Spelt-Wheat blend and 20% Rye with added seeds

This week my DH looked positively radiant when unpacking some midweek shopping. “You'd never guess what I found,” he said rooting about in his backpack “Hmm, extra bananas, milk…” so far so normal. I don't usually get a item by item review of his shopping lists so I thought “This had better be worth it”. “Ooh, here it is….” he says producing with a flourish… a bag of Doves Farm Wholemeal Rye flour.

Does this count as breaking my promise to use up things in the cupboard before buying more flour or grains? I hope not. It was a cute gesture. Plus I hadn't actually told him I'd banned myself from buying new flour.

20% Rye bread with added sunflower and flax seeds

First up this week, a classic combination of add-ins with the 20% Rye recipe from Tartine #3. I am very fond of this recipe as a basic country-style loaf. It is enough rye to contribute to the taste of the finished bread without having to adopt any rye specific techniques.

I scaled the recipe to a total of 400g of added flour per loaf. This is because I have found that with add-ins, 500g of added flour per loaf is too much for my bannetons. As usual, due to cool weather, I increased the percentage starter to 30% (adjusting added high extraction flour and water to compensate). Finally, I increased the hydration a little as I expected the sunflower seeds and flaxseeds would absorb quite a bit of liquid.

The sunflower seeds (115g) were toasted in advance in a clean frying pan. The flaxseeds (115g) was soaked overnight in 150ml of cool water. Immediately after shaping, the loaves were retarded in the fridge for about 12 hours.

So the loaf came out fairly flat and probably would have come out more flat without the Dutch oven for support. The loaves did not have much vertical oven spring and mostly spread outwards rather than upwards. Quite possibly accidentally a little too much extra water or over-fermented.

While not entirely perfect, I'll be happily spreading honey, jam or peanut butter on it for the rest of the week.

Spelt and Wheat bread

This recipe is a cautious attempt at making bread with spelt flour. Overall there is 40% spelt flour and 60% wheat flour.

The recipe calls for 300g high extraction spelt flour and 100g whole grain spelt flour. Instead I used 200g white spelt flour and 200g whole grain spelt flour. I'm a little wary of spelt so reduced the water added in the final mix by 5% and tried to manipulate the dough the minimum possible amount.

The spelt flakes on the outside made scoring a little more challenging than usual. Taste wise, beautifully creamy coloured soft crumb and a thin crispy crust. However, I'm not sure I could tell there was spelt flour in there from the taste alone.

Finally, while waiting for the bread to rise I baked a marble cake from this book.

Happy Baking!