread too?" I asked them.

"No," my dad said, a little bit too quickly.  It was blunt.  There was no hint that he had even contemplated saying, "No, thank you" (like he had taught me to do, since I was knee-high to a grass-hopper).

He blinked.  I blinked.

There was a long beat, a deep silence that enlarged the distance between us.  Then I foolishly insisted he take some.  I thrust a loaf of my newly made bread into a bag and set it on top of the eggs for him to take with him when he left, whether he wanted to or not, barely registering how his shoulders fell slightly, hardly seeing his frustration rise.  He was annoyed at having to once again eat some of my bread.

You see, my dad is a "white bread" kind of guy.  He likes his peanut butter, he likes his jam, but he likes it on toasted tasteless white bread, the stuff he is used to.  And my bread -- even the white loaf I gave him, the one I made from all purpose and barley flour -- he simply doesn't like.

This is what the barley flour loaf looked like just before adding salt

So there you have it.  My bread makes no one in my family happy, except for me.

Sorry Dad.  But even if you don't like it, you can tear it up and throw it in your compost.  The worms will like it.

Results

My sweetie ate the remaining barley loaf, but before she finished it she complained that it staled quickly.  Good thing she didn't have 2 loaves to get through.

Signs of fermentation in the bread. 
Oh, that was the day I put some grapes through the Dampfentsafter.

Barley bread can be sliced thin.
But it won't hold jam, Dad: sorry.

I had a slice or two of this bread, and I enjoyed it. But I prefer more whole grains now.  The 17% Rye bread that I made for myself was much more to my liking:

ww&17%Rye Sourdough with cracked rye crust

This Rye Bread was tasty

Notes to Myself

• Do not force people to eat your bread, no matter how much you have on hand.
• I was particularly pleased with these rye loaves.  They were so good.  The cracked rye crust was especially tasty and interesting.  The crumb was soft and tasty.

Tartine-style WW bread with 20% Rye, and a (Final?) attempt at Millet bread

 WW breads with 20% Rye, and another (final?) attempt at Millet bread

I quoted a government source the other day that suggested pearled millet was poised to become the next big grain, like corn.  But after a couple of days experience with it (baking it into bread, making a porridge, and making some patties for a meal), I have to say that I have my doubts.

millet porridge

millet mush having a bit of sourdough added to it

In order for pearled millet to approach the importance of corn or wheat or rice, someone has got to solve the problem of millet's rapid staling or rancidity.  Its oils may have to be removed, as they are in wheat, and if the oils go, there has to be some fortification added; or its oils may be further processed, as they are in corn, and secondary markets like corn fructose or ethanol will have to be found in millet for this to happen.  Neither wheat nor corn end up being healthy when they are so transformed.  And millet will suffer the same fate, I'm afraid.

With the last couple of breads (the millet loaves) going stale before I could eat them -- literally before my eyes, even as they cooled from the oven -- I was forced to make some more bread the very next day.

Bread #1
Just in case the millet loaf I was making bombed again, I mixed up some whole wheat with 20% whole rye flour, with a hydration of about 84%.  It was retarded overnight in the fridge.

Bread #2
Then, because my sweetie's all purpose millet loaves were also hardening on the kitchen counter before she could eat them, I thought I'd at least try one more millet loaf before calling it quits with bijri flour. 

I made an loaf with 60% AP, 30% bijri, and 10% ww flour.  This was at about 78% hydration.

But I made a mistake with the ap loaf: I had completed my folds and was bench resting it for 30 minutes prior to shaping it when I fell asleep on the couch.  I didn't even hear my ipod's duck alarm going off in the next room.  I was gone.

At about 3 in the morning, the cat roused from his spot under the neighbour's barbecue, where he was safely out of the rain, and he knocked at the window.  His wet furry paw sounded like a squeegee being rubbed against the glass next to my ear.  I heard that.  I got up and fed him, and realized my bread had been bench resting for 4 hours.  There was a bit of oozing happening, but I formed it the best I could and set it in the prepared colanders.  I was a bit worried about what might happen to this bread: would the gluten be already peaked, and even now unwinding?  Would the yeasts be spent?

I decided to go ahead with it and see what would happen.  After all, some old recipes advise you to knock the bread down twice.

Results

I put a loaf of the millet and a loaf of the ww&rye in the freezer for a day when I won't be able to bake.

The rye worked fine.  This is a bit more rye than there is in the official Tartine Rye bread recipe (and there is no AP flour in this one, either).  There are some awfully wide holes in places in this bread.  Doesn't hold jelly too well because of it.  But the crumb is quite pliable and it tastes good.

The millet loaf again performed poorly in the oven.  I didn't see any rise in it.  This is not the way to make millet bread, I've determined.  Nevertheless, there is evidence of a lot of yeasty activity in the airy crumb.  I was happy to see that, since I have been refreshing my wild yeast daily for a while, thinking that it was a little sluggish.  But because of the long bench rest, this loaf is probably quite a bit over-proofed, and the gluten is likely weakened because of it.

I'm still quite happy with it.

Unfortunately, the bread was (barely) acceptable, the next day, for my sweetie's breakfast.  She had entirely rejected the millet loaf based on the weight of the bread, literally setting it aside as she ranted about how inedible my tough loaves are.

I quietly cut her a thin slice and she tried it.  "It is good with peanut butter," she reluctantly said, after complaining for several minutes that there was no breakfast bread in the house, and all this bread I had made is just "lunch bread." 

Notes to Myself

• Still not a fair trial of millet flour in a bread, since it had such a long bench rest. Will it stale quickly like the last loaves, even though I didn't include the hulled millet? Time will tell. So far, the loaf tastes fine and nutty.
• The millet porridge that I fermented with a few tablespoons of whole wheat starter was a revelation in taste.  I loved it.  But I gave it to my wife to try, and she wrinkled her nose.  "Ugh," she said.  "It tastes like nutty yogurt." Exactly!  I would eat this plain, like yogurt.  And if you add a bit of fruit (and perhaps some sugar or some maple syrup, if you must), you have a dessert.