Khorasan & semolina bread and apple & oat Bread

This week, I've collected up three recipes which have worked really well in the last month. I'm still working on a decent double fermented rye bread. It's going badly so far as all attempts have been a little to wet and/or over-fermented so are a little flat (only 6-7cm tall in the centre). At present, I've run out of both wholegrain rye flour and chopped rye so continuing these experiments will have to wait a while.

Khorasan, semolina bread with sesame seeds

This bread was inspired the sesame-wheat bread from Tartine #3 which I blogged about here. The idea being to switch out the wholemeal flour in order to use up the last little bit of Khorasan flour hiding in the back of my cupboard. I love baking with Khorasan flour as it poses a lot less problems than other ancient flours. During mixing and shaping the dough it behaves similarly to modern wheat but may absorb a little more water. The main difference comes into play during the final fermentation. I find that the interval in which a dough is ready for the oven is longer with modern wholewheat. I find it tempting with Khorasan to think, “oh, it needs a bit more” and delay baking only to find that the dough very rapidly reaches a maximum and spends a very short period there before being beyond all hope of redemption. I'm trying learn to bake the bread a little earlier to be on the safe side.

Overall formula for 2 medium loaves

Ingredient	Bakers percentage	Weight (grams)
High-extraction wheat flour	41.6%	400g
White bread flour	27.1%	260g
Wholegrain Khorasan flour	16.6%	160g
Fine semolina	8.3%	80g
Wholegrain wheat flour	6.4%	60g
Water	87.5%	840g
Salt	2%	20g
Toasted Sesame seeds	21%	200g

The leaven was mixed the night before and consisted of

Ingredient	Bakers percentage	Weight (grams)
White bread flour	50%	60g
Wholegrain wheat flour	50%	60g
Water	100%	120g
Starter	12.5%	15g
Total weight		255g

I used 240g of this leaven to make the bread and reserved and feed the remaining 15g to use next time. Hence, the bakers percentage of the leaven was 25% (240/960). Before taking my dog for a run around the park (aka. autolyse) I mixed together the following ingredients until roughly combined.

Ingredient	Weight (grams)
High-extraction wheat flour	400g
White bread flour	200g
Wholegrain Khorasan flour	160g
Semolina	80g
Water	680g
Leaven	240g

After 30 minutes, I added 40g of water and 20g salt and mixed by hand. The bulk fermentation time was 3.5hrs a stretch and fold in the bowl every 30 minutes for the first 3 hours. During the second set of stretch and folds I added the toasted sesame seeds.

I shaped the dough into two roughly equally sized boules and placed them in brotforms in the fridge for the final rise. After 12 hours in the fridge, I scored the tops of the loaves and baked them straight from the fridge at 220ºC/430ºF for 45 minutes.

The cold final fermentation made scoring this loaf significantly easier. Normally, I would stick to scoring with scissors but felt brave so used a sharp serrated fruit knife instead. I'm really pleased with the result.

The customary crumb shot

This bread is extremely tasty. As usual with Khorasan, it is slightly less bitter than its modern wheat cousin due to differing levels of tannins. However, the bread retains a complexity and nutty flavour from still having a decent about of wholegrain flour but is quite mild and sweet. The crumb was a tiny bit tighter and hence less soft than my idea bread but it still made amazing sandwiches.

I would like to try this bread a few more times and try to increase the percentages of semolina and khorasan flour. This really needs to be added to the bottom of my “to do” list.

Apple and oat porridge bread

Oat porridge bread is a favourite in my house from Tartine #3. When I'm unable to bake, K usually makes Hamelman's “Golden raisin bread” which contains rolled oats. It's a compromise between our radically different tastes in bread. K prefers white bread, especially enriched with butter, honey, milk or similar. Ideally with minimal holes in the crumb so that it can be covered in butter and hagelslag. I can't say I'm entirely happy with cooking or eating this type of bread regularly, especially since it seems to go stale all to quickly. Rolled oats are a great way to make a bread which tastes soft without enrichments and doesn't go stale so quickly.

This bread has won a place in my heart and without a doubt will be repeated again soon.

Overall formula for 2 medium loaves

Ingredient	Bakers percentage	Weight (grams)
High-extraction wheat flour	43%	400g
White bread flour	50%	460g
Wholegrain wheat flour	7%	60g
Wheatgerm	6%	56g
Water*	100%	920g
Salt	2.2%	20g
Coarse oatmeal	10.9%	100g
Apple (grated)	21.7%	200g

The leaven was mixed the night before and consisted of

Ingredient	Bakers percentage	Weight (grams)
White bread flour	50%	60g
Wholegrain wheat flour	50%	60g
Water	100%	120g
Starter	12.5%	15g
Total weight		255g

I used 240g of this leaven to make the bread and reserved and feed the remaining 15g to use next time. An hour before the final mix I made a porridge by gently heating and simmering the following ingredients together for about 20 minutes.

Ingredient	Weight (grams)
Water	250g
Coarse oatmeal	100g
Apple (grated)	200g

Once the porridge had cooled completely, I weighed it again. As the cooled porridge weighed only 500g, hence, it contributed only 200g of water to the total formula (see *). Okay, it was 500g after I tasted a teaspoon full – I regret nothing and it can't really affect the formula that much can it?

The porridge was yummy, quite sweet and soft. It was hard to resist the urge to eat a second breakfast! For the premix, I mixed together all the remaining ingredients except 40g of the water and the salt.

After 30 minutes, I added 40g of water and 20g salt and mixed by hand. The bulk fermentation time was 3.5hrs with a stretch and fold in the bowl every 30 minutes for the first 3 hours. During the second set of stretch and folds I added the porridge as gently as possible. It took about 10 minutes and a considerable amount of extra folds to fully incorporate the porridge. Once the porridge was incorporated the dough was soft and a little glossy. I was having doubts as to whether the hydration was a horrible mistake.

Two hours later and feeling a little more confident, I shaped the dough into two roughly equally sized boules and placed them in brotforms for the final rise. After 2 hours, I scored the tops of the loaves with scissors and baked them at 220ºC/430ºF for 45 minutes.

The customary crumb shots

This bread is soft, tender, a little sweet and smells mildly of apple. This bread is so good, I've been eating it toasted with only a little butter. So far, it's five days since I baked this bread and the tiny wedge that is left is no less stale than it was 24 hours after it was baked.

Bonus pizza

Pizza is becoming a weekly tradition. I confess to having made a lot of pizzas over the last few years. I've tried a lot of different recipes, from dodgy old cookbooks to Reinhart's - “Crust and Crumb” and Hamelman's “Bread”. Recently I have settled upon using the dough from Weekendbakery's tartine bread recipe. Perhaps, it is not the purest pizza crust as it contains a leaven and no olive oil but it is still amazing.

Overall formula for 1 large crust (suitable for 2 people)

Ingredient	Bakers percentage	Weight (grams)
White bread flour	85%	188g
Wholegrain wheat flour	15%	33g
Water	74%	163g
Salt	1.3%	3g
Instant yeast (optional)	0%	1g

This recipe uses such a small amount of leaven that I typically just used a little left over starter with the following composition.

Ingredient	Bakers percentage	Weight (grams)
White bread flour	50%	13g
Wholegrain wheat flour	50%	13g
Water	100%	26g
Total weight		52g

Mix all ingredients together except 10g of water and the salt. After a 30 minutes autolyse, add 10g of water and 3g salt and mix by hand. The bulk fermentation time is about 2.5 hours with the added instant yeast or 3.5-4 hours without. During the bulk fermentation, there are typically a stretch and fold in the bowl every 30 minutes for the first 3 hours (1.5 hours if using additional instant yeast). At the end of the bulk fermentation the dough should nearly have doubled in size. Preheat the oven to maximum/250ºC/480ºF. Scrap the dough onto lightly oiled greaseproof paper and use a flat, wet hand to push to dough from the centre outwards to the desired size. Alternatively, use any pizza shaping method you are comfortable with!!

This is the time to cover the pizza in toppings. In this case, I used, tomato paste, red onions, sweet pepper and blue cheese. I bake the pizza on a oven tray for about 12-15 minutes. Better results could undoubtedly be achieved with a baking stone and/or some added steam.

There are not enough adjectives to describe this pizza. Certainly, I would never purchase pizza from a supermarket or order pizza take-away ever again.

Happy Baking!!

Lots of seeded bread and a cake!

So, I guess I'm off to a lumpy start! A month and a half has passed and much bread has been baked. Some very tasty some over-fermented puddles and somehow it's been hard to collect up ideas to post here. I bought some Rivet flour from BakeryBits in the hope of being inspired to improve my white bread.

Thus far things are still at the blow out stage. :(

So this is going to have to wait until next time. Two weeks ago I took a trip to 8th Day, a lovely co-op in Manchester, for more wheat germ and came back with quite a stash of goodies use for breads.

Exciting!

Last week a friend finished his PhD so this week I baked some cake from Tartine 3 to celebrate.

Zucchini & Kumquat Teacake

I followed the recipe nearly exactly, but made the following small changes:

• Reduced walnuts to 60g (due to running out).
• Replaced whole wheat pastry flour with whole wheat bread flour.
• Replaced half of the molasses with golden syrup.
• Sieved wholemeal spelt flour to remove bran in order to make high-extraction spelt flour.

The mixture fit into four mini loaf tins (11cm x 4cm). I first made this cake last summer using candied clementines rather than kumquats which worked well, but this version is definitely better! The food programme on BBC radio 4 contained a piece on the history of sweets recently, which referenced candied fruit being available in the UK in the middle ages.

The long and short of it is this cake is amazing! It was difficult to give some away and even more difficult to stop eating these beautiful little loaves. I'm now day-dreaming about possible variations...

Seeded wheat breads

The rest of this entry is going to be a overview of some of the wheat bread with seeds I've been cooking over the last month. As always the recipes are based on the seeded bread recipes in Tartine 3. I've baked some of the seeded breads since purchasing the book a year ago and have found that the taste is typically excellent but that at 80-85% hydration the crumb is significantly more dense than the porridge breads. Somehow, I always came away a little disappointed and return to baking the five grain levain recipe from Hamelman's 'Bread'.

However, this month I've finally felt a little more confident with the timings for the Tartine 3 method and how wet truly is too wet. As Hamelman's Five Grain Levain is a whooping 98% hydration, I decided to just see how much water can be added to the seeded bread recipes. The only puzzle being that the seeds absorb quite a lot of water but the water is added significantly before the seeds. Anyway by gradually edging upwards, with the flours I have from Shipton Mill and the average Mancunian climate I've settle on increasing hydration by 10%.

For all of the variations I've used the following basic bread recipe

50% High-extraction wheat flour
30% White flour
20% Wholewheat flour
7% Wheatgerm
95% Water
30% Leaven
2.5% Salt

and followed the Tartine master method. This is a very wet and sloppy dough until the second turn of the bulk fermentation when it's time to added some combination of seeds and spices. The seeds take a while to absorb some of the excess moisture so the feel of the dough changes quite a bit between the 2nd-5th fold. The three variations in Tartine 3 are:

Sunflower seeds and Flaxseed: 14% flaxseeds soaked overnight in 18% boiling water; 14% toasted sunflower seeds.


Many seeds: 10% flaxseed soaked overnight in 13% boiling water; 10% toasted sesame seeds; 10% Poppy seeds; 5% toasted sunflower seeds, 5% toasted pumpkin seeds; 1.25% toasted caraway seeds*.


*I've significantly reduced the amount of caraway seeds as I find this spice quite overwhelmingly strong.

Sesame seed: 25% toasted sesame seeds.


The outcomes lead to a more open, soft and slightly gelatinised crumb with small to medium sized -irregular holes. Considering the quantities of seeds involved, I'm very pleased with the outcomes. The taste was lovely and much improved by the lighter crumb.

A variation of my own:

Sunflower and Pumpkin seeds: 14% flaxseeds soaked overnight in 18% boiling water; 7% toasted sunflower seeds, 14% toasted pumpkin seeds.

Unfortunately, most of the sunflower, pumpkin seed bread I gifted to friends and the final loaf that I had retarded in the fridge was over-fermented when I woke up this morning. It was a unavoidable yet in retrospect predictable error. The weather in Manchester at the moment is well above average for April and yesterday the dough was rising quite quickly compared with a couple of weeks ago. It was probably ready to bake hours before I was awake.

Never mind, I'll just have to try a few variations of my own over the summer and keep a closer eye on the dough during warm weather. Perhaps sunflower seed and raisins or adding sunflower seeds and flaxseeds to the rye variation?

Happy baking!

First post: three types of bread with chopped rye

After much deliberation and yet more procrastination, I've decided to blog about my attempts to bake bread. For this first post, I baked a rye porridge bread and a double fermented rye porridge bread based on the recipes in “Tartine 3” as well as one of my favourites the five grain leaven from “Bread” by Hamelman.

I've been baking with a sourdough starter for about two years now. Initially, I was inspired by watching River Cottage and I saw a recipe and thought about trying to make a starter. After about a months worth of trying, troubleshooting and many mixtures that smelt like paint, I stumbled upon a great site with photos of every step and suddenly we were up and running. My current starter, began about a year ago using the pineapple juice method mentioned in Reinhart's “Wholegrain Bread”.

The starter lives on my kitchen counter and gets feed daily. I've considered naming these friendly micro-organisms but this is difficult as there are a lot of them. Instead I refer to them collectively as the yeastie-beasties. Each day, I take a little of the starter and discard the rest. The remaining starter gets feed water, wholemeal flour and white flour at a ratio of 1:4:2:2. That is 10g of starter, 40g water, 20g wholemeal flour, 20g white flour. For two or three days before making bread the starter gets fed twice a day.

The night before I make the bread, the leaven needed to be built. I checked that the starter is ready to use by putting some in a glass of water. If it floats it's ready, if it sinks – either it's not ready yet or it's too old.

Ok, the starter is ready lets go!

Rye porridge and double fermented rye

I've been obsessed with trying to bake a decent Tartine 3 style loaf for about a year and it's been ups and downs. Mostly downs. I find myself constantly troubleshooting and often unable to untangle the catalogue of errors which has contributed to sub-optimal bread. If there is any reason other than blind determination that I continue it is that baking bread is grounding and helps with reconnecting with reality. There is something a little zen or mindful about doing almost the same thing, trying to attend to and accommodate the details. If I've learnt anything its that I'm an impatient perfectionist who needs to listen to the dough and avoid drift off into day-dreaming.

Pre-fermented Rye

The double fermented rye bread started two days before when I mixed up 150g chopped rye and 300g of water with 1 tsp of starter. This mixture became quite active producing bubbles and separating slightly within a few hours. By the evening before bake day (36hours later) it looked like this:

The smell was quite mild and creamy rather than tangy.

Leaven

For each type of bread, I mixed 90g water, 20g starter, 50g white flour and 50g wholemeal flour to make a leaven to rise the bread, covered the mixture with clingfilm and left it on the counter. This was ready in about 10hours (probably shorter but I didn't get round to mixing the dough for 10 hours).

Although this is double the percentage leaven than used in a typical Tartine 3 recipe (formula below), I settled on this after trying the modifications suggested by the weekendbakery. More leaven helps the dough rise enough in cooler conditions and by changing the temperature of the water in the final mix can somewhat balance out that it has only been about 20-22C in my kitchen. Temperature is definitely the most uncontrollable factor and has lead to disappointing results many a time.

After 10 hours the leaven looks bubbly and collapsed slightly when wobbled a sure sign that I should have got up a couple of hours earlier!

Rye porridge and a fermented rye porridge

For the rye porridge I simmered 150g of chopped rye in 300g of water until no water remained. The porridge was beginning to become gelatinous and stick to the bottom of the pan a little. I covered the mixture and let it cool for about 2 hours.

At this point, I looked at the fermented rye chops and felt worried. How active was that mixture? After 48 hours plus stirring could it raise bread on it's own or would be have peaked long ago? In my fear I decided to deactivate it and rely on the yeast in the leaven instead. So it went in a pan as well and I gently heated it to just below boiling. The mixture was a pink/purple colour and a lot more smooth than the rye porridge.

I guess this a fermented rye porridge apparently this is a half decent breakfast already and somehow that felt reassuring. Adding pre-fermented rye along with all the active enzymes and yeast will have to wait for another blog post.

Premix

Rather than use a commercially produced high-extraction flour, I use a sieve with a #30 screen to remove some of the larger bran particles from wholemeal flour. The result is about 80% extraction flour, i.e. if I start with 1kg of wholemeal flour, about 800g passes through the sieve and is used in the bread, the rest is larger bits of bran or wheatgerm which is discarded.

I added 490g water (about 32C), 50g wheatgerm and mix of white (350g) and sieved wholemeal (350g) to each bowl of leaven. Into one of these premixes I added 35g of molasses. Once roughly mixed it is time for an autolyse phase so that the flour can absorb all of water properly.

I used this free time to take the now desperate looking dog for a run around the park.

Mixing and stretch-and-folds

Approximately 45 minutes later, I added 18g of salt and 35g of water too each bowl of dough and mixed this in gently.

After 30 minutes rest, I gave the rough a stretch-and-fold in the bowl. This is kind of difficult to take pictures and my technique is far from perfect but it is well explained here. After another 30 minutes it was time to mix in the porridges.

I then repeated the process of wait 30 minutes, stretch-and-fold the dough another 4 times. Finally, I left the dough to rise for an additional hour.

Shaping and final proof

The dough was now ready to be shaped and placed in the bannetons. The dough was half poured, half scraped out of the bowl and roughly divided in half.

I then gently preshaped the dough and left the pieces to rest of 20 minutes while washing up and cleaning loose flour off the bannetons. This is tricky to photograph as the dough was quite sticky. However, weekendbakery have an amazing demo on how to shape round loaves.

I dusted the bannetons with rice flour and shaped the dough again slightly more tightly. 

(The difference in colour is that the pre-shaped loaf was the double fermented porridge which contained additional molasses, whereas this one is rye porridge.)

After shaping the dough is still soft and difficult to handle but curves a little rather than oozing over the work surface. If the dough completely refuses to hold its form at this point, usually I've pushed the amount of water added over the edge. Sometimes it is difficult to guess with these porridge breads and the extra water in the porridge takes a while to blend in with the rest of the dough.

I placed the dough in the bannetons and left it to rise for about 2 hours. The picture on the left is the rye porridge dough just after it was shaped and on the right is the double fermented rye porridge bread just before it was baked.

Scoring, baking and afterwards

The bread was scored with scissors because as a novice baker this just seems easier and less messy with high-hydration doughs. The photographs on the excellent blog TartineBreadExperiment have helped me a lot with how to cut to get a much better oven spring. (1) Deep snips about an inch into the bread at 45 degrees or more from parallel with the top of the loaf. I was snipping too close to parallel and the bread was not blooming much at all (2) Snip in a straight line, after baking this will give a curved shape. Previously I often snipped in a curve which does not cause the loaf to open in a curve! (3) Only snip across the top of the loaf. I often made too many cuts, destroying the tension in the sides of the loaf and causing the dough to expand more sideways than upwards.

Despite hearing rave reviews of baking bread in a dutch oven, I have decided against and bake these breads on unheated baking sheets directly in the oven at 220C for 45 minutes. Madness, I hear you mutter, yes probably. Yet the oven is a bit broken and I get a massive face full of steam when opening it, so somehow it could be worse. However, while I'm still able to improvement and get good enough results without a dutch oven, so I will continue.

Anyway enough rambling here are some pictures of the final bread.

The taste of the molasses was strong in the double fermented porridge bread. I would be tempted to reduce this further or remove it to see if there is a significant difference in taste between the two recipes. Both have a very soft texture characteristic of porridge breads went very well with both soup and aubergine and goats cheese gratin. Both loaves had an excellent shelf life and I was still eating the double fermented rye porridge bread with butter and honey for much 5 days later. Yum.

Formulae

The hydration in both cases is a guess as I did not weigh the porridge after it was cooked so do not know how much water evaporated.

Rye Porridge Bread: 

40% White flour

35% Sieved wholemeal flour

15% Chopped Rye

5% Wholemeal flour

5% Wheatgerm

91.5% Water *(see comment above)

1.8% Salt

Double fermented Rye Porridge Bread: 

40% White flour

35% Sieved wholemeal flour

15% Chopped Rye

5% Wholemeal flour

5% Wheatgerm

91.5% Water *(see comment above)

3.5% Molasses

1.8% Salt

Finally, this week I baked a couple of extra loaves to try to seduce an ex-colleague into eating my bread regularly. As I have a limited amount of bannetons to hold the bread while proofing, I returned to Hamelman's “Bread” to one of my all time favourite bread recipes which could easily be ready to bake before the rye porridge bread needed to go into the bannetons.

“Five grain” bread

The night before making the bread, I built a leaven using white bread flour, water and some of my starter. It was a sloppy liquid mess.

The added grains in this bread are soaked overnight in boiling water with a little salt. The salt is needed to slow down the enzyme activity in this grain mixture. From bottom to top there are chopped rye, flaxseeds, rolled oats and sunflower seeds.

About 16 hours later, it's time for the final mix. The leaven mixture now looks more like milkshake.

First I weighed out the dry ingredients, white flour, wholemeal flour, salt and dried yeast.

Then added more water, all of the leaven and all of the soaker mixture and mixed everything by hand until roughly combined. Unfortunately, there is no picture at this stage as I was just too messy and sticky to operate it property! I kneaded for about 8 minutes using the 'slap-and-fold' method illustrated wonderfully by Richard Bertinet in this video. It was neither so graceful or tidy as bits of flaxseed have a tendency to splatter the whole kitchen. Here is the dough afterwards.

I left the dough to rise for 45 minutes before giving it a 'full-letter-fold'. The dough is turned out on the surface. I picked up the end facing me and gently pulled towards me before laying the stretched dough on top of itself. Next for the side furtherest away from me, followed by each side.

Now, the dough goes back in the bowl and is left to rise for another 45 minutes.

I gently removed the dough from the bowl and divided into 3 small pieces, about 700g each. These I shaped into a round using the method in this video but much much much more slowly! The loaves then went into the bannetons dusted with rice flour for a final rise lasting about 2 hours. Here is a before and after picture.

My kitchen is about 22ºC at the moment so a bit below the 25ºC used in the recipe. Although this is only a little bit, the yeast slows up considerably so final rise times are quite variable. I turned the loaves out of the bannetons onto baking sheets lined with paper, scored the tops as well as I could and baked them in a preheated oven at 200ºC for 45 minutes. Here is a couple of shots of the final product.

This bread makes truly amazing toast. I'm going to try to improve my photography and make sure all of the pictures are in focus next time. :)

Happy Baking!