Just another bread blog: Running out of Rye: khorasan bread and white maize and wheat sourdough

Deciding what to bake this week has been a challenge. Initially I was thinking of baking a 40-60% rye bread as we haven't had one of those for months. Last week I'd finished a small bag of wholegrain rye flour and thought nothing more of it as I usually have a few spare. Over the last year, I've been collecting various types of flours, grains and seeds so there are a good few things in my baking supplies cupboard that I've half forgotten about. After checking the entire content of the hoard, I found no wholegrain rye flour but three bags of Khorasan flour from Shipton Mill.

Having taken stock, I have decided it is time for a temporary moratorium on purchasing further baking ingredients. That rye bread will have to wait for a while longer.

60% Khorasan

There is something about Khorasan I find irresistible. Maybe it is the yellow colour. Maybe its that it seems to have less tannins and hence less bitterness than modern wheat. Maybe it is because it was the first ancient grain I successfully baked with. Maybe it is that it is easier to deal with than einkorn, emmer and spelt.

This week I increased the percentage starter to 30% (adjusting added high extraction flour and water to compensate) and increased the hydration a little. Including the flour and water in the starter there was 1,145g of flour and 975g of water which makes the overall hydration about 85%. Immediately after shaping, the loaves were retarded in the fridge for 14 hours.

The crumb is soft and very tasty. Somehow, I'm not entirely satisfied with this loaf but I don't know what could be improved. Perhaps it is the tiredness and frustration caused by the other loaves I baked this week.

Maize and Wheat bread

This recipe is from Dan Lepard's book The Handmade Loaf. The Homemade Loaf was the first ses leftover cooked polenta. At the time, I looked up the recipe only to be disappointed that I bread book I bought back in 2013 and I'm still fond of the simple methods and spectacular results.

On New Year's Eve, I was cooking baked chicken with a spicy polenta crust and remembered the recipe for maize bread in this book but didn't have enough maize flour. However, Dan's book contains two recipes for maize bread, a sourdough version and a straight dough version with added polenta.

As I've not baked the sourdough version before, this discovery ultimately lead down the rabbit hole to buying maize flour from Eighth Day. The maize flour is this one from infinity foods. Upon opening it turned our to be yellow rather than white maize.

I doubled the recipe to make 2 large loaves and used a mixture of 200g live yoghurt and 450g water instead of the whey. This did change the length of the final proof. After 2 and a half hours the dough was pretty much unchanged. After 4 hours, the dough had barely risen but I decided to bake them anyway as I wasn't willing to be baking in the middle of the night.