Lahey #6 - A Nut Loaf (uses almonds not walnuts) plus Hooch

A Nut and Raisin Loaf based on Lahey's Walnut Bread Recipe.

If I had walnuts, this might have just been Lahey's Walnut Bread.  But since an 11pm search of the cupboard and refrigerator turned up only pecans, almonds and cashews, I decided to experiment a bit further.  So while the Recipe I started with was Lahey's Walnut Bread, that was merely my point of departure.

I have been reading about Hooch.  It has been some time since I refreshed my sourdough starters, and I have been noticing that there is quite a bit of alcohol floating on the top of them.  I was wondering how much, if any, toxic methanol is part of that band of yeast exudate, so I was doing a bit of reading on it in various Internet web sites.  Just casual browsing, not true research.

I guess I learned that the alcohol that yeast produces when it consumes grain starch is about 13% ethanol; there are a lot of other impurities in it, but probably there is very little of the dangerous methanol, because if any of that was produced, it will have been changed to water and carbon dioxide just from being in contact with the oxygen in the air.  The old prospectors who lived off sourdough apparently drank some of this hooch, for want of other ways to get inebriated.  Most sourdough bread bakers will just stir the alcohol back into the mix, because it adds to the flavour of the bread that will be baked.  However, it does inhibit some of the yeast growth.  And the alcohol will burn off during the baking of the bread.

As an experiment, I scooped just under a tablespoon of the hooch from the layer of alcohol atop my all-but-expired sourdough starter, and tossed it into my dough to see what would happen.  I was hoping that some of the flavours that are found in the sourdough would be transferred to this loaf I was making.

Adding the hooch

12 hours fermenting

Before folding

After folding

Here is how I changed the original Lahey walnut recipe:

* I added 1/4 tsp more of cinnamon
* I added another pinch of fresh pepper
* I added 2 tbsp more of water
* I added almost a tbsp of hooch
* I used almonds instead of walnuts; and I ground them pretty fine.
* I used cracked wheat instead of bran for the crust.
* I only baked it for 15 minutes with the lid off, so the crust wouldn't get too hard.

Even as I covered the dough to set it aside for 12 hours, it smelled terrific.  The dough had a nice rise to it, and it was wet but not overly sloppy to work with.  I didn't hit the middle of the crock pot with precision, but it didn't seem to affect the rise of the loaf too badly.  The cinnamon in the dough is very fragrant, the raisins smell sweet and winey.

This loaf is for my wife's friends who are coming tomorrow night.  I may not be around to get the picture of the crumb, or to even taste this loaf.

Notes to Myself:

• Try sprinkling some raw sugar, or turbinado sugar, on the top surface of this bread as it bakes.
• If hooch works to flavour the dough, why wouldn't other alcohol?  Try some whiskey (one for the bread, one for you, one for the bread...), or perhaps some port or sherry.
• Sprinkle some nutmeg on top of this loaf just before baking
• What if you ferment the raisins in some hooch by themselves?
• Try using walnuts, the official nut of the original Lahey recipe, but don't grind them too fine.

Everyday Bread #10

Brot ohne Kneten

German No-Knead Bread

The other bread that caught my eye this past weekend while I worked nights was a Brot ohne Kneten, a German No-Knead bread.  This was another bread that was supposed to have a long fermenting period -- of 18 hours minimum.  I made this bread more or less alongside the Bauernbrot during this past sleepless weekend.

The dough amounts are roughly the same as those that Lahey uses for his method of baking in a Dutch Oven; however, the hydration percentage in this German recipe looks to me to be a bit more wet.

But the interesting thing about this bread, to my way of thinking, was not that it is baked in an enclosed Dutch oven or Casserole dish in a very hot oven, very similar to Lahey's method, or that the hydration was slightly different than his.  What intrigued me were the comments of several people who tried the recipe and really liked the results: one said that they didn't have to heat the Roman pot before baking.  Another said that they even decided to forego the shaping step, and they merely fermented the dough and cooked it right in the same pot!  Well I had to try that! 

Fitting the 18 hour fermentation into my schedule was a bit trickier.  I decided to bake it in on Monday morning, when I got home after working my final night.  That meant I would mix it up on Sunday afternoon when I awoke.  The fermentation period was about 18 hours, give or take an hour.

• 400 g Flour (1/2 rye, 1/2 wheat)
• 320 ml Warm Water
• 1 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1/4 tsp Dry Yeast
• 1 pinch Vitamin C
  
  Mix dry ingredients and add water.
  Mix by hand until nothing is dry.
  Cover the bowl with foil in a cool basement for 18 hrs.
  The dough should be bubbly.
  Knead only as envelope fold and put in Dutch Oven.
  Heat oven to 250 degrees C (482 F).
  After 5 min in 250 degrees C, reduce heat to 230 degrees C (446 F).
  Bake 30 minutes.
  Then take the lid off and bake 18 minutes longer.
  

Most of the ingredients are in this picture.  I also later crushed a vitamin C pill and tossed in a pinch of that to the flour mixture too, before adding the hydration.  In the comments to the recipe, in a response to a question, the author wrote "Vitamin C is a 'propellent', it makes the dough softer and increases the volume."  He did say that it wasn't absolutely necessary to make this bread, though.

The directions say to mix it up with the hands. But I didn't have to: it mixed up with a spoon quite easily - which you can't really do, with Lahey's dough. To my mind, that was because there was more water in the German recipe than Lahey's recipes, making the German recipe easier to mix up. Or did the German recipe require more water because their flour is different from ours? I wouldn't know the answer to this until the bread was baked.

I did use my hands to kind of shape it a tiny bit, in the bottom of the crock pot, but I wouldn't exactly say that I was forming it into a ball.  After all, it still had to rise 18 hours.  I just wanted it to be fairly cohesive so that I could compare the dough at the start with the dough in the end.

After the 18 hours, this dough was not really bubbly.  It looked rather dense.  No real rise during the fermentation that I could see.  I was dubious about it.  But the pot where I had mixed it up and let it rise still had its lid on, and there was moisture dripping from the inside of the lid.  So the dough is moister than it looks in the picture.

I baked it in the same pot, skipping the stretching and folding stages, and omitting the preheating of the crockpot - just to see what would happen,

It baked, but there was no oven spring.  That wasn't the worst of it, though.

It wouldn't come out of the pot.  Whereas with Lahey's methods, I just invert the pot and the loaf comes tumbling out of the pot into my expectant oven-mitted hands like a newborn, this loaf was well and truly stuck.  I spent a good ten minutes just trying to loosen the sides around the loaf with a bread knife.  After getting burned on the very hot crock pot a few times, I decided to let it cool down and I went to bed.

When I awoke, I tackled getting the loaf out of the cold crock pot.  There was no way it was going to come out intact, so I started digging.

A short time later, I had this mass of crumbs and moist bread bits strewn about the kitchen counter, and a vast clean up job on my hands.  Was this nothing but my latest bread failure?

I nibbled a few of the pieces before tossing them in the bin.

Hey.  Not bad.  Kind of moist.  If I could cut some of these a bit thinner, they might toast up nicely, I thought.  This will go good with some old cheddar.

And I was right about that, at least.

Notes to Myself:

• Shaping the loaf (either with the letter-fold technique, or some other method) will add to the oven spring effect.  Don't ignore this step, no matter how wet the dough: think of a way to stretch the dough that will impact the dough's crumb the least.
• Pre-heat the pot you will cook it in.  The time it takes to do this will easily offset the time you will save in clean-up.  And the bread will be better for it.
• This dough is worth another try, the taste is wonderful.  There is no molasses in the recipe, but it almost tastes like it, the rye is so sweet and moist.

Lahey #3 - Olive Loaf

I simply followed Lahey's recipe here, using bread flour, and some pitted, roughly sliced Kalamata Olives.  Since they are so salty to begin with, this recipe doesn't need any extra salt.

I used a full 18 hour fermentation here.  When I took off the lid, it was very yeasty and had a pleasant  scent of olives that would carry through all the steps of baking and eating.  The dough was very gooey, and despite my wet hands, it was pretty tricky to form into a ball.  I have had to use a pastry scraper.  The couche kept the dough from spreading sideways too much while it rested, and as I've said before, it even soaks up some of the excess moisture too, even as the dough incorporates some of the bran you have sprinkled on the surface.

I should mention that when I place the dough into the crock pot, it is entirely removed from the oven, unlike the youtube video of Lahey, who flung his dough into his crock pot and probably burned himself. The question then becomes, what do you place the very hot crockpot on, when you remove it from the oven with oven mitts?  Well, I have been putting it on my baking stone, which sits on top of the stove.  So far, I haven't had any problems.

This dough was so sticky it stuck to the linen as I was putting it into the crockpot.  There is a huge wet spot on the couche, and the bran is impossible to get off.  I left the couche to dry in the sun outside.

I may not have had enough bran on the couche, the bottom of this loaf seemed to me a bit blonde.  And because it stuck to the linen, this boule didn't form well, didn't rise well, and was a bit misshapen.

We cracked into this one for lunch a trifle early; it was still warm.  It tasted great with the vegetable soup, but my wife said that she thought I could use a lot fewer olives next time.  She had the idea of broiling some bruschetta and cheese on slices of these, so that is what we had for dinner, too.

Notes to myself:

• Make sure you have enough bran on your linen couche to completely coat the bottom of your loaf, so that it will not stick to the cloth
• Anything you might put with the dough that contains a lot of salt might inhibit the gluten formation: make sure that you give it enough time to ferment
• If what you are adding to the dough might have extra hydration (such as these olives), you may be able to back off your water content by a tablespoon or two.  You still want a wet dough, but it has to be manageable.
• Try it with about 100 g less olives next time.
  
  

Lahey # 2 - a fair trial of the master recipe: using bread flour

Today was a busy day, breadwise, full of fun and experimentation, and new ideas for later experiments happening fast. 

For starters, I had purchased some bread flour on the way home from work from the bulk barn, and decided to try Lahey's recipe the way it was written, to give it a fair trial.  The bulk barn is a store that has lots of stuff in bins, and you help yourself to however much you think you need.  I just grabbed a few hundred kg, not measuring it or marking what it was.

This bread flour is so fine, the clerk wondered if I was buying icing sugar.

I was actually kind of surprised to find that it wasn't as pasty as the all purpose flour was, when I mixed it up.  It was already a pretty tight little ball of dough, even after the initial no-nonsense, 30 second mixing.  My thought was, this is not wet enough.

But I let it go, and decided to have it rise in one of my plastic containers.  Although the recipe calls for a rise in a bowl, I watched the Lahey you-tube video and saw that he had let his dough rise in a fairly low flat plastic container.   If plastic was good enough for Lahey, who developed the method, it was good enough for me.

On baking day, I was pleased to note that the dough seemed a lot more moist than even when I put it in the container.  Whatever moisture was in the original dough had obviously loosened up the entire consistency as the gluten strands aligned.  I didn't notice too much rise, but certainly there was some expansion.  The dough was much looser.  It smelled yeasty when I took off the lid.

It was still quite difficult to handle, very gooey.  This is going to take some practice.

I let it sit out the 2 hours on the branned couche and then plopped it into the hot crackpot, covered it, and stuck it in the oven.

The results were pretty much what I expected.  Excellent crust.

When I set this bread on the table to cool, I did hear it 'singing' as Lahey describes in his book.  It was singing for a lot longer than I thought it would, too.  So long was it singing, in fact, when I went on to make the pizza dough for tonight, I could hear it singing so loud that at first I thought that there was a fire in our fireplace in the next room.  Amazing.

I have no complaints about the amount of rise I did get, but if I were honest I'd have to say that the loaf did not rise really well, and I suspect that this is because I am still an amateur in the shaping of the loaves.  I think that as you try this more, your ability to shape a gooey dough will improve, and the boule shape will be tighter, forming a nicer gluten cloak, within which the bread will rise more significantly.  I also think that I am still manhandling the dough too much.  It is actually a gentle touch that is required with these wet doughs.

Notes to Myself:

• With these wet Lahey doughs, try using wet hands to handle the dough, and try to be gentle with it.
• Try an even longer baking time for a more interesting crust.
• Try a hotter oven, even as hot as 500 degrees, to see what happens to the crust and interior.

Lahey #1 - a forgiving technique

Ever since I got Jim Lahey's book 'My Bread', I've been anxious to try it, but I haven't had the right tools (Lahey's bread requires a Dutch oven).

I've been very curious about the technique.  I took the book to work with me and read some of it on break.  The method looks pretty simple, and the breads look so great in the pictures, you just want to have at it.  Could I do that, I wondered?  Could I make a bread as pretty, as inviting as that?

I didn't have a Dutch oven. But I wouldn't let that stop me.  What I did have was the inside crockery of an old Electric Crock Pot, or slow cooker.  Recently we tossed out the electric part, since it wasn't working.  But I saved the crockery to try to cook bread in it.  It had a nice glass lid that I assumed was safe for oven use.  I would use this, I thought, until I got my official Dutch oven.  Probably any really heavy duty casserole pot would do -- but it would have to be ovensafe at the high temperatures that Lahey's methods need.  For my first experiment with Lahey's method, I wouldn't care if the pot fractured in the heat.  The inside of the crock pot was otherwise garbage anyway.  Come to think of it, I have seen such crockery pieces at the goodwill store before for a couple of bucks.  That is certainly cheaper than a real cast iron Dutch Oven would be.

When I got home from work, I looked in the cupboard.  Although this blog is about my interest in whole grain breads, I actually do have some bread flour, which Lahey's loaves call for.  Unfortunately, it is an unusual Multigrain Bread Flour, made by Robin Hood, that I bought once out of curiosity.  I wasn't sure of the protein content (and the website link above was no help).  This multigrain bread flour contains quite a lot of bran, some rye, some cracked wheat -- quite a mix of flour, actually.  I figured I'd use it, to be sure, but I wasn't convinced that my loaf would turn out quite as nice as Lahey's.

I decided to do a side-by-side experiment on another loaf, one using some ordinary Canadian All Purpose flour that we get at the local Arva flour mill.  After all, Firtig's book (200 Fast & Easy Artisan Breads: no-knead, one bowl) tells me on almost every page, 'Canadian Wheat has more gluten!'  So perhaps, I thought to myself, that must mean that Canadian All Purpose Flour has gluten (almost) as high as bread flour everywhere else.  I don't know if that's true, but I figured I would try it.

Lahey's method requires a long fermenting period, of 12-18 hours.  That meant that if I mixed it at night, since I had to work the next day, it would be fermenting 24 hours, which I thought might be too long.  So what I did was, I set out the ingredients so that I could combine them easily in the morning before I went to work.  My intention was to bake it when I came home, before I go to bed.  It would be ready to eat for breakfast on my day off.  

And, I figured if it neither of these trial loaves worked out, I could go to the store and buy some real bread flour that isn't multigrain, and do a better trial of Lahey's methods.

The next morning when I mixed the dough I could already see a potential problem.  First, the multigrain bread dough was going to be too firm.  I could probably use the flour in some of Lahey's recipes, but I would likely need to add more water (Lahey advises 1 - 2 tablespoons.  Yes, tablespoons, not teaspoons.  After the last bread fiasco, I now pay attention to such things.)  Just because I weighed everything doesn't mean I'm safe: this multigrain bread dough contains a lot of bran which is going to soak up more water, and inhibit the formation of the gluten strands.  So I either need more water, or a longer rise.  I think.

What I need is just a tiny amount of bread flour so that I can see what the original recipe's consistency is supposed to be like.  Thinking ahead, I thought I might just buy 400 grams of it or so at the bulk barn on my way home from work.

Second, the all purpose dough was going to be too wet.  When I mixed it up, it wasn't really dough consistency, it was more like paste.  We'll see if it ferments properly over the 12 - 14 hours I'll be giving it.

---

I arrived home and took pictures of the fermented dough.  This is at 15 hours.  As expected, the multigrain bread dough doesn't seem wet enough, it hadn't risen that well; and the all-purpose dough, although it had some nice bubbles, it was still pretty gooey and looked like it hadn't risen at all.  Neither of these doughs had doubled, from what I could see; of course, in the bowls, it is hard to tell.  But I decided to try and make the bread anyway.

I turned out the multigrain bread dough on a floured counter.  It was sticky, but already fairly tight, the gluten in it holding it tightly together.

I formed the first boule as per Lahey's instructions (probably I slightly overhandled it, due to inexperience with his gentle methods) and  I set it in the towel to rise 2 hours.  I didn't notice much change after those 2 hours.  But supposedly it is not ready to bake before that proofing is done.  I didn't check with my finger as Lahey suggests.  I didn't have time to mess around, I was tired after working all day, and it was already getting late.

I had the crock pot ready in a pre-heated oven.  I placed the dough in the crock pot -- none too gently, I might add.  The crock pot is a bit deeper than a Dutch oven, and so the dough hit the side on the way down and became somewhat misshapen.  I gently nudged it back into place, and replaced the lid.  Into the oven it went.  I had my doubts that anything good would come of all this.  (How can you call it a trial of Lahey's methods if you change everything at virtually every step of the way?)  Here is a picture of the skidmark that the multigrain dough made as it went into the pot, and its rather ignoble landing:

...and here is what it looked like after I attempted to straighten the dough (which I probably shouldn't have done).  Anyway, I baked it as per Lahey's instructions for time, temperature, periods of lid on, lid off.  Since the crockpot is so deep, you can't really see into it while it is baking.  You have to wait until it is completely done to tell what you've got.  I was just so excited to see, I felt like a kid again.

And here is what I got:

Hey!  Despite everything I did wrong, this loaf looks pretty darn good!  It is not quite a poster-child for Lahey's bread, like the loaves in his book.  But for a first attempt, I was really very pleased with this loaf.

And what about the all-purpose loaf that I made at the same time for comparison purposes?

When I turned it out on the counter, it was pretty wet still, but I was pleased to see it had a sort of surface tension so it didn't all just drip away.  It reminded me a little of the too-wet fiasco I had the other day when I added a cup more water to Reinhart's recipe than I should have.

I did my best to form it into a boule as per Lahey's instructions, but my hands were getting very gooey.  Reinhart says that it is best to use wet hands when handling wet dough.  I didn't listen.  I used flour, and since it wasn't working for me, I more or less just plopped the dough on my homemade couche (a double layer of linen that I sewed haphazardly together).

I left it for a couple of hours and then unwrapped it to find it hadn't changed all that much, to my eye.  I picked it up by the cloth and dumped it in the crock pot.  Two things I noticed about doing it this way: One, the cloth was now very wet.  This dough was so wet, it kind of soaked into my cloth.  I wonder if this is one of the ways Lahey allows the dough to lose some excess moisture prior to baking?  Two: I was getting better at this.  Despite the fact that this dough was stickier than the first one I tried, I hit the center of the deep crockpot, there were no skid marks.  And what is more, the dough actually looks more cohesive than when I started.  More like a ball than a bag of frog jelly.  So I was pretty hopeful this one would turn out okay -- if it had enough gluten to rise like bread dough.  The suspense was killing me.  Perhaps literally, since I had been awake since 0500 and now it was well past midnight and I was still baking bread.

When finally I looked in at the finished loaf, I almost swooned.  It had a lovely caramelized crust. There were flecks of red and gold in it. I fell in love with the texture.

I took many pictures.

I really must be an Exorphin Junkie.

It was now very late.  I didn't have to work the next day.  But what I did have to do was, I had to taste that bread before I slept.  And Lahey says you have to wait at least an hour before cutting into the loaf.  Yeah, yeah.  My mother used to say that you couldn't go swimming for an hour after eating, too.

Of course, I listened to both of them.  I waited.

The multigrain bread flour bread had a marvelous taste, but a denser crumb.  I found it a trifle too salty for my taste (at least when buttered with salted butter); I think I will try reducing the salt on the next loaf I make with this flour and method.  (and I will make more Everyday bread using this flour and method).  I think I will not be afraid to let it ferment 24 hours next time, either, especially in a cool house as ours was last night.

The all purpose flour bread had a wonderful moist texture, full of character holes, but it did not rise as high as the other loaf (and I think the reason was because it was not formed as well or as tightly).  The taste was not special.  I can see how it might develop with Lahey's olive loaf, or walnut loaf, or cheese loaf, or with a dozen other ideas that are surfacing in the back of my mind as I continue to experiment with it (and I will experiment with it for my Everyday Bread in the future).  Will Lahey's methods require me to buy bread flour?  Perhaps not, in our area.  As long as I use Arva's All Purpose flour, which currently comes (if I recall correctly) from a hard Red Wheat.

As grateful as I am to the people who gave us the '5 minute a day' books for getting me started on bread making and no-knead bread, I have to say that I think that Lahey's breads are superior in ease of making, and in taste, and in crumb, and probably in results.  Look how many ways I diverged from his recipe, and look at the results: his recipe and method is very forgiving to amateurs like me.  It remains to be seen, however, whether I will be able to use his techniques for whole grains the way I want to.  I will try this again with 100% whole wheat (Lahey's whole wheat recipe uses 75% bread flour).

Notes to myself:

• Use less salt than Lahey suggests.  Drop it down to 1 tsp next time, and keep going down by 1/4 tsp until you get the flavor you want without the saltiness you don't need.
• Try fermenting for longer periods.  Don't be afraid of 24 hours fermenting.  Use a container like the 5min/day people use for the fermenting (not a bowl as Lahey suggests), so you can actually see when it is doubled.  Mark the starting point with some masking tape on the side.
• Try Lahey's whole wheat recipes and rye recipes, but with more wheat and rye than he calls for, even try 100% loaves.
• Try Lahey's method with some sourdough starter.
• Incorporate some of Reinhard's ideas for prefermenting, and combine those things with the wet dough at the moment of shaping the loaf
• Get a real cast iron Dutch Oven pot and try this on the barbeque, or on open fire coals when camping.
• The crock pot works good for a boule; for a different shaped loaf (e.g. a mini-batard), try a longish ovensafe casserole dish and see if that works