We've got so many jars and tins and boxes and bottles in our house. I "digged" in our cellar and found an old jar of dried apples. Dried 1998, surprisingly still look alright. Found a bag of organic buckwheat flour which my parents brought home from the Bretagne, France some holidays ago. And found a glass with some kind of Estonian instant Buckwheat which our Estonian exchange student left here two years ago. Everything looked alright, smelled alright, felt alright, I decided: It's time to use it!

End of August - The fall is coming! What about an Buckwheat Apple Bread, that sounds good and seasonal. It just had to be created. That's where I came into play. I intensified the apple flavor trough some cider, which we had in our cellar as well, and added a little bit of pear honey as well. Rather easy, utterly delicious.

The apple and the buckwheat are not only on the picture a nice couple, I found that the light sweetness and the sour tang of the apple worked very well with the nutty buckwheat flavor. Especially the crunchy loaf had a very interesting mouth feel!

Buckwheat Apple Sourdough

Ingredients

liquid levain
100 g buckwheat flour
125 ml cider
15 g mature starter

final dough
385 g bread flour
15 g Vital Wheat Gluten
230 ml cider (start with 200 ml and add more cider as required)
12 g salt
a little less than 1 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp pear honey ("Birnel"), can be substituted by any sweetener
40 g dried apple rings, chopped
1/2 cup whole buckwheat

 

1. Mix the ingredients for the liquid levain, put aside for 12 hours.
2. pour some hot water over the whole buckwheat and let it soak for a while.
3. In the meantime, mix the liquid levain, the flour, the Vital Wheat Gluten and cider and let it autolyse for some time. I let it sit for about 15 minutes, as long as it took to clean up after lunch. Watch out with the amount of cider added, I had to juggle a bit with some extra flour and extra cider until I found the right consitency, a tacky but not sticky dough.
4. strain the buckwheat berries and let it drip off well.
5. mix the final dough, but don't add the apple chunks and the buckwheat yet. Knead until the gluten is developed, then incorporate the apple pieces and about 2/3 of the buckwheat berries.
6. Let the dough ferment for about 1.5 hours, with one fold after 40 minutes.
7. Divide the dough into two, shape two boules. I rolled one in the leftover buckwheat berries and let it proof on the board, the other one proofed in a proofing basket.
8. after the proofing, I decorated the second boule with an apple sign (Cut out an apple out of paper, mist the boule, place the apple on the loaf and dust the loaf now with flour. Take the apple paper away and in the oven it goes).
9. Bake the loaves on a preheated baking stone with steam at 430°F, lower the temperature when the loaves take on to much color. (I finished baking at 400°, after about 40 minutes of baking in total)
10. let it cool on a rack and enjoy plain, with butter or with a mild cheese.

Simply autumn, doesn't it look like it?

No other pictures of the "sleek" apple loaf, I gave it away to somebody who has borrowed me her car for my driver's license preparation a couple times. Of course I couldn't cut into it. ;)

Salome

Didier Rosada is our instructor at Artisan III course at the San Francisco Baking Institute.  The course is intensive in technical knowledge as in baking schedule.  Didier is an incredible instructor with amazing energy; he "trained and led the Bread Bakers Guild Team USA to first place victory in the bread category at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris in 1996."

I chose to blog this bread because, as Didier said, this bread is what bread was like "in his grandfather's days" (he came from south of France), also because back home I don't normally have the luxury of baking big size breads.

    

                   

 

     

Formula 

First Levain Build - Day one at 2:30 pm

• 64 g high extraction flour*
• 76 g water
• 16 g liquid starter @100% hydration

Mix all ingredients until well incorporated with desired temperature of 21C/70F and allow to ferment 16 hours at room temp 18 - 21C/65 - 70F.

* If high extraction flour is not available, substitute with 80% white bread flour and 20% whole wheat flour.

Second Levain Build - Day two @6:30 am

• 388 g high extraction flour*
• 466 g water
• 2 g salt
• 156 g all of first levain build

(The SFBI staff did this levain build for us.)  Mix all ingredients until well incorporated with desired temperature of 21C/70F and allow to ferment 8 hours at room temperature 18 - 21C/65 - 70F.

Final Dough - Day two @2:30 pm

• 263 g bread flour
• 88 g high extraction flour*
• 88 g medium rye flour
• 97 g water (@55F)
• 17 g salt
• 1,012 g all of the second levain build**

Total dough weight 1,565 g and total dough hydration 72%

**Note: the total levain is 230% of final dough flour.

1. Mix all ingredients in first speed of your mixer until well incorporated about 3 - 4 minutes.
2. Switch to second speed (approx. the 4th gear on home Kitchen Aid mixer) for 2 - 3 minutes until medium strength of gluten development.
3. First fermentation in mixing bowl for 30 minutes.
4. Turn out onto a lightly floured work bench and pre-shape to light ball.
5. Rest 20 - 30 minutes.
6. Shape into a boule and place in a well dusted linen-lined basket.
7. Proof retarding overnight at 8 - 9C/46 - 58 F (in this case 18 hours).

Bake - Day three @10:15 am

1. One hour before baking, turn on your oven to pre-heat to 450F.
2. Score (or stencil) your dough any way you like (a traditional score is diamond score; I did a stencil of three overlapping circles with three scores).
3. Bake for one hour with steam before and right after the dough is loaded onto your baking stone.
4. Cool before slice.

 

                     

                                             

Didier used my Miche as demo to explain that this bread was how bread was made in the old days and that its flavor was quite sour.   The sour taste is too strong for my liking but apparently many people in the U.S. like the strong sour taste and, surprisingly for me, almost all the other Aussies in the class like it too.  I was told that these days in France however, people generally don't like it too sour. 

 

         

                                

 

If I were to do this Miche again, the following are the changes I would incorporate: 

1. Hand mix to achieve a more open crumb;
2. Increase total dough hydration to 76% at least, also for more open crumb; and
3. To cut down the sourness by reducing the levain as a % of final dough flour from 230% to 120% or lower (in which case the shaped dough will proof at room temperature for an hour or two before goes into the retarder and for shorter time).
4. I like the flour profile and will make no change in that.  

 

Shiao-Ping

p.s.  I asked Didier if I could blog this formula with his picture and the answer was a very happy yes to me.  Thank you, Didier.

Struan is the bread that truly launched his bread baking career, Reinhart says (p. 102). In Gaelic, struan means “the convergence or confluence of streams,” a good description for multigrain breads where all kinds of grains and seeds are coming together (the combinations are, of course, endless).

Because I love breads full of grains and seeds, I have bought Peter Reinhart’s book “Whole Grain Breads.” Most of the recipes in there consist of three parts: a soaker (part of the flour, the seeds and grains and part of the salt are soaked in water or often in milk, buttermilk or yoghurt for 12-24 hours), a biga (to be refrigerated for at least 8 hours or up to three days) and the final dough.

The flour for this multigrain Struan is whole wheat (67%) and to it I added in about equal parts: sesame, pumpkin, sunflower and flax seeds, and millet (seeds and grains 33%). Reinhart says that he prefers to cook the millet, but it can also be added to the soaker uncooked. I prefer it that way since it gives a beautiful crunch to the bread that we like very much.

I made a school lunch with this bread for my 15 year-old son and thought he’d tell me upon his return to never use such a seedy bread again. To my big surprise he announced that this was the best sandwich ever.

For guests I made one of my favorite desserts. It’s a Swiss recipe called “Quarktorte” which in English gets translated as cheese cake. Most cheese cakes in the US are made with cream cheese as you all know, in Switzerland however we use a product called “Quark” which is a type of fresh cheese, much lighter than cream cheese (kind of like a firm yoghurt) and very tasty. It comes in plain form (which is needed for this dessert) or in many fruit styles. It is available in the US in some specialty stores, at about 10 times the Swiss price. To substitute I use sour cream light. I had to get used to the different taste, but it works very well. Only the base gets baked, the rest is a mixture of egg yolks, sugar, vanilla, stiff egg whites, sour cream, whipped cream and gelatin. I always import my yearly supply of gelatin leaves from Europe whenever I go there, thus I have never had to get used to gelatin in powder form, the only one readily available here, as far as I know.

It’s an elegant, fresh dessert that has a somewhat airy texture and the appearance of being very light.

I also made this typical, very common and simple French summer dessert: a clafoutis with apricots and blueberries. It is a very easy and tasty way to use up fresh fruit. The most common version is with cherries.

 

And finally for brunch at our neighbors this past Sunday I baked these cinnamon rolls (I myself don't like cinnamon in sweets much, I prefer it in savory dishes). They came out very light and fluffy. I used a recipe from the King Arthur site and substituted the potato flakes (which I don't have) with a freshly cooked potato (before cooking it was around 120g) that I mashed finely with a little water. This ingredient, I read, makes cinnamon rolls very soft, and it's true, as several people commented on how fluffy and light they were.