ww, quinoa, spelt and rye raisin walnut bread

ww, quinoa, spelt and rye raisin walnut bread

Ah, walnuts.  It is that time of year again, when the fragrant nuts are falling.  I find them underfoot when I'm out walking the dog.  The bruised green husks are drying up, or rotting.  I lift the odd one to my nose and inhale the scent.  Careful: don't let the husk actually touch your nose, or it will paint your nose brown.  And brown is not typically a great colour for noses.

I have fond memories of collecting bags full of walnuts for my father-in-law.  He would, every fall, plant some in an effort to get some of the seedlings to grow.  He loved working with walnut wood, and planted trees that he knew he would not live to harvest.  Usually the biggest problem was the squirrels, who followed right behind him and dug up the nuts.  One year we tried placing a screen over where we had buried the nuts, but the squirrels dug right through it.  It never deterred him from trying again the next year.

There is a Canadian animated short film that made the rounds many long years ago, that deeply affected me, and reminds me of my father-in-law: The Man who Planted Trees, based on the short story by Jean Giono.

The actual movie "The Man Who Planted Trees" can be watched online here

Synopsis: An old man carefully selects a number of nuts every day before his walk, and places each of them in a hole in the ground.  After decades of unending toil, the groves that result provide recreation and joy for many humans and animals. 

My brother-in-law, a graduate of Guelph Agricultural University, says that the film is utterly implausible.  But that never stopped him from planting walnuts with his father, nor from transplanting some of the seedlings that did grow, nor from working with walnut wood himself.

With every bite of this walnut-filled bread, I will remember my father-in-law as the man who planted walnut trees.

Here are the numbers for this raisin walnut bread, in percentages.  Walnuts and raisins are given in grams.

• ww 50
• quinoa 20
• spelt 20
• rye 10
• wild yeast @100% hydration 20
• salt 1.9
• water 75
• walnuts 107g (11)
• raisins 185g (19)
• golden flax seeds (a sprinkling)

Method: A la' Tartine: i.e. mix dough, let it rest and then add salt and 5% of the water.  Fold during bulk fermentation x 3 hours, Q30min.  Add walnuts and raisins on 2nd turn.  Divide, bench rest, then form and proof in baskets overnight in fridge.  Bake 40 minutes in an Iron Dutch Oven at 450 degrees, the first half with the lid on.

Results
This dough was a pleasure to work with.  It seemed really slack at first, but it was silky-gooey.  I wondered if it was the quinoa that was so sticky on my fingers.  But I wet my hands with water at each turn, and it helped.  Indeed, as the bulk fermentation progressed, the gooeyness ceased, the gluten strengthened and the dough became somewhat firmer.  The feel from beginning to end was substantially different.

The taste is great.  Strange how the crust was so much improved by just a few of those golden flax seeds on the top.  They add a distinct toasted flavour, and offset the sweetness of the loaf's raisins in the crisp crust.  The walnuts add something special -- of course, they turn the surrounding dough purple (you can't detect it so much in the digital photos, unfortunately).  This is just how many walnuts there were in a small package that I bought at a local store: there is really no need to fill the bread up with so many nuts you taste walnuts in every bite, as in the official Tartine bread that contains walnuts.  Who needs too much juglone anyway?

A very nice bread indeed.  There are lots of different textures here to consider as you chew.  I like it with cheese, or with nothing but a little butter.  It toasts well too.

Notes to Myself

• As I began to research the movie mentioned in this blog entry, I tried to google for it, but didn't for the longest time remember its name. It didn't help that I thought I was searching for a man who planted walnuts, when in the original story he planted acorns and beechnuts. But while looking for it (I googled for 'old man' animation), I came across this interesting cartoon, with an old familiar Neal Young song. Reminds me of what I do, every day, in palliative care. 
• As far as I know, the packaged walnuts I used were not on a list of recently recalled walnuts here in Canada, suspected of having an E.Coli contamination.
• Walnut oil contains omega-3 fatty acids, but likely the high temperatures of the oven are going to unravel some of the goodness.

Professional Help for the Exorphin Junkie #1

I get Professional Help for my Addiction - #1

I have been baking bread and blogging about it for about a year now (baking longer than that, but only blogging about it for a year), and I figured it was time I got some professional help.  I took my first ever bread course today at the nearby college.

This bread making course is a rather intensive 2-day course, and our instructor is one of the chefs at the college's Culinary Arts program.  When I say it is intensive, I don't mean that the loaves we made were difficult or time consuming.  No, I just mean that we moved along fairly rapidly, and made a total of 4 different doughs in one solid day of baking.  I didn't have a lot of time for taking pictures.

This course is something my wife and I have done together, on this cold Saturday in February.   We have been looking forward to it for a long time now -- almost like a vacation.  And although I was warned by several people that I probably wouldn't learn anything I didn't already know, I expected to learn quite a bit.  And I wasn't disappointed.

Chef Stephanie has been teaching for eight years, and has had lots of baking experience before that.  Many of the restaurants that she worked in serve Mediterranean meals, and some of her favourite breads are in the Mediterranean style.  That is what we worked on today, for our first lesson.

She handed out some recipes and an apron to each of us, and we began.  I have posted the recipes from day one here, in case anyone else wants to peruse them.  They are volume measurements, not recipes given by weights.  (I may be able to get the weight measurements from her, I'll see).

Chef started us off with a Rosemary Focaccia, which I thought was a great idea because there is virtually no forming of the dough: you just mix the ingredients, get a feel for it, let it bulk ferment, and then press it onto a pan. 

My focaccia

While it is proofing the second time, we were making our second dough, essentially the very same ingredients, only this time we added Sundried Tomato and Chevre (Goat Cheese).  Here, she showed us how to roll up the dough with the cheese inside it.  It is essentially the same as pushing down the dough like we did the focaccia, but instead of proofing it like that, we sprinkled some cheese on the bread and rolled it up like a log.

I got to use a dough hook on a mixer, first time ever: mostly, I do all my kneading by hand

 

My sundried tomato and chevre loaves: before the final proof, and after baking

While that was proofing, and we were baking our focaccia, we made the same loaf using Black Olives and Gorgonzola Cheese.  By now we were getting the hang of it.  This was made exactly the same way as the Sundried Tomato and Chevre loaf.  The interesting thing about these loaves, I thought, was the way she had us brush olive oil on the tops, and score the loaves BEFORE the final proofing.  I had always only ever scored my loaves just prior to putting them in the oven.  For these loaves, this pre-scoring worked well, although I really didn't see any meteoric oven spring on any of my loaves.

My olive and gorgonzola loaves, before proofing and after baking

The final loaf of the day was a Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf, which she allowed us to make into a free-form loaf.  I made my dough into a couple of smaller boules, and they retained their shape and didn't sag out over the parchment paper, like some of my whole wheat doughs do.  If you use bread flour, bread is a lot easier to form.

Walnut and Carmelized Onion Loaves

One of the Convection Ovens

I was pleased with the way the surface of these boules turned a nice light chestnut colour in the College's convection ovens.

Almost the entire haul of bread, made between the two of us

My wife and I came home with a lot of bread.  We ripped into my Focaccia on the drive home, and we ate some of the Black Olive and Gorgonzola loaf and the Sundried Tomato and Chevre loaf for supper tonight with a soup, and we froze some.  We'll be delivering some to our moms in the morning.

These loaves squished down a bit on the ride home.  Imagine, we forgot to take some bags with us.  Next time, we won't forget

The breads we made today are easy to make, and they taste good.  They do, however, all use bread flour or all-purpose flour.  My interests, as I have been blogging and baking, have turned almost exclusively to whole grains, but it is good to make other breads once in a while to remind oneself of the possibilities.  I am not sure whether the bread recipes that Chef gave us will translate well to whole grain flours, but I am sure going to give it a try.  (I already have a whole wheat focaccia recipe that turned up recently on the Fresh Loaf blogs by Marie H that I want to experiment with!)

Addendum:
The next day, we cut into the Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf.  We both think that this is the best of the loaves we made.  The Onion imparts a nice scent and a surprising amount of sweetness.  The roasted walnuts provide texture and colour (they leave the white bread stained a bit purple -- the digital photos here don't quite deliver that colouration, unfortunately), as well as an interesting taste.  This is a nice bread, almost like a desert bread, it is so sweet.  You can't eat this all the time, it is far too starchy.  But it is nice as a treat.

I am thinking that a whole wheat version of this might work, too.

Best of the Four Breads: Walnut and Caramelized Onion Loaf

Notes to Myself

• Get the weight measurements for these recipes, and then see if it will translate to whole grains.
• What is the advantage of scoring prior to the final proofing, vs scoring just before putting the bread in the oven?  It is possible that the late scoring will deflate the dough somewhat.  It is possible though, that you won't get as high an oven-spring if you score it too early.  Hmm.