Reinhard's Transitional Country Hearth Bread (with found Morels)

Reinhard's Transitional Country Hearth Bread

Day 1:

Worked nights, Mon & Tues.  Tues Afternoon when I awoke BEFORE work, I measured ingred for Soaker & Biga

The Biga is white flour, making this a 'transitional' loaf.  It is mixed & kneaded 2 min.

After a 5 min rest, it is kneaded 1 more minute before being refrigerated at least 8 hrs.
This biga will be in fridge 12 hours. 

The Next Day:

I wake up Wednesday afternoon, my day off: time for "Mis en Place"

The Biga needs 2 hours to come to room temp.

But even before that 2 hrs is up, I can cut the pieces and roll them in flour.
While I'm waiting, I can cut the grass, which is getting shaggy from all the spring rain.

After 2 hours, the yeasty pieces of the biga are waking up.

The soaker, biga and final dough ingredients are squished together and kneaded 2 min in the bowl.

Then 3 min of kneading on the counter: by then, ingredients are mixed well (no more 2-tone dough)

The dough rests 5 minutes, and then is kneaded one more minute.
Oh, did I mention I found some morels when I was cutting the grass? 
Not enough for a meal, but perhaps I can add them to bread.

The dough is placed in an oiled bowl to bulk ferment 60 min, room temp.

Supposed to be 1 1/2 x the original size before you form it.

Plop it on the counter gently.  The dough is a little saggy.

cut up the morels

Flatten out the dough prior to rolling it up into a sort of batard shape.
Morels get tossed on, they will be interior to the loaf when complete.

Some day I'll get a real banneton.  For now, the cheap basket must suffice.
ERROR: seam side should be up.

After proofing 45 minutes, just before tossing in the oven @500 degrees F.

The loaf sagged open along the seam. 

Outside on the picnic table for a picture, before the rain begins again.
See all the maple keys that came down in the last few days of rain?
Lucky I got the lawn cut!

Day 3: Results

Not many morels show up in the crumb.  Maybe there will be more as I cut into it further.

The morels add very little morel scent to the loaf.

And they look more like gooey raisins or boogers than something appetizing.

Notes to Myself

• This loaf was poorly formed, not nearly tight enough.  It probably would have seen a much better oven spring if you had made a tighter batard shape, and really pinched the dough around the surface better.  Squishing it into an improper basket size didn't help much either.  But by far the biggest problem with this loaf was that you proofed it seam-side down, which meant that as soon as it was free of the basket, on the peel, it already started to unwind.
• The morels were just a spur-of-the-moment idea.  Unsure if it was a good idea or not.  They might have been better on a pizza.
• You aren't careful enough when you make bread.  Get some more sleep and pay attention to what you are doing!
• You don't care at all about the Transitional Loaves, merely want to get past them to the real Whole Grain breads.  Although I suspect that for most people, the reverse is true.  This bread is a mere 53% Whole Wheat (and 47% All Purpose Wheat flour).
• Use more morels, or leave them out entirely.  They are lost when used this way.

Reinhart's Transitional Challah

What happened when I made Reinhart's Transitional Challah

For some time now, I have been working my way through Peter Reinhart's book, Whole Grain Breads, trying to find my way clear to making use of more whole grains in my diet.  Along the way, I've had to battle, at various times, my own ignorance, preconceptions, attitudes, information overload, ennui, and whatever likes and dislikes I've picked up along the way both from my own tastes and my culturally imposed preferences, as I've tried to understand why or if I need to use more whole grains, how they ought to be best used to achieve health and nutritional benefits, and what sort of baking routine I can incorporate into my own life.  I can't say that I've been educated yet.  But finishing this particular bread brings me to a sort of plateau stage: this is the last of the enriched breads in the book.

Extended Rant Section

For some time now, I have been railing against how sweet these Reinhart breads taste.  Others who have tried the breads that I've made from these recipes have been astonished at the texture, the mouth-feel, of the loaves I've made, and have wondered if I have perhaps made a mistake in making them: the crumb is very moist, and yes, they are sweet, and yes, they seem more like cake than bread. 

While I expect and hope that the future loaves I make from this book  -- I am just about to start the "Hearth Breads" section -- will be closer to what I assumed I'd find when I began baking my way through this book, I'm not entirely convinced.  A quick look at the recipe-to-come, the whole wheat heart bread, shows me that it too has some added sugar in it.

Others seem to share the notion that Reinhart's breads are plenty sweet (e.g. see the recent-as-i-blog-this-today discussion here  following DMSnyder's quest for the perfect whole wheat bread: Snyder eventually goes on to compare Reinhart's Whole Wheat from the Bread Baker's Apprentice to the one in Whole Grain Breads.). 

Does the health benefit of the whole grain outweigh the high glycemic index of the simple carbohydrates used to make the bread more tasty?  I don't know the answer to this question.  I hear Reinhart and many other bakers say that good taste trumps all (for example, he says "Flavor Rules" and "Flavor is King" in his Ted Video when he was making the circuit to advertise this Whole Grain Breads book). 

Well, I beg to differ.  Flavor is not king.  Good taste does not trump all, except in the silo of bakeries that pander to common taste.  Sure, you can make breads that are sweet and that lots of people like.  But ultimately, are you doing your customers a service if they are dying of diabetes and heart disease because of what you feed them?  These days, we have to consider more than just taste.  We have to consider our health, and the health of the planet.

When I say the word "silo" I am referring to the way in which our knowledge seems to be gathered in stacks that are not well distributed.  We have farmers who grow the grains, who have a certain expertise; they buy the grain seed from suppliers who have a certain other expertise; they send the grain to mills that have a certain expertise; the flour has ingredients added to it that are mandated by the government based on recommendations by nutritional/medical science of decades ago, in order to curtail epidemics that were rife in those times; the scientists today have their own ideas about what additional additives ought to be put into our food, and these ideas are battled out in the test studies that are more or less funded by those who have an interest not in our health and well-being so much as making money from what they are lobbying for.  The baker who buys the flour has her own expertise.  And the consumer who will taste the bread knows what he thinks he knows, or what he is told he knows.

Each of these areas have their own area of expertise, and none of them are particularly interested in the expertise of the others.  They each live in a silo.  So the farmer is not particularly interested in how the seed is produced, except he wants it to be able to hardy, easy to grow, disease resistant, and fetch a good price in the market; the miller is not particularly interested in the grain, except that it should stand up to the milling process and the flour that is produced should find a buyer who is interested in its properties as a food ingredient; the government is not interested in the flour except as a foodstuff that is only nourishing enough to keep its taxpayers alive up until the age of 65 when they become more of a liability than an asset; the scientists have their own vested interests based on what they are trying to prove and for whom; the baker doesn't care what is in the flour as long as it has good baking qualities and can sell the final product to the consumer; and the consumer may or may not be guided by their taste: there may be other factors that they are considering, such as cost, or health benefits, or even lifestyle and culture.

Ultimately it boils down to this: the corporations who are fighting for control of our food supply are telling the consumer that what they are selling us most cheaply is best for us; and so our taste is being steered at every level into areas that may not be in our own best interest, but in the interest of those who seek to control what we eat so that they can improve not our health (or the planet's health) but their bottom line.

Take the example of transgenic wheat, which I've been doing a lot of thinking about.  Transgenic wheat is a reality.  The corporations who control the seed of our food have developed lots of different types of transgenic wheat, and they are ready and willing to put it into our food supply.  Farmers are willing and ready to try it, if it is easy to grow, and has other properties that farmers like (higher yield, less fertilizer, more disease or drought resistance, etc.).  Governments are ready to rubber stamp transgenic wheat because they have been lobbied to do so by the corporations that fund the research.  Scientists like transgenic wheat because they are able to show off how they can manipulate the genome of virtually anything.  Probably bakeries would like certain transgenic wheat if the gluten could stand up to baking procedures and some could be made that would help with the growing gluten sensitivities that are showing up, or if the new flour could be shown to be more nutritious and beneficial rather than dangerous.  If flavour alone were the king, then all a corporation would have to do is to make a transgenic wheat with more flavour than ever before, and the consumer would buy it.  The point is, the corporations who control the making of the seed are trying to appeal to every step along the chain of supply to make it more acceptable to us.  The resistance is not from anything other than the marketplace now: some customers are rejecting it on principle because the culture is so intertwined with bread made from wheat, and they are scared that the new wheat might somehow destroy them and their culture.  The corporations are currently trying to show that their wheat is safe to ingest: they are introducing it into the food supply of third world nations, and the poor and starving people of the world are going to be the guinea pigs that will convince the rest of us that our fears are unfounded.

So when a baker tells me "flavour rules", I say no.  In fact, tastes change.  Tastes can be manipulated like fashion.  What rules -- everywhere along the chain of interest -- is the bottom line.  As long as the ruling class can give us bread to fuel our bellies, we are going to be pacified.  Reinhart said it: "(Bread) is the product that everyone in the world eats, that is so difficult to give up."  We are narcotized into eating bread.  It is the exorphins in the grains that are king.  Bread is the opiate of the masses.  Whoever controls the bread controls everything.  This is all about total power and control of the world and its resources.

About this bread

This is the gooiest bread dough I've ever worked with.  It is really very sticky.  I ended up incorporating about an ounce more whole wheat flour while I was kneading it.  The goo was awful otherwise.  Like trying to knead the yellow part of a deviled egg.

I had no great interest in this bread.  Frankly I just wanted to get through it, to get on with the rest of the bread recipes in Reinhart's book.

The Soaker

The Biga

Day 2: Final Dough

I used this loaf as a practice of my braiding technique.  I'm still not much good at it, I'm afraid.  And I did have some question marks over my head when I turned the loaf over and braided the second half of the loaf.  Something there is still not right.

Today was a cold day in the house and things didn't rise very much.

The bread, in the oven, seemed to spread and sag rather than plump up.  And so most of my braiding is lost.  This is one ugly challah loaf.  But then, I'll never make this again, so who cares?

Crumb:

The crumb is surprisingly holey.

Notes to Myself

• If you aren't going to pay attention, what is the point of baking? You are guaranteed not to learn anything. You'd be better off just not baking anything until you really want to bake a particular loaf. Otherwise, you will be disappointed in what you bake, so why bother baking? Don't bake a loaf just to "get through the book" whether you want to or not. That's just crazy. Don't do this again.

Reinhart's Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread

Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread

I am not quite sure why I tend to lag my way through Reinhart's book.  My best guess is that when it comes time to try the next recipe on the list, in the order that they are presented, the recipe is hard up against a rather thick part of my skull, and I have much to learn in order to make it -- or, as in this case, I had much to learn in order to even want to make it.

I had pretty much decided that I'm going to make whole grain breads, and leave these half-way whole grain breads behind.  I had even reached the point where I said to myself, "Why does Reinhart even bother with these loaves with all-purpose flour?"  I mean, I was seriously becoming a purist here, if by purist we mean someone who insists, with evangelical fervor, that their way is right, and all other ways are wrong.  The Religion of Whole Grain, and me the only member of that church.

Yeah, it's lonely standing on that street corner, trying to save everyone.  No one else would, or could, eat my bread.  So the last several bakes, I have been using some all purpose flour in amongst my whole grain breads, in varying amounts.  And some of the people who have partaken of these 'transitional' loaves have indeed liked them.

And so you have the concept of a 'transitional' loaf: if someone isn't used to eating whole grain breads, you want to ease them into it gently.  Don't keep trying to feed them loaves that sit like a stone in the gut; don't keep trying to bake dense, all but indigestible fiber-filled breads that don't have much taste.  Bake something that tastes good, that they will want to eat, but that will also have some of the whole grain in it -- be it 50, 60, 80 percent or whatever (this loaf is 42% all purpose, or 58% whole wheat).  If it is too much like bread that they don't know, they will not turn to it, they will not understand it, they will not appreciate it.  Better to have a little bit of good stuff in there, than too much, or none at all.

Of course, it is this sort of compromise thinking that gives us the government regs behind naming whole wheat loaves: there is such confusion in the marketplace now.  People simply do not know what a whole grain bread is anymore.  They think that transitional loaves are whole grain breads.  Well, they are, and they aren't.  They have some whole grain in there, but they are not wholly whole grain.

I woke at 0430 this morning for no good reason, and just began making this loaf.  So the soaker only got 12 hours, and the biga only 10 hours in the fridge.  The final dough was made around dinner time tonight, and it performed admirably.

Mixing the Soaker

Soaker ingredients

This has to be worked some to get all the ingredients moist

That sure seems like a lot of raisins.

Mixing the Biga

My chickens lay bigger eggs

Biga ingredients: here is the recipe's AP Flour

The biga gets mixed 2 min.

The biga sits 5 min.

It is kneaded 1 min.

And then into the fridge for 8 hours minimum

Reinhart's biga called for 47g of egg, slightly beaten, and the chicken egg I used, an organic egg from our own hens, was 56g, and I did not toss any away.  The white flour and the yellow yolk sure made this a yellow dough (the digital camera didn't pick this up).

The elastic properties of this all purpose dough are one of the reasons why so many people like making bread with this stuff.

Mixing the Cinnamon Sugar

I used the volume measurement for this, and got slightly less weight than what Reinhart gives in the recipe, and that made me happy: last time I made one of his cinnamon loaves, there was far, far too much sugar.  This is only 41g of sugar and 5 g of cinnamon.

This will get sprinkled onto the rolled out dough later in the build process.


Mixing the Final Dough

I laid out most of the ingredients the day before, when I was making the Soaker and Biga.  That meant it was all ready to go once the biga and soaker were ready.  A real time saver.

The final dough ingredients, minus the biga and soaker

Mis en place

This won't be mixed by spoon: you require your hands or a mixer

Once again, I rolled each of the pieces of the biga and soaker in some additional flour, as the recipe says.  I'm not sure why I didn't do this for the first few recipes I made (I was rolling it in some of the measured flour), but it really does make a difference.  The recipes seem to come together even better.

The Kneading times

 At this point, the dough is mixed but not kneaded

 After 4 minutes of kneading, it must rest

After 5 minutes rest.  That 5 minute rest seems to make all the difference!

 Another 1 minute of kneading, and the dough is ready for the bulk fermentation

 Ready for the bulk fermentation

 This was supposed to swell to 1 1/2 x the original size in 1 hour, but it just dries out

The biga, when you work it into the final dough, really makes this bread quite kneadable.  I didn't see much rise after the initial bulk fermentation.

Rolling out the Dough

 I used the rolling pin to roll this dough out evenly -- and I went a bit thinner than Reinhart suggests

 Cinnamon sugar on it, and it rolls up nicely.

I didn't see much rise even after rolling it up (I made this into a panned loaf).

But the later oven spring was substantial.

Into the pan and into the oven

 Ready for the final fermentation

 One and a half hours later.  No expansion noted: it just looks a little drier

 Score just goes through the top layer of roll

Glaze

 I included the optional corn syrup

 My glaze is always so much wetter than the one in Reinhart's picture

I tried to make a half amount of the glaze, as I find Reinhart's loaves too sweet for my taste.  But the glaze wasn't the right consistency, so I ended up making the whole amount.  And I poured the complete glaze over it, even though I know it's going to be too sweet, because I didn't know what else I'd ever do with it.

Results

 A nice oven spring, this loaf rises nicely

 It cools 5 minutes before the glaze is added

I had no great hopes for this loaf, but it held together well after baking.  And despite all the sugar poured over top of it, I am pretty sure that it will get eaten.

It might even be sweet enough for those who don't like raisins.

 She doesn't like raisins

Over half of this loaf was fed to the chickens, because it was too gooey inside, too under-baked.

Notes to Myself

• Bake the occasional transitional loaf.  It's okay, you aren't breaking any laws.  You won't grow horns.
• This is a fairly easy bread to make, and as I've proved here, it can be made in a single day.
• This is one of those loaves that you might make for special occasions. 
• This loaf is a little bit 'clinchy' (a word we use in our household for when bread is too doughy, possibly under-baked; I don't think it is a German word, it is probably just a made-up colloquialism).  It is difficult to tell though, because the raisins themselves are a bit clinchy.  This slice would probably be fine if it were toasted.  Next time: bake another 10 minutes (I baked a total of 45 minutes: 5 minutes at 450 degrees F, 20 at 350 degrees F, then I turned the pan and baked at 350 degrees F. -- and it wasn't quite enough, obviously. 
• Next time bake for another 10 full minutes.