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!