Wholegrain Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread with lots of wheat berries

Wholegrain Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread

Today's Musing
How do you know if you are making too much bread?

I personally love the smell of fresh made bread.  My wife, however, is starting to lose her interest in it.  Years ago, she was a Real Estate Agent.  And you know what those agents tell people, before their open house, right?  "Bake some bread."  Yes, there is nothing that tells people "you are home" than the smell of fresh baked bread.  When people walk into a house and smell fresh baked bread, they start writing cheques.  Apparently.

Except that all those open houses, and those many years spent with a husband who bakes bread constantly -- not to mention that I make such a terrible mess in the kitchen, and invariably I am off to the cellar to look for my camera just at the precise moment she walks through my mess and thinks I have abandoned it -- all of this has left my wife with nausea whenever she smells me baking: "Again?!" she shouts at me as I move yesterday's loaves aside so I can bake more.

So today, instead of mixing 2 different doughs to make 4 loaves, I set aside some of the rye discards and decided to just make 1 dough.  I figure, this marriage is a collaboration, and we all have to compromise.  Right?

I know that I am baking too much bread when my wife gets really really angry at me.  She starts talking to the air instead of talking to me.  (Or is that just me, tuning out?)

Today's bread is just tossed together ad lib, so as to abandon the kitchen (which should be a neutral space) as soon as possible.  I decided to stick to Wheat, and so today's bread theme is entirely wheat.  Even the 'extras' are wheat, or wheat based.


Ingredients

• 90% Whole Wheat Sourdough 398g
• 100% Whole Wheat Flour 442g
• 65% Water 287g
• 2% Salt 8g
• 1% Yeast 4g
•  4% Wheat Germ 19g (1/4 c)
•  44% Wheat Berries, 194g dry weight,
  20 min. in Pressure Cooker with 2c water, then rinsed (1c)

the wheat berries are still in the pressure cooker

I can mix everything up and add the berries later, when they are cool

Method

Prepare the Wheat Berries in the pressure cooker.  Run some cool water over them so that they are not too hot before adding them to the dough.

That sure is a lot of berries!  And they are still moist, so they are going to add some hydration as you mix them

Mix it all together, kneading only enough so that you see the cooked grains are more or less randomly distributed.

Let it sit under a cloth while you sleep in the daytime, about 4 hours.

The dough is a little sloppy.  I can't form a decent gluten cloak, it tears when I try.

 Knead it again a bit, and then form a boule.

 After 45 minutes proofing in a basket, bake at 410 degrees F for 40 minutes, with steam.

lately I've been spritzing the dough before popping it into the oven: good idea, or not?

Results
I probably could have done without the yeast here.  The sourdough is working again as a wild leavener (I've returned all of the starters to the refrigerator now, they all seem to be viable).  This means the bread really didn't need the help with extra commercial yeast, especially since I was sleeping in the daytime and couldn't get back to the dough for 4+ hours.  At that point, the dough was a bit over-fermented.  I did form my 2 boules, but the gluten was already starting to break down, so I couldn't stretch it much (of course, this could also be the wheat germ that is doing this too).   Thus I didn't see much of a second rise, nor much oven action.

Right out of the oven, stick your ear to the crust and you can hear it sing. 
What is it singing?  The same song the Sirens sang to Odysseus.

The bread smells like a nice sourdough.  It came out of the oven crackling.  One of the loaves I smeared with butter for a softer crust.

It tastes quite nice, lots of really complex subtle harmonics from the sourdough culture, lots of interesting textures from the whole grains, lots of nuttiness from the wheat germ.  My wife, who is so very tired of my bread, ate two slices of this loaf today for her lunch.   So I think that I have redeemed myself -- and I have successfully brought my sourdough cultures back from the brink.

Tastes particularly good with a small amount of honey.

 

Notes to Myself

• If you can't get back to a dough for a certain length of time, modify the yeast, or the temperature. You were right to leave it at room temperature on a cold day, but wrong to add the commercial yeast to a starter that could have risen the dough on its own.
• Mix up some grains in the pressure cooker and let them soak in a fruit juice over night: try different juices. Nils Schöner uses apple cider, but you have been thinking about tomato juice for a while and haven't done it yet. What about your homemade grape juices? What about something exotic like vinegar, or vanilla, or rum?

Everyday Bread #49 - Boiled Whole Grains Bread

A Boiled Whole Grains Bread

The ideas for this bread really developed due to other recipes I've made: James Beard's Cracked Wheat bread, and more recently the granola (bars) I made (by mistake) without any eggs.  The first one told me that you really don't need to let your boiled grains cool down completely before using them; the gums in the boiled grains are sticky enough to help give some cohesion to the loaf.  The second one gave me the idea that you could add some dough to some (boiled) grains and you might get some cohesion without requiring it to have an egg.

But truth be told, Reinhart has some boiled grain breads too.  I have already baked his Multigrain Sandwich Loaf, which can use boiled grains.  And the Sandwich Struan can be made this way.  But this was going to be a quick and dirty recipe, pure play.  The dough was actually from a Sourdough English Muffin recipe.  This is a sweet dough, it already contains molasses.  I would just add some boiled grains to it.

This was the whole dough; I would only use half of it with these grains.

I gathered a few grains together that I thought I'd like to try boiled.  I used 1/4 cup each of:

• flax
• millet
• roasted buckwheat
• cracked wheat
• whole rye berries
• red quinola

I boiled this over 10 minutes in 2 cups of water, until all was absorbed.  The scent of the buckwheat was a bit overpowering.  I think this was because it was roasted already, but I don't know.  What I really wanted to use was barley, I think.  I think I have some pearled barley, but the bag wasn't properly labeled.  Damn.

Boiling the Grains

The pot requires an extensive clearnup from the boiled grains sticking to it.  Maybe a little oil in the pot might help this?  Or more attentive stirring?

The Dough falls apart with the hot grains added and kneaded in.

I removed it 5 minutes from the heat before I tried to mix it into the dough.  The dough had already risen once, and had been divided, and rested another 15 minutes.  So the gluten was already well developed in the dough.  But when I added these grains, the gluten fell apart and I had a mess.  I think the grains were still very hot, and when they hit the dough, the dough just broke its gluten.

The Dough doesn't even fill the tin from one end to the other

That's when I decided I'd just chalk this up to another failure.  I would just dump it into a loaf pan, though, and see what happened when I baked it.  The dough was not well developed gluten anymore.  It was just glop, and continued kneading wasn't helping.  I sort of poured it, scraped it, into a loaf tin. And I didn't expect it would rise any more.  Shoot, it didn't even fill to one end of the pan.

I let it sit about 30 minutes and I noticed that there was some activity underneath the towel.  It was rising after all.  I preheated the oven to 425.  But by the time the oven was preheated, the tin was now overflowing.

Overflow

I put it into the oven.  But this dough was jiggly.  There wouldn't be any gluten cloak.  I thought it would continue to overflow the loaf tin, so I placed it on a baking sheet to catch the drips.  I used steam for the crust, but it could have been improved by brushing on a glaze.

No oven spring: oven droop

I baked it at 400 degrees F. for 20 minutes, then turned the loaf for another 20 minutes.

I dreaded scraping this loaf from the well-oiled, no-stick pan.  I let it sit in the pan for 30 minutes before taking a knife to the edges to try to get it out of there.  It actually came out intact, and quite easily.  Too easily.  I touched a finger to the bottom of the loaf.  Still felt like jelly.  Gooey.  I put it back into the oven, upside down on the baking tray, for another 12 minutes at 350 degrees (though most of that time was preheating).  That helped form some crust along the bottom half of the loaf, but I was still worried about the interior.

The globs that had overflowed onto the pan tasted like the marriage of blah unsweetened crunchy overcooked granola bars and burnt toast.  Was this the taste I was going for?

The crumb is dense, and greyish brown, full of specks of grains.  I can make out the millet and red quinoa easily.  When you get your nose right next to it, you can smell the buckwheat, which is still overpowering.  But it is a fairly good bread despite that, full of interesting flavours.  It toasts nicely.

Notes to Myself

• Try this again using a real dough.  Use delayed fermentation in the fridge to develop flavour, use some whole what and some rye flours.  Try using only 10% all purpose.  Try it without any.
• Perhaps more enrichment: why not some honey?  Hey, why not an egg?
• Try glazing the finished loaf.  Hey, why not use an egg?
• Put some oil into your boiling water so the gluey grains don't stick as much.
• Try waiting 10 or 15 minutes before adding the boiled grains.  They don't have to be room temperature, but at least they shouldn't destroy the gluten structure that is already there, should they?

Everyday Bread #4

Long before I started this blog of my own, I was experimenting with a Detox Bread that supposedly was endorsed by the long dead but influential German Naturopath Louis Kuhne, who otherwise championed mostly a raw vegetable and fruit diet.

I'd like to revisit that loaf for today's 'Everyday Bread', only I'm going to try something a bit different not only in the ingredients, but also in the way I mix it, and the way I fold it up.  Kuhne's original loaf was just graham flour and water.  I didn't have graham flour back then, so I tried rebuilding that 'unbolted flour', using all purpose flour, bran and germ.

The last time I made this loaf, I used a bit of yeast, and just mixed it all together into a single dough.  This was the result.  Pretty dense, right?

In today's version of the recipe I'm still rebuilding the flour, but in addition to those grain parts, in this recipe I will add yeast, and substitute milk for some of the hydration.  And I'll take advantage of the fact that the grain parts are in different form to pre-ferment the bran and germ, and use the plain all purpose flour for the heavy work of lifting the dough in the way I put it together.  The original idea of soaking the bran and germ comes from other members of the Freedom Gardens bread group where I originally tried making Kuhne's bread; since working through Reinhart's book, the idea of pre-fermenting parts of it begins to make much more sense to me.

The idea behind rebuilding the flour is to include everything that is in the original wheat, in the same percentage ratios (endosperm : bran : germ = 83 : 14.5 : 2.5), but to mix them up separately.  Kuhne only added water, but I will also add yeast, and milk -- and why not some salt, while I'm at it? -- for this experiment.

To invent this recipe, the first thing I did was look at the entire ingredients (this picture was snapped before I thought of adding salt too). 

Total Ingredients for 1 loaf:

644 g -- 4 1/8 cups all purpose flour
81 g   --1 2/3 cups bran
8 g     --1/8 cup wheat germ
213g  --1 cup water
210g  --7/8 cup milk
5 g     --1 1/2 tsp yeast
4 g     --1 tsp salt

?
1/2 tbsp honey omit
1/2 tbsp butter

It makes sense to me to preferment and refrigerate the wheat germ and the milk, so I planned to mix those together.  Originally I was going to simply divide the rest of the hydration between the flour and the bran, 50:50.  But when I looked at all the ingredients set up in this way (see above), I grew dubious.

First, it didn't look like there was going to be enough water to mix up the all purpose flour.  So, I thought I would be reserving a bit of the milk to help out.  So I just added 1/3 cup of the bran and 1/4 cup of the milk at a time to see what I would end up with.  Not only did the milk mix up the germ and all of the bran (see the picture with the mixing bowl with spoon, below), it was also able to incorporate a cup of the all purpose flour (see the picture with the mixing bowl without the spoon, below).  So I just made one bigasoaker of all those ingredients. 

Obviously I'm just making this up as I go along,  And that is actually the fun part.

BigaSoaker:

    8 g            1/8 c wheat germ
    81 g          1 2/3 c bran
    156 g        1 c all purpose flour
    210 g        7/8 c milk
    1 g            1/2 tsp yeast   

Mix it thoroughly and refrigerate overnight

Dough:
   
    488 g        3 1/8 c all purpose flour
    240 g        1 c water 
    253 g        1 c water + 3 1/2 tbsp
    4 g             1 tsp yeast
    4 g            1 tsp salt

    When I looked at what remained of the ingredients, however, I was still worried that this wouldn't be enough hydration for the flour.  In Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice, he says the classic French dough has 100% flour, 60%water, 2% each of salt and yeast.  To get the rise of the dough that I want, I should be in this ballpark, so how much hydration should I require?  60% of 488 g is 293 g of water.  I would have to add 53 g to the single cup that is already there -- which works out to be 0.2208 c (pretty darn close to 3 1/2 tbsp).

    So, to the above hydration, I added 3 1/2 tbsp water.  This was, to my thinking, still pretty dry so it was difficult to incorporate by hand, but was accomplished by kneading it for about 10 minutes.

    Knead until it is some kind of dough

 This is one tight little ball of dough.  Since it isn't all that hydrated, I had some doubts that it would double, certainly not in 2 hours.  But I set it aside to watch what it would do.

    Cover.  Let it rise 2 hours.

I don't think it doubled in size, but I did get some volume expansion.  It still feels quite tight to me.

    Then put it on a lightly floured surface and press it gently into a rectangle.

If I didn't know I am a vegetarian, I would swear that this looks like I'm adding raw hamburger here.

 Spread the bigasoaker on top.

Roll the whole thing up and shape it into a batard

This dough is not sloppy.  In fact, it is almost too easy to work with.  I was trying to be gentle with it, but I probably should have been more interested in rolling it up very tightly, so that the gluten got a good stretch as it curled around the bran and germ mixture.

Shape into a batard shape, more or less.

    Proof it 2 hours

    Score it, Paint with butter, sprinkle seeds

At this point, my wife wandered into the kitchen to make herself some tea.  She saw the end of this dough, and could see that something was rolled up inside it, so she asked, "What's inside it?"

I laughed.  She was not going to like the answer.

"Why do you laugh?  Is it something I won't like?"

I nodded.  "What does it look like to you?"

"It looks like dates."

"No.  It's bran."

"Bran!?  Why would you put bran in it?"

"Because its never been done," I told her.  At least, to my knowledge, its never been done this way.  "That is what makes it fun."

"Oh well," she said, as if I had done something not quite so irretrievably stupid.  "At least it will all fall out."


    Preheat the oven and bake at 350 x 20 minutes with steam, turn it once and bake another 20-30 minutes.

The finished loaf, cooling on the racks.  And first taste test, below.  Even my wife likes this bread.  She is surprised by how moist the bran is, and how sweet it tastes without honey.  And no, the bran doesn't all fall out, it is so moist it holds together in the loaf. My wife even likes the crust.  I wonder what I can do, though, to prevent the crust from breaking apart the way it did.  Looks like Harry Potter's forehead -- a lightning bolt.

Notes to myself:

• Try soaking some flax seeds with the bran overnight next time.  Will their omega-3's survive the baking, I wonder? Worth a try.  Check the smoking point of flax seed oil, and compare that to the interior of baking bread.
• Would this work with a boule?  A fist-sized lump of soaked germ and bran surrounded by a white flour coating?  Give it a try.
• What if you soaked the all purpose flour in milk, and the bran and germ in water?  What if they both fermented overnight?