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!