HBin5's 10grain recipe as an 8-grain with turmeric

HBin5's 10grain recipe as an 8-grain with turmeric

I was just using up this dough, that still contained papaya seeds.  I used a longer basket here, just to use up the dough in a single loaf.

I've always wanted to try adding some turmeric to the interior of a bread.  That was the only plan here.

I sprinkled a bit of ginger in the flour that coated the couche, and you know what?  That is actually the best part.  I think that next time I want a gingery crust like this, I will mix the ginger and the flour completely, and use it liberally to line the couche. 

I love the colour of turmeric, and of course, it is just so good for you. I flattened out the dough gently with my fingers and sprinkled lots on before rolling up the dough and placing it in the basket to proof for 90 minutes.

I also tossed a bit of dill on what became the bottom of the loaf, but this really got lost in the process.

The loaf turned out fine, sagging a bit, but it worked as a stone-baked artisan loaf with 3 slashes.

I think that the golden colour of the turmeric interior is amazing.  Although, it does seem to me as though the colour fades somewhat as the loaf is exposed to air.

Notes to Myself

• What if you add the turmeric to the dough itself?
• Add the ginger to the flour that you will line the couche with; or better yet, roll the dough in flour mixed with ginger before proofing.
• What other spices would work here?

HBin5's Pseudo-Bavarian Pumpernickel - a new tactic

HBin5's Pseudo-Bavarian Pumpernickel

With the last experiment of the HBin5 Bavarian Pumpernickel a total failure, this time I decided to try a longer bulk fermentation, and a longer baking cycle, and a different method of baking.  Pumpernickel is traditionally steamed, and to approximate this, I returned to a Lahey-style method of baking it inside a pre-heated old crock pot interior.

I rolled the soaked rye seeds in the interior as I had previously, but I put it in a floured, cloth-lined basket for about 2 1/2 hours prior to baking.

The baking was done at 450 degrees F for 30 minutes with the lid on, another 30 minutes with the lid off, and then a further 15 minutes with a boiled rye flour starchy coating to the crust to keep it from getting too hard -- a total of 75 minutes.

Results:

It still was not long enough.  The interior of the loaf is still far too moist (even a full day after baking, before slicing into it).  The loaf did stick to the preheated container -- probably due to the damp rye seeds that were sprinkled on what ended up being the bottom of the loaf prior at the time of bulk fermentation; or it could be because of the rye starch wash that was placed on the loaf during the final 15 minutes of baking.

The crust is crunchy and has a nice taste.  The loaf was damaged in digging it out of the container with a spoon when stuck.  It is very airy inside, and far lighter than it looks.

When you get an edge piece of the loaf, it tastes quite nice (although not a thing like pumpernickel) -- a nice, mild rye bread.  But the interior remains gummy, that no amount of toasting will correct.

Notes to Myself

• This will be the last time I make this recipe.  It is not a good one.
• When baking rye breads in this manner, and this thick, you best consider a time of 45-60 minutes with the lid on, then another 30-45 minutes with the lid off.

Karin's German Feinbrot

Cellarguy's version of Karin's German Feinbrot

I made this bread on a whim, mostly to see whether or not my motherstarter was still viable.  I am in the process of making some new motherstarters -- both rye and whole wheat, but my old motherstarters have kept me more or less in sourdough breads for some time now.  My only problem with the old motherstarters is that I end up refreshing them more often than I do using them.  I tend to use the old discards more than I use the new refreshed starter.  And so I don't get any drastic rises from my loaf.  I wanted to know, are they still working?  They were sour, to be sure, so I knew that they had the bacteria that would make lactic acid all right.  The question was, did they still contain yeast?  Would they rise breads on their own, without adding commercial yeast?

So recently, this German Feinbrot caught my eye as I perused the various bread blogs.

From information I have gleaned, Karin is an ex-pat German now living in Maine who was forced into making her own bread when she couldn't find anything decent in her adopted home state.  Once making her own, she became hooked: and this recipe was one that she came up with on her own, to achieve the taste she missed.  See her article on 'The Fresh Loaf Blogs: From Brick to Bread, My German Feinbrot', or the original on her own blog, 'Brot & Bread'.

From what I understand, a "Feinbrot" is a light rye bread containing mostly (>50%) wheat flour, and somewhat less rye.  Using my favourite online German-English dictionary, you can see the many adjectives that 'fein' can be translated as:  accurate, beautiful, choice, classy, dainty, delicate, fine, gentlemanly, nice, pretty, subtle, tenuous, wispy.  I think that I would translate it as 'Fine', with whatever connotations or baggage that fine word brings to English.

The similarities here to Reinhart's technique in Whole Grain Breads (he uses an overnight soaker, a starter, and some more ingredients in a final dough on day 2) are of course, deliberate, since she claims that as one of her inspirations.  But this loaf is not entirely whole grain.  There is a fair amount of bread flour (for which I have substituted an organic Canadian All Purpose flour).  She does use a whole wheat motherstarter at 75%, though -- which is what Reinhart uses in his recipes, and it is what I have on hand.  So I felt relatively 'at home' with this recipe.  This was my experience, your mileage may vary:

Day one: Mix up the soaker and starter and leave covered overnight.

Soaker:

• 192g whole rye flour (I freshly milled this amount, it is about 1 c of whole rye grains)
• 64g whole wheat flour (I freshly milled this amount, it is about 1/3 c of whole wheat berries)
• 4g salt (~1 1/4 tsp of Kosher salt)
• 192g water (200ml)

Starter:

• 195g whole wheat motherstarter @75% hydration
• 200g organic all purpose flour (1 1/2 c)
• 120g water, lukewarm (150 ml)

At the end of day 1, I have a soaker and a starter set aside in containers.  At this point, they look pretty much the same.  But the one that is expected to rise is the starter, on the right.  Is my wild yeast still viable?

Day Two:

 The starter has seen a nice rise, overnight.  I'm thinking the yeast is good.

Final Dough Ingredients:

• Soaker
• Starter
• 56g organic all purpose flour
• 10g salt
• 1 g homemade bread spice (I used the bread spice I made once before)

 Final Dough: Mis en place.

Method:

• Mix all ingredients, 2 minutes, knead 4 minutes, rest 5 minutes, knead 1 minute.
• Cover, rise at room temperature for 4-5 hours.
• Shape into a boule, proof in a basket, seam side up, 2-3 1/2 hours.
• At 2 1/2 hours, preheat oven to 500 degrees, with a stone and pan for steam.
• Score the bread, and bake at 475 degrees for 10 minutes with steam.
• Bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes more, then rotate the loaf.
• FInally, bake for 20 minutes more and cool on a rack.

 Initial Mixing I

 Initial Mixing II

 After several minutes of kneading, I stop to rest the dough for 5 minutes.

 You can see how the dough relaxes somewhat during its resting phase.

The bulk fermentation was looking good.  I never get a good idea of how much my dough expands until I actually look at these pictures afterward.  The ball was quite tight, before, and it did expand nicely in the bowl.

The final proof in the basket was looking good, too.  Perhaps I could have left it a bit longer during the final proof.  But I had left it for 3 hours.  And if I had waited any longer, I would not have been able to use the stone to bake the pizza I had planned for supper, before yoga.  So I was up against the clock.

The baking went off without a hitch.  The dough was dumped out pretty close to the edge, but it didn't drip, thank goodness.  I scored it roughly when it hit the hot stone.

It didn't see a huge rise while baking, but then, it didn't see much rise during the final proof, either.   Still, the loaf looks fine from the outside, even if it is a bit small.  You can see the texture of the linen that it proofed in.  Someday I'll get a real banneton.

This is a bread that my wife will like.  She says that it certainly is the right crumb density that Germans have come to demand -- without all that 'crunchy munchy' stuff I tend to put in.  This is a bread that holds up to toasting, and it can handle some jam or honey without being overpowering.  It also complements a nice mild cheese.  This bread will disappear quickly in our household, because she will help me eat it.  Finally!

Thanks, Karin!

Notes to Myself

• I wonder about more whole grains.  Sure, why not?  Try this with only whole wheat and whole rye, to see what kind of a rise your loaf gets.
• Maybe you can try sifting the home-milled whole wheat and whole rye flours (perhaps to 80% of the original weight), and use the bran that gets removed to cover the surface of the loaf when it is proofing and baking.  That might be interesting.
• Wait the appropriate time when proofing in the banneton, for a better oven spring.
• Follow Reinhart's directions to bring your motherstarter back to full strength again.

Adapting Mini's Rye Ratio to my old Starter

Adapting Mini's Rye Ratio to my old starter

I have been wanting to try Mini's Rye Ratios ever since I first saw the posting about her breakthrough discovery of the 'right' ratio for rye on 'The Fresh Loaf Blogs'.



This is not it, but is an adaptation of her recipe to suit the needs of my day.  One day, I will use her recipe with more exactitude.  For now, this will have to do.

For today, I take some old starter (here is where I begin to diverge), at 75% hydration (another divergence) and considered that my weight standard ("one part rye starter").  To this, I added 3.5 parts water, and 4.16 parts flour, and salt at 1.8% of the flour's weight, as per Mini's ratio.

I am also adding someinstant dried yeast, (another divergence) because my starter is old.  I'll go with 1% of the total flour mixture (i.e., the weight in grams that is 1% of the flour's weight added to the part of the weight of the starter that is rye flour. 

I will also made my own bread spice, using the recipe she talks about elsewhere.  Mini uses 4 TBSP of bread spice per 500g flour (that is, 1 TBSP:125g flour).  I will use instead the ratio given in the recipe I found online for Brotgewürz, i.e. 5g per 1000g of flour.

The Bread Spice I Made

The bread spice is based loosely on the German Brotgewürz, a commercial product I have never tried.  Mini gives her own recipe for bread spice elsewhere in the fresh loaf blogs, but that only uses fennel, coriander and caraway.

 The spices in this Brotgewürz

I found an online recipe that gives a recipe for a German bread spice (presumably for those who, like my wife, do not like caraway) at Germany's Recipe Wiki:

• 10 tbsp whole cumin
• 6 tbsp anise
• 6 tbsp fennel seeds
• 2 tbsp coriander seeds

Directions: Mix in a mortar with pestle, but not too fine.  Put the mixture into a glass jar in a dark place.  Incorporate into a dough at 5g per 1000g flour.

I did not have enough spices to make this as described.  I made it in the same ratios, but instead of using tablespoons, I made it with teaspoons.  This had a nice side-effect: once ground, it fits nicely in an old empty yeast jar.

The bread spice smells wonderful when you are crushing it in the mortar.  The next time I make this, I think that I am going to also include some dried papaya seeds.

The first thing I did was to calculate some of the values of this table.  These are huge amounts I am working with!  I was originally going to use all of my spent sourdough, both rye and whole wheat, using these ratios.  But it was not to be.

Ingredient	ratio and overall%	Rye amount	Rye volume	Whole Wheat amount	Whole Wheat volume
Starter	1 parts (%)	466g	--	390g	--
Flour	4.16 parts (%)	1939g	--	1622g	--
Water	3.5 parts (%)	1631g	--	1365g	--
Total Flour	100%	117g+1939g= 2056g	--	98g+1622g=1720g	--
Salt	1.8% of flour's wt	37g-	--	-31g	--
ID Yeast	1% of total flour's wt	21g	--	17g	--
Bread Spices	0.5% of total flour's wt	10g	--	9g	--

I didn't have enough rye flour to make all of this, so I decided to cut it in half.  Even that looked like too much, so I cut it in half again.  Finally I had what looked like the amounts I'd need for one loaf.  And I decided that I won't make the whole wheat version this time, I'd just stick with the rye.

While fiddling with the table amounts, I encountered a little math problem that had me scratching my head for a while.  This recipe brought up a strange problem (for me) in Baker's Math.  Perhaps something like this has stopped other people too, so I'll reproduce it here in detail:

Baker's Math Problem:

You have a recipe that calls for a sourdough starter at 100% hydration.
You have a starter that is at 75% hydration.
You want to know how much flour is in the sourdough starter, so you can calculate the total amount of flour in the recipe (because that is what the other percentages in the recipe are going to be based on)
In my case, I knew only the total weight of the starter (117g), and its hydration (75%).  That 75% means that the water weight is 75% of the flour weight in the starter.  The flour in the starter is at 100%, obviously.  And the weight of the flour is going to be the weight of the starter less the weight of the water.

The key to answering this problem is realizing that the starter actually contains more than 100% of ingredients.  Always remember that the flour is 100%.  So to get the total percentages of weights in the starter, add the percentages to the flour: it will always be greater than 100%.  Bakers have to forget what they learned in school about the parts of the whole adding up to 100%.  Just remember that with baking bread, the whole is always greater than the parts!  You are creating something that contains more than 100%!  Always!

So in this starter, the total percentages of the weights is 175%.  How much of that is flour?  It is going to be the total weight minus the weight of the water.  The percentages are related to the weights.  So let's set this up as a ratio.  The only trick about setting up ratios is keeping what you are comparing on the same side of colon, for each side of the equal-sign.  I'll show you what I mean:

75% water : 175% starter  = x grams of water : 117grams starter

So this is (water to starter) on the left side of the equation, and (water to starter) on the right side.  Set up in this way, you can then cross multiply.

175x = 75 X 117
x = 8775 / 175

= 50g

So the amount of flour would be 117g - 50g = 67g

You can test this out now to see if 50 g is 75% of 67g, also using ratios.  Let's test for the weight of flour in grams, by calling that x.  Thus:


75% : 100% = 50 grams  : x grams
75x = 5000
x = 5000 / 75
= 67 grams.

Very simple once you have the key.  So let's generalize a formula for the flour:

waterWt = (hydration% X totalStarterWt) / (hydration%+100)

starterFlourWt = totalStarterWt - waterWt

 = totalStarterWt - ((hydration% X totalStarterWt) / (hydration% + 100))

I didn't have this formula in front of me for this experiment.  But I will have it the next time I try to make Mini's Rye, officially.

Here's what I did:



Making the dough:

I mixed up 117g starter, 485g rye flour, 408g water, 9g salt, 5g yeast, and 3g bread spice.  I didn't add the salt later, like Mini does. I just mixed it and it rested for 3 hours.   Then I folded it a couple of times and shaped with wet hands into an oblong and placed it in a basket.  There it rested for 4 hours.

Making the bread:

I preheated the oven and a casserole dish to 390 degrees F.  30 minutes later, I placed the dough inside the dish, splashed some yogurt on top, docked it with a fork, and baked for 25 minutes.  Then I removed the lid and baked another 25 mites (I figured that, because of the yogurt, I should add a longer bake than Mini suggested in her recipe).

While I was taking a picture of this bread for the blog, the cat jumped up on the table and walked over to see what I was doing.  I thought he was going to take a drink of water, but no, he was attracted to the bread.  He went over to the bread -- which smells marvelous, by the way -- and licked the top of the loaf, once, where the yogurt is, before I could get the camera down and shoosh him off the table.  The nerve of that cat.

The crumb is okay, nothing special, in fact it is very moist and although it tastes okay it could have used a slightly longer baking period, in my opinion.  But it tastes very interesting, with the bread spice.  I really like this.  I ate some of it this morning, side by side with an old piece of rye bread that is going stale, and I decided that I like the taste of rye by itself, but that this rye flavour, with bread spice, makes for a nice change.  It does change the whole character of a rye, slightly obscuring its bitter tones, but developing other personality traits.  I'm glad I made the bread spice, and of course, the bread -- even though the bread was kind of a flop because I didn't actually follow Mini's recipe.  I just needed a rye bread for work this weekend, and this recipe and my spent starter was at hand.

A bit misshapen, but a very interesting loaf

Notes to Myself

• Docking it and then dumping yogurt on top may have a counter effect. In this bread there was no great rise seen, only a sagging and spreading. Was that due to the heavy yogurt on top of the bread that prevented the bread from rising?
• The bread spices are actually quite nice, not too overpowering in this ratio. I think they do add something to the flavour. It is not something I would need all the time, but it is nice for a change. Wait and see if my wife likes it. She may not. I won't force her to try the bread this time, she gets cranky when I make her eat bread.
• This loaf could have benefited from an even longer baking, in my opinion. The crumb looks okay, and is moist, but in rye crumb, some moisture tends toward gumminess. I am just basing this on the fact that the knife did not come out clean when I first cut it. It tastes okay, not gummy.
• Harry the cat is attracted to the smell and the surface of this loaf. Keep it out of the reach of the cat.
• Be more attentive to Mini's directions and amounts when you next go to make this bread.
• I am not really sure why this simple bread math stumped me. My only explanation is that I was working on only 3 hours of sleep, in the flip-flop of going from working nights to days off. Get some sleep.