Scoring experiments: Whole oat porridge bread and a sprouted rye loaf

For the last couple of weeks I've been baking loads of oat porridge loaves. These are a favourite of mine for being long lasting and soft so I try to keep a spare half a loaf in the freezer in case of emergency.

As my go-to bread, I am forever searching for the perfect loaf of oat porridge bread. Most of the oat porridge loaves have been disappointing. Some have been over-hydrated, difficult to shape and flat; others have been under-proofed and yet more have a tight crumb of undiagnosed cause. The formula gets baked and tweaked and baked again yet still seems to show all of the minor flaws in my techniques and timings. It is getting to the point of being incredibly frustrating and disappointing to see my own flaws so amplified in one of my favourite type of bread.

Recently, I've been practising and improving the scoring on all loaves to try come up with some ways of allowing the dough to bloom as much as possible and improve the aesthetic of the finished loaves. It is gratifying to lift the lid on the dutch oven after steaming to see what pattern my scoring created. As illustrated by the first set of loaves in this post, the joy of beginning to improve scoring only amplifies the disappointment when the crumb does not measure up to the sky high expectations set by the crust.

Oat groat porridge bread

During the summer, I was tempted into splurging on a few bags of whole grains, one of which was oat groats. Initially I had hoped to sprout these but when soaked, drained and left for 24 hours most of the grains swell a little and the germs plump up as though ready to sprout but they then stop. Most likely the groats have been heat-treated in order to stabilise the groats and extend shelf life.

As an alternative, I boiled one part groats to 3 parts water (by weight) for about 15-20 minutes until all of the water was absorbed. The resulting porridge is quite similar in texture to rice-pudding.

Ingredient	Weight
Oat groats	150g
Water	450g

These cooked oats were added into the standard base dough for all of the porridge bread recipes from Tartine #3. I aimed to make three medium sized boules with approx 400g flour in each.

Ingredient	Weight	Bakers percentage
High extraction wheat flour	600g	50%
White bread flour	600g	50%
Wheat germ	84g	7%
Water	960g	80%
Leaven	180g	15%
Salt	30g	2.5%
Cooked oat groats	600g (approx)	50% (approx)

All ingredients except the salt and oat groats were mixed together and left for a 60 minute autolyse. After the autolyse, the salt was added and the dough was folded every 30 minutes for 2.5 hours. The cooked oats were added the first time the dough was folded. The total bulk fermentation for these loaves was only 3.5 hours due to having other obligations making it hard to delay shaping the loaves. This was a shame as the dough felt sluggish and could have done with more bulk fermentation – possibly closer to 5 hours like the polenta porridge bread last week. To compensate a little the shaped loaves were retarded for about 20 hours.

I'm really pleased with the scoring and may use a couple of these patterns instead of the spiral cut which doesn't seem to allow as much oven spring.

Despite the crust and bloom being attractive, the crumb shot does show that the loaves could have had a little more fermentation time as the edges are substantially more open than the middle of the loaf. Although, the taste was quite close to that of the standard oat porridge bread made with rolled oats the texture was improved by the oat groats being slightly chewier and similar to having sprouted whole grains in the bread.

Sprouted Rye Loaf

This loaf is worth a mention for a couple of reasons. Firstly as it generated a clue as to another variable I could adjust in the never-ending quest for perfect oat porridge bread and secondly as the beginnings of a formula that I can finally call my own.

My usual starter lives on the counter top and is fed every morning a 1:2:2:4 ratio of starter, bread flour, whole wheat flour and water. The temperature in the kitchen is a stubborn 66-70F in the daytime and dips quite a bit at night so the starter lives on one feed a day for most of the week with 2 feeds per day in the run up to bake day. I've been managing my starter like this for about a year (with additional feeding in hot weather), it leavens bread just fine so I've had no reason to complain. I took a few days to convert a bit of this starter into a rye starter as I'd read somewhere that wheat starter can need time to adjust to being fed rye flour. After a single feeding this appeared to have been way too pessimistic.

The starter loves eating wholemeal rye! Seriously, it was climbing out of the bowl trying to find more… The starter fed with rye was making its wheat cousin look slow and cumbersome by bubbling ferociously after 4 hours. This has lead me to wonder whether it would a good idea to try the oat porridge bread with a rye leaven… perhaps next week.

Ingredient	Leaven (weight)	Final mix (weight)	Baker's percentage (Total)
Wholemeal Rye flour	150g	100g	21.7%
Wholemeal Wheat flour		200g	17.3%
White bread flour		700g	61%
Water	150g	700g	74%
Sprouted rye grains		360g	31%
Salt		25g	2.2%
Honey		50g	4.3%
Butter (melted)		40g	3.5%

1. (Day 1) Mix leaven ingredients with 25g rye starter and leave at room temperature for approx 12 hours.
2. (Day 2) Mix all flours and water, cover and leave for a 40 minute autolyse.
3. Add 300g of rye leaven and mix well until combined, leave for 30 minutes.
4. Add salt and fold the dough until combined and leave for 30 minutes.
5. Add remaining ingredients and fold into dough. Fold the dough 2-4 times every 30 minutes for an additional 2 hours.
6. Total bulk fermentation should be about 4.5 hours at 68-70F.
7. Shape the dough gently into boules and retard in the fridge.
8. After 4 hours the loaves were ready to bake as the dough was expanding out of the banettons!
9. Bake in preheated dutch oven, 20minutes covered at 250C, 10 minutes covered at 200C and 20minutes uncovered at 200C.

These loaves darkened a lot more quickly than usual once the lid of the dutch oven was removed due to the added honey. Perhaps next time I would consider reducing the oven temperature a little further.

In terms of crumb, I'm pleased with the outcome. This bread is a bit like a posh version of mighty white a bread I was obsessed with as a child – which is a good thing.

Happy Baking!

Maize and sunflower seed bread

Last week I was considering baking a bread with corn porridge to use up some polenta lurking around in the back of the cupboard. As a northern European, cooking with corn is unfamiliar to me and associated with Italian and/or American cuisine. As a child in the 80's, I thought maize = corn = tinned sweetcorn. Tinned sweetcorn was either an unwelcome addition to tuna mayonnaise or one of the 10,000 things crammed into salads along with boiled eggs and cubes of cheese. I was convinced that one of the key benefits of adulthood, would be not finding sweetcorn hiding in my food (and getting to mix lemonade and cordial whenever I wanted).

When I first got my hands on Tartine #3, I flicked straight past the corn porridge bread drawn in by less humble more exotic grains. This year, I've baked two types of bread with maize flour and/or polenta from The Handmade Loaf. Both loaves tasted fascinating and smelt so enticing that I decided to make a naturally leavened bread with corn porridge. I picked this recipe from the inspiringly beautiful blog Girl meets Rye.

Polenta bread with sunflower seeds and rosemary

I've incorporate some of the suggested changes mentioned at the end of the original blog post. The night before the bake, I prepared the polenta by mixing together 150g coarse cornmeal with 385g of boiling water in a bowl and covering the mixture with clingfilm. This mixture was left at room temperature to cool and when mixed into the bread was set into a rubbery mass.

For the final mix, I did not add the 50g of water used to dispense the salt as the white bread flour I use tends need less water than average. Before adding in the polenta, I broke it down a little with a fork. However some clumps of about 1-2cm diameter remained, I tried to pinch these out while folding but a few remained. As the temperature is still cool here, the dough seemed a little sluggish so I stretched the bulk fermentation to 4.5hours at room temperature (68C)

These changes made the dough soft, light and easy to handle. Unlike previous attempts the dough was better behaved and not quite as wobbly or worrying as the maize bread which I accidentally over-hydrated a few weeks ago.

The smell and taste of this bread is truly outstanding. There is something special about the combination of maize, rosemary and seeds which just doesn't often feature in traditional English cooking. It's a great combination of add-ins, with a clear procedure which is fully explained here and straightforward to reproduce. I'll definitely be trying more of the recipes from Girl meets Rye in future.

Polenta, Almond and Orange cake

There seems to be a trend towards gluten-free cake. As this is a bread blog, you may (rightly) assume I don't feel the need to jump on the gluten-free band-wagon any time soon. However, why not take the flour out of cake if instead we can stuff it full of almond and cornmeal instead?

The recipe can be found here.

Happy baking!

Second try with barley flour and spelt porridge bread

After last weeks barley flop, I decided to try again. This time with Dan Lepard's barley bread recipe. I doubled the recipe and baked too large loaves. This bread has overall less barley flour but a lot of cooked barley added to the mix. I was hoping for a distinctive taste of barley but less stress than last week. The barley flour is lightly toasted in the oven for 10 minutes at 160 degrees fahrenheit. The smell of the toasted barley is quite strong, nutty and a little woody, this made the aroma of the dough very distinctively.

The barley grains were pot barley. In quite a few of the recipes in The Handmade Loaf, I've been swapping out cooked grains for sprouted grains. However, in this case this is not possible as hulling barley seems to damage the germ of the grain making it unable to sprout. Chad Robertson seems to think that purple barley varieties work better but these are only available from one supplier in the US. In this case, I simmered the barley for about 25minutes. They were cooked but still quite chewy.

The texture of the dough was initially extremely tough. It was difficult to include all of the flour and the dough felt like heavy clay. I reduced the honey to 20g per loaf and added an extra 50g of water per loaf to get a dough that was slightly more pliable than plasticine! The dough was similar to last week, a little stronger but clearly lacking gluten and soft rather than gummy like rye dough.

These loaves came out a lot better than the barley loaves from last week. I'm pleased with the result.

The second set of loaves I baked this week used the spelt porridge recipe from Tartine #3. I don't have too much to say about these loaves except I've decided to continue with 150g of leaven and retarding for 18 hours in the fridge.

I've tried to increase the hydration very slightly and used a little more water in the spelt flakes when making porridge as well. The spelt flakes absorb quite a lot of water so I add a little water so that they take about 5-10 minutes to cook. There is probably no need to cook the flakes and pouring boiling water on them would probably be sufficient. I've found there is a little bit of a difference between the two approaches as cooking seems to make the spelt flakes a little bit more glossy and gummy and they disappear into the dough more.

This is really lovely bread with a soft crumb. On the afternoon after being baked, the crust was thin crispy and totally irresistible. I'm coming round to the taste of spelt as a softer less bitter variety of wheat.

Happy Baking!

Not such a good week: Millet porridge bread and a lemon barley loaf

Continuing with the theme of sorting out the random baking ingredients I've collected the first type of bread I baked last week was a millet bread. Last week was a struggle, one of the set of loaves came out well and the other was a real challenge.

This bread is a simple 50-50 mix of white flour and high extraction flour with added cooked millet. The recipe is exactly as in Tartine #3 except I've scaled it to 400g of flour per loaf as my bannetons are not big enough for the porridge recipes. I've decided to continue with using 15% leaven and try to stretch the fermentation time out longer. It doesn't seem like we're going to get a proper winter in Manchester this year and daytime temperature is stubbornly above 5 degrees.

The cooked millet smells grassy and a little nutty - like bird seed and tastes a little grassy but fairly neutral. In terms of texture, it falls somewhere near quinoa and couscous or burghur wheat. Every time I cook some for this recipe I consider making salad or serving it as a side dish with a stew but it hasn't happened yet. I'd be curious to know how millet was traditionally eaten in Europe.

The very perky shape suggests I've slightly under fermented these loaves a little. This bread is simple, easy to make and doesn't smell anywhere near as much like bird seed after it is baked! The toasted millet on the surface is quite different – crunchy and nutty and pretty too.

Another one of those things in the back of the cupboard is bag of barley flour. Probably the safest thing to do with this would be to bake biscuits. I was tempted by the idea making bannock but settled on a recipe for a lemon barley loaf from Dan Lepard's 'The Handmade loaf'.

Lemon barley loaf

The recipe is 40% Barley flour and 60% white flour so I wasn't expecting the dough to behave like a wheat loaf but even though pretty much everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Most obviously, I forgot about the salt crust. The dough was difficult to handle as it seemed fragile and lacking structure, which makes sense with so much gluten-free barley flour. However this caused me to panic and just make matters worse with a whole series of mistakes.

The dough was soft and sticky but not in the same way that rye dough is as it lacks the cement-like gloss and gloopiness. I didn't feel confident shaping these batons as I haven't done this for ages. Things got worse at the scoring stage with the knife snagging and more tearing that cutting the dough. Finally, the loaves were significantly over baked giving a dull and thick crust.

The taste of this bread is unique and oddly appealing, so I can see that the recipe could be very special if executed a lot better than this attempt. A much more successful version of this bread has been posted on The Fresh Loaf by TXFarmer's and can be found here. At the moment I lack the skill and patience to recover once things start to veer of track which is disappointing.

Happy Baking!

Catch up: Rye porridge bread and maize bread

This is a catch-up post about bread baked on 9th February which has been hanging about a couple of weeks waiting for editing.

Maize bread

The first bread I baked this week was a Pan de Mais using the straight dough recipe from 'The Handmade Loaf'. The loaf contains both maize flour and precooked polenta. The recipe requires buttermilk which I substituted with milk and half a tablespoon of vinegar stirred together and left for 15 minutes. My precooked polenta (50g) was cooked with 200g of water rather than 100g. This was a silly mistake, as I placed 100g of water on the polenta while stirring the milk and found it was absorbed before I got a chance to heat up the mixture!

The dough turned out to soft and extremely sticky, so I added enough extra flour to make it soft and fluffy. During the folds the dough seemed to turn into a giant bright yellow marshmallow… I was doubtful that that was a good thing but blindly continued, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. This dough raised extremely quickly! By the time the dutch oven had preheated the dough was precariously spilling out of the banneton and wobbling like a giant blancmange. The dough deflated a tiny bit on scoring but bounced back a little in the oven – crisis averted.

This bread was a real treat. It smells enticing and has a beautiful creamy soft crumb. I used this bread to make some grilled cheese sandwiches inspired by Jamie Olivers recipe. Amazing!

Rye porridge bread

Secondly, I baked Rye porridge bread using the last of the rye chops in the cupboard. This is one of the first breads from Tartine #3 that I got acceptable results from. I've tried quite a few variations with varying degrees of success, with and without extra rye flour, pre-fermented rye chops extra molasses, extra bread spices, extra walnuts are all viable and delicious options. However, on this occasion I decided to go back to basics and just bake the recipe exactly as in Tartine #3.

That includes reducing the amount of leaven back down to 15%. My loaves have had limited oven spring recently and rather than get up earlier or mix the dough later on in the evening I thought I'd just try retarding the shaped loaves a bit longer (about 18 hours). I'm pleased with the outcome.

Happy Baking!

Sesame Wheat and a Prune and Hazelnut Leaven

This week feels a little less hectic, last week I was signed-off as fully trained in my volunteering role. While I'm really pleased to have got this far, the process really scrambled my brains for a couple of days. This week I've swapped my shifts about to start working some mornings so as to have more free time at the beginning of the week (for baking). It has been lovely to bake bread without as much time pressure this week and really let the bread develop at it's own pace.

Sesame-Wheat bread

First up this week, the next seeded bread in Tartine #3 which has added whole wheat flour and toasted sesame seeds. This is an unapologetically bold and brash bread. Chad Robertson says it is the bread that drove him to become a baker and I can see why. The smell alone is irresistible.

As usual, due to cool weather, I increased the starter to total of 300g and tweaked the hydration a little as I expected the sesame seeds to absorb some additional water. For two large loaves, the overall formula without listing the starter as a separate ingredient was as follows:

Ingredient	Weight	Bakers percentage
High extraction wheat flour	425g	40%
White bread flour	375g	35%
Wholegrain wheat flour	275g	25%
Wheat germ	900g	6.5%
Water	275g	84%
Salt	25g	2.3%
Toasted sesame seeds	250g	23%

The sesame seeds were toasted in advance in small batches. The sesame seeds pop like crazy and either refuse to toast much at all or spring all over the kitchen! Immediately after shaping, the loaves were retarded in the fridge for about 12 hours.

So the loaves came out (as usual) not as open as would be ideal. I think I'm a bit heavy handed with shaping. However, the aroma and taste was incredible and the lack of medium/large holes did help when making grilled cheese sandwiches.

A few years ago, while living in student accommodation, I ate virtually only fruit bread (toasted with jam) and toasted cheese sandwiches for a whole semester. The motivation for this being that I did not have to brave the mess in the shared kitchen and could stay in my bedroom studying in peace. After a while, the store bought bread was oddly addictive despite tasting dreadful. I literally broke this habit when melted cheese short-circuited my toasted sandwich-maker.

Since then I've had an on-off relationship with fruit bread. Some recipes are so soft, fluffy and cake-like that I wish I had just made scones instead. This next recipe is definitely on the more bread-y, less cake-y end of the spectrum.

Prune, hazelnut and fennel leaven

This bread was inspired by STUinLouisa's spring cleaning post on The Fresh Loaf. The nuts and dried fruit in the cupboard were, unfortunately, limited to 70g of hazelnuts and 160g prunes left over from Christmas.

I decided to use these to make a small variation on the 'toasted hazelnut and prune bread' in Hamelman's Bread. Hamelman's original recipe includes some dried yeast making it unsuitable for retarding overnight. The only changes I made were to add one tablespoon of fennel seeds and omit the yeast. I also extended to bulk fermentation to 2.5hrs and retarded the loaves overnight so that they would fit my schedule better.

Wonderfully tasty bread and makes very good toast. Normally a fruit and nut loaf like this would disappear extremely quickly due to DH's midnight snacking habits but this week the sesame seed bread was nibbled instead.

Happy Baking!