dabrownman's blog

I was lucky enough to get out of town and go visit my daughter in Houston for 3 days this week.  I also got to seem my brother and SIL who lives there too.  We had a great dinner on Tuesday night down in Rice Village at a nice Italian restaurant that served good Italian bread – not SD but still good with olive oil on it.  The Mud Bug Ravioli with a good fruity Zin was very nice too.   We don’t get together enough….

One of the things I have not done in a long time is make Chocolate Chip cookies without a mixer too.  What a workout creaming the butter and sugar!  My daughter wanted them to give them out at work as she finished her last day of clinic on this rotation.  She really liked the Doctors.  Nurses and others in this Cardio practice and enjoyed the work even though the hours were very long – she learned a lot – like having Dad make the going away cookie by hand!

Heikjo had a post earlier this week about making SD bread easy in a day.  The reminder that this was easy as pie came at the right time since we didn’t have our usual 5 days to make our normal sprouted Double Retard SD Bread of the Week.  We could have made it in one day but we had two, if you discount the levain build of 12 hours the overnight before autolyze.

We still managed to grind up 6 different grain; rye, spelt, Kamut, barley, wheat and buckwheat for this 30% whole grain bread.  We sifedt out the bran for the first feeding of the levain.  We did a 2 stage levain build by using the high extraction flour for the 2nd build that sat out overnight. The levain ended up at 17.5 % pre-fermented flour.

 Instead of our normal 24 -36 hour retard of the levain we skipped it altogether and only did a 30 minute autolyze of the dough flour and water with the salt sprinkled on top instead of usual 1-2 hour autolyze.  We did 3 sets of slap and folds of 60 -30 -30 slaps and 3 sets of 4 stretch and fold sessions all on 20 minute intervals.

We skipped the bulk ferment and went straight pre-shape and shape after a 15 minute rest.  We placed the boule in a rice floured basket for a 21 hour retard instead of letting it proof on the counter and baking in the afternoon.  When we took the proofed loaf out of the fridge the next morning it already looked 100% proofed so we fired up the oven with the CC inside to 500 F.

We unmolded the dough slashed it T-Rex style and loaded it into the CC for 20 minutes of lid on steam at 450 F.  Once the lid came off, we continued baking for 5 minutes at 25 F convection before removing the boule from the bottom of the Combo Cooker to finish baking on the stone for another 10 minutes.  At the 35 minute total baking time the bread was 210 F on the inside and was removed to the cooling rack.

We love fresh tuna.  When fresh it makes for a fine grilled fish.

Since the dough was 100 % proofed it didn’t spring and bloom spectacularly but it did blister and brown nicely like most near white breads do.  We will have to wait on the crumb once the bread cools completely.

The crust came out crispy but went soft and chewy as it cooled.  It was thin though,  Tee crumb was fairly open soft and moist.  These kinds of breads are difficult to slice thin and hard not to squish the slices when slicing too.  The taste of this bread is outstanding. 30%b whole grains remains our favorite tasting white bread!  No reason to go whiter than this one.

The recipe is an easy one.  The bran 6 grain levain is 17.5%, the whole 6 grains are 30%, the water is 75% and the salt 2%.  It is nice to make a simple bread once on a while but the proof is in the taste.

Lucy still recommends a good salad at least twice a day. Even if it with left over stacked chicken enchiladas. 

After last week’s mooshed Altamura shaped loaf we decided not to try to moosh this one.  Lucy wanted to give it another go to try and make amends but she has been acting oddly of late and frankly just can’t be trusted - especially on Earth Day.

As we all know and 100% of scientists have confirmed, the Sun is burning hotter and hotter, a bit more every day, as it ages.  This is what stars do.  They can’t do anything else.  When Lucy found out it was Earth Day and that in 500,000 years the temperature on earth would be 100 F hotter than today due to the Sun burning hotter, she just had to do something to save us poor humans.

She told me her solution might sound a bit weird at first but to give her idea a chance and just hear her out for once.   As usual I just couldn’t do it since her idea was really off the wall and totally out of a really big box.  Her idea was to genetically modify human beings so that they would be totally covered by a thick coat of hair.

That way people could feel 100 F hotter today. Like she does in her fine coat of fur and get used to it like she has already done – no worries.  As time goes on and the Earth heats up, humans could just go to a groomer like she does and get a bit of hair trimmed off to adjust their temperature appropriately just like we do for her in the summer. 

I thought about telling her I was going to sell her to the Gypsies like my mother used to tell me when I was little and was acting up but I guess you can’t say that today.  I heard these kinds of threats are considered insensitive toward and a mini macro or major mini aggression against Gypsies.   Oddly, it is still fine to take her to the pound where they will euthanize her for much less. 

At least I can till bake bread on Earth Day and contemplate the day when later generations won’t need ovens to bake it.  They can just make pizza dough and while they are tossing it upwards to form the pie, it will just bake itself in the hot air to make flat bread.  Just think, no ovens required, a very green idea for Earth Day indeed and Lucy thinks this alone might save us all from the future heat of the sun – but she has to do more calculations with her climate super computer to know for sure – so we will have to wait a bit before we can celebrate.

Well, on to more important things that still require an oven today.  This week’s bake followed out usual MO of late where we start the sprouts on Monday, dry and mill them on Tuesday.  On Tuesday, we also mill the other non-sprouted whole grains in the mix and then sift it all to separate out the Low extraction bran to build this week’s 3 stage levain so that it can be retarded on Tuesday night before we go to bed.

After 36 hours of cold retard in the fridge, we get the levain out to warm up and stir it down.  While the levain is rising 25%, we autolyze the dough flours - in this case the high extraction and sprouted high extraction rye, spelt, wheat, barley and Kamut along with the King Arthur bread flour…. with the salt sprinkled on top.  We also had time to make and cool  the 20 minute, simmered porridge – in this case quinoa and buckwheat groats. 

When the levain hits the mx. we do 1 set of 60 slap and folds and 2 sets of 30 slap and folds and 3 sets of 4 stretch and folds all on 20 minute intervals with the porridge being added in on the first set of stretch and folds.  After a 30 minute rest we did a quick pre-shape into an oval and then 10 minutes later we final shaped it and placed it onto rice floured oval basket seam side up.  We bagged it and placed it into the fridge for a 16 hour retard.

When the dough came out of the fridge we starter the 500 F preheat for the oven.  When it beeped we loaded in the two trays of lave rock, half full of water (Mega Steam) on the bottom rack and set the timer for 15 minutes.  Once the steam was billowing the top and bottom stones were at temperature, the dough was unmolded onto on a peel, slashed and loaded on the bottom stone.

4 minutes later the temperature was turned down to 450 F and we continued steaming for another 14 minutes.  After the steam came out we turned the oven down to 425 F convection and continued to bake another 20 minutes until the bread was 208 F on the inside.

The bread browned well but spread mire than it sprang or bloomed.  It proofed to 100% proofed while we slept instead of the 85% we would want but instead of re-shaping and proofing again we baked it off hoping the crumb would still be  OK  but we will have to wait on that.

The crumb came out open, moist, and soft like a porridge bread should be..  It is wonderful and delicious,   The porridge was a fine addition  that brought the mix of whole grains up to 7.  It made a fine lunch with grilled chicken, cheddar, tomato and lettuce sandwich with the usual veggie fixings. - Yum!

And Lucy wants to see another salad somewhere.

Seems many things come in spurts on the TFL.  We are always looking for something new and interesting to do on the bread front.  Recently, we have seen a few Pain di Altamura breads with the odd folding of the dough a few minutes before baking.  The most interesting thing is this folding.  The bread itself is a straightforward durum wheat one but the look of the weird lump of bread you end up with is its calling card.

For the life of me, I have no idea why they would want to deflate their dough and moosh it into a shape, resembling a scientific oddity, that ends up densely pinched in the middle and good for nothing I can think of right away.   But there are all kinds of things in the bread world that I can’t understand or explain and these are the things that make bread making addicting for me.

The non-Kamut berries sprouted faster.

Traditional Altamura bread is usually 100% durum wheat bread, at 60% hydration made with sourdough in about 5 hours from mix to bake.  The biggest complaint of late is that it doesn’t really taste that great. It has a nutty flavor, the bread has a beautiful yellow color for the crumb and crust which is pretty cool for an un-enriched bread.  But if a bread doesn’t taste as good as it looks we are naturally let down a bit.

Easy to tell which side is the semolina porridge.

So Lucy tasked herself this week to get some flavor into this bread, increase its nutrition, improve its GI and still try to keep its dinosaur dump looks.  First foo she tossed the 5 hour process and went to a very long one instead.  Long means flavor when it comes to SD so that was good place for her to start.

The really dark, if tiny, bran levain is also easy to spot.

The 2nd thing she did was to get some other whole grains in the mix to present a more complex and deep flavor profile.  She used small amounts of rye, wheat, spelt and barley.  If the mix stayed all durum, that is what you will get a greatly refined durum bread that doesn’t taste that great.  For a 3rd change she replaced much of the durum with its close cousin Kamut.  Kamut is a 28 chromosome grain like durum and an ancient one too - a natural hybrid of durum and polonicum finally confirmed by DNA testing for the science starved like me.

 The bread really fermented well in the fridge.

Kamut also has that wonderful yellow coloring like durum.  The problem with durum semolina is that most of the flavor found in the bran and germ has been stripped away by the milling and sifting proves.  So using whole grain Kamut and milling it at home we could keep all of the lost flavor and remove the blandness that plain pasta is known to have.

This beautifully risen loaf should have been slashed and baked rtter than folded over to bring out its full potential..

Since the whole grains would end up at 72% for this bread instead of 0% for the traditional Altamura we upped the hydration to 75% and used all the sifted out bran from the whole grains in the levain to keep it wettest the longest and attacked by the acid in the mix for as long as possible.

The longer it sat waiting for the oven to heat up the more the bottom half was deflated.

Might as well shoot for as open a crumb as we can muster especially knowing that much of the openness would be wiped away with the folding at the last minute.  The barn also will make the levain and resulting bread more sour as well and this bread need every helping hand in the flavor department.

The other edge.

The levain was built over 3 stages and then retarded for 36 hours to bring out the sour as well as soften the bran from the whole grains.  We also learned not long ago that the kids in the UK are fed semolina porridge for breakfast.  You learn something new every day and it had been years since we had made a decent gruel for bread.  So we made a semolina one for this bread to try make Ian happy..

All of the durum semolina in this bread was re-milled to make it into more of a flour than sandpaper grit.  The levain ended up being less than 10% pre-fermented flour.  Less levain means more time and more time means more flavor generally speaking.   We did our usual 3 sets of 30 slap and folds and 3 sets of 4 stretch and folds, all on 15 minute intervals since durum and Kamut don’t like much man handling and are fast to ferment.

There is that same old same old salad again!  Still yummy though....

We skipped the bulk ferment because of the speed of these grains and did a 21 hour shaped retard in an oval basket.  We took the bread out of the fridge and cold shaped it by folding it over gently in half and then fired up the oven to 500 F preheat with one pan of Mega Steam in place of our normal two pans of lave rocks.

Yep, the bottom got smooshed.  Very dense down there.

Normally this bread would be baked in a WFO without steam but the oven itself is packed with bread that is putting out a lot of steam all by itself so we thought one pan of steam was a good compromise.  The folding of the bread mooshed the bottom half and it wasn’t likely to, nor did it, recover with spring in the oven.  If I was making this bread agai, I wouldn’t fold it but just slash it twice and bake it off.   No sense ruining half the bread in my book.

Looks better if you cover up the dense part:_)

We baked it with steam for 18 minutes at 450 F and then 38 minutes at 425 F convection until it read 207 F in the middle.  We then moved it to the cooling rack.  It was amazing how much like a real WFO loaf of Atamura this bread actually looked.  Dark, no gloss crust with that beautiful yellow tinge underneath that you could see well where the bread sprang at the open folded overlap section.

 I don’t have much hope of the crumb on the bottom section but hopefully the top half will be OK.  We shall see once it cools.  We are pretty sure the flavor problem of this bread will be cured just from the aroma it is putting off on the cooling rack!  This bread is as tasty as any other whole grain sprouted bread that we have have made lately with the added bit of a slight sweet nutty finish.  Just don't fold it over like this doofus did. The crumb din't come out as yellow as we hoped - too many whole grains:-)  It made a great grilled chicken pepperjack cheese, avocado, lettuces and tomato sandwich for lunch with the usual fixings.\

Last time we under filled the new Oriental Pullman pan so this week Lucy though she would overfill it.   It was perfectly filled until she duped in a bunch of add ins that made for about 400 g of too much dough.  From famine to feast still means the pan is struggling to do its thing because of a lackadaisical master and overly ambitious apprentice bordering on a doofus twofer.

So to really mess things up we decided to do an hour autolyze with a bunch of sprouted and whole grain rye and wheat too.  We decided to do a retard for a high percent rye bread – oh no! And we are doing a total 19% pre-fermented flour in two different levains which is a lot, about twice as much, for a long retarded dough on a near 100 F day or two in AZ.

We are hoping for 3 things I guess.  That the rye bran in the SD rye levain will make it very acidic which helps control amylase action in rye breads.  That the long cold retard temperature will also help control the amylase action in rye breads – enzyme and other wee beasties of all kinds don’t like the cold and slow way down.

Also, we hoped that the very long cold retard of weeks on end for the two rye starters have managed to increase the LAB to yeast ratio in the starters levain and dough so more acid will be produced helping to keep the amylase in check.  We also hoped that the separate YW wheat bran levain will help to open the crumb on this very heavy, whole grain bread as it usually does and has so well in the past.

Then Lucy decided to do a set of slap and folds and 3 sets of stretch and folds to do some gluten development on a bread that doesn’t have much of any of that.  She is a real renegade for sure and possibly a stealth Vicious Viking who will eviscerate you faster than vittles at best and upchuck on your toes at worst!

Lucy went for the really dark side with the Boulder Beer Shake Chocolate Porter for the autolyse liquid, some barley malt syrup, red malt and a bit of cocoa.  But, she went purist too by omitting the aromatic seeds we usually would put in a bread like this, so we could taste the whole and sprouted grains better which sounds a lot better than the real deal being….. that we just forgot to put them in.

She chucked in the add ins into the mix on the first set of stretch and folds, forgetting the squash seeds we had purchased for this bread,  which were done with a wet bench scraper and one wet hand to keep the sticky mess at bay with some luck in that regard.  Still, it was heavy, sticky at 94% hydration and gloppy going into the tall pan.

We shaped the top with a wet spatula and stuck more sunflower seeds to the top, bagged it and chucked it into the fridge with no bulk ferment at all since we were worried the long retard of 21 hours would likely over proof the dough anyway.  At the 11 hour mark, the dough looked fully proofed with the first cracks starting to form on the top.  Too bad we don’t bake bread at 10 pm around here, if the wife is at home, so it had to wait it out.

We preheated the new GE to 450 F with Mega Steam on the bottom rack once it hit temperature for another 215 minutes of getting the steam up to speed.  At the 21 hour mark it was way more cracked and possibly past its prime, so we sort of reshaped the top with a wet spatula, docked the top with a toothpick and hoped it wouldn’t collapse completely when it hit the heat.

We got lucky in that the bread didn’t collapse but it didn’t spring much either so I’m guessing it was fully proofed.  After 10 minutes we turned the oven down to 425 F and continued steaming for another 10 minutes.  Once the steam came out, we turned the oven down to 350 F convection and continued baking for another 80 minutes

We then took the loaf out of tin after 100 minutes total baking time when the loaf was exactly 195 F.  We baked it on the rack for an additional 40 minutes and took it out of the oven to cool on a rack when it hit 205 F. 140 minutes seems like a long time but this is big loaf of bread nearly a double miche at 4 pounds baked weight. Once cooled we wrapped it in plastic for the 24 hour wait before slicing.

It has promise crumb wise….. but it didn’t smell nearly as enticing or exotic as a loaf with aromatic seeds. Without the bread spices, the flavors of the sprouted and whole rye and wheat really stand out.  It was easy to slice in 1/4' sections with no crumbling at all.  Even with the fruits it isn't too sweet.  The crumb is moist and not as open as i would have thought it would be - bout normal for this kind of bread and all the add ins,  I don't think a bread could get moire healthy and hearty.- delicious too!.

Ribs and Salad don't go together well enough.

Now that is some windowpane!

We are getting pretty good at keeping baked bread out of the freezer by sticking to only baking one loaf a week.  When out future son-in-law came over for breakfast in Easter weekend he rolled away with the last of the frozen bread and a couple of homemade jams and some citrus to take back to Colorado.

So it was wide open of bread this week and we decided to make a white bread.  Well, technically, not white but as white as we get around here.  It was 75% white flour half LaFama AP and half KA bread flour with 25% home sprouted and milled 3 grain flour of wheat, spelt and rye.

Lucy also decided to toss in 125 g dry weight of sprouted wheat, spelt and rye as an and in during the first set of stretch and folds which upped the whole grains to 40% overall.  The levain ended up being a bit less than 15% pre-fermented flour and pretty much followed our usual methods.

Half the add in sprouts go in.

After sprouting the 3 grains and getting a15% extraction of hard bits once the drying and milling was done, we did a 3 stage, 4 hours each, levain build using the hard bits first and then the 85% extraction for part of the 2nd and 3rd stage flour build.  Instead of doing a 36 hour retard of the levain we cut it back to only 8 hours because we were out of bread…… at least at that moment – so the sour and crumb would have to suffer a bit.

The other half of the sprouts go in.

I had commented to Yippee, after she used the bran levain build on her last WW sprouted bread, that came put so well and made her so happy, that IO wished I could taste it.  Yippee was kind enough to make that happen.  She sent me a few slices of that wonderful bread to try out and it arrived 10 days after it was baked – it was frozen for part of that time but it oy took 2 days to actually get from there to here.

I can’t tell you how great her bread really is.   Even if a few days old and coming out the of freezer, it was the best WW bread I have ever tasted, the best looking and smelling too!  It isn’t unusual for Fresh Loafians to make some of the best bread of all kinds to be found anywhere but hers is exceptional and a cut above.  No one would have a problem making this the bread they would take to Deserted Isle if they could only take one -it’s that good.

On top of fixing my being out of bread, she sent a lovely gift along with the bread…..an Oriental style sandwich baking tin, matching the one she made the bread in and something I have always wanted but could never find.  She also is very good at slicing bread too.

I’ve never been able to slice so perfectly with the slices exactly the same and the right thickness – I thought a machine had done it.  Yippee is awful good at making people happy and those around her have to be blessed for sure.  Now I can only try and make bread in it as well as she does – fat chance!

First slice of the Easter Prime Rib.  Perfectly done and delicious. 

Once the first batch of sprouts were done we started the 2nd identical batch of sprouts to use for add ins.  We love the chew they add to any bread crumb.   Once the levain came out of the fridge, we stirred it down and set it on the windowsill to warm up while we autolyzed the dough flour with the dough water and the salt sprinkled on top.

Some of the prime rib left overs went into these Meat Pies.

It only took an hour for the levain to rise 25%, our cue to mix it into the dough.  We stirred in the salt first and then the levain went.  We did 60 slap and folds to get the levain mixed in and to start the gluten development.  It was followed by 2 more sets of 30 before the first of 3 sets of stretch and folds from the compass points – all of them on 20 minute intervals .  After a 15 minute rest, we did a pre-shape and the a final shape 10 minutes later.

Yippee's great Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread to the right.  She got enough dough in the pan and didn't over proof it either:-)

So….. even though the bread I was making was not big enough to fill the tin properly for a white bread and a couple hundred of grams light, I put it in there anyway after spraying it with PAM.  No way I wasn’t going to use it.  One thing to remember about these pans is that they are not water tight so you can’t really pour water in them and weigh it to see how much dough it will take to fill it.

You should have seen me.  Pan on scale with the dough under a mixing bowl on the counter right next to the scale.  Water starts going in and I don’t have enough to fill it so go get some more and kept porting away -  and then I notice the water is pouring all over the scale and counter and …..the dough!

Lucy headed straight outside through the doggie door fast as could be as I grabbed the towels and dumped the tin in the sink.  Funny as could be and the counter and floor got a good scrubbing too.  Lean something new about bread every time I bake it seems.

We let the panned dough sit for 20 minutes on the counter, bagged in a trash can liner, before tucking it into the fridge for an 18 hour retard.  Some dough rises a lot for the first 10 hours as it cools and some rises not much at all but this one kept rising after the 10 hour mark.  I pinched one bubble on the loaf at the 10 hour mark and there was one 3 times bigger at the 18 hour mark – talk about windowpane.

It had risen to the rim in the middle but I could feel other bubbles under the top so I went ahead and docked it with a toothpick.  It didn’t collapse but I could tell it was a bit over 100% proofed instead of the 90% I wanted – one of the things that can happen when doing a shaped proof.

The slice is so tall you can cut it in half and make a fine roast beef sandwich with some tomato, half an avocado,a salad with some Swiss cheese, half an orange, a pickle, a few strawberries and some green olives. 

As the oven pre-heated to 500 F the dough was warming a bit on the counter.  As soon as the oven hit temperature I put in a half dose of Mega Steam, waited 15 minutes and then slashed the top and put the tin on the rack between the 2 stones for 18 minutes of steam at 450 F.

Yippee's bread, toasted with butter, jam with Swiss cheese melted on top made an excellent platform for today's breakfast of bacon, sausage and egg.  Yummy

Once the steam came out we turned the oven down to 425 F convection and continued baking for 10 minutes before covering the top with foil as it was browning too quickly.  After it tested 209 F 35 minutes later, we un-molded the bread and put it on the rack to continue to bake to dry out the crust that had been touching the tin.  It only sprang an inch at best – but it didn’t collapse either.

We will have to wait and see how the crumb came out.  The crumb was open very soft and moist.  I tried my best to slice it like Yippee did only a bit thinner - perhaps early and still a bit warm.  Very tasty and I love the chew of the Sproutes. FOr some reason this bread came ou tasting sweet .  We will have to see if it sours up by tomorrow.

Thanks Yippee - you are an inspiration! 

Salads go with anything.

The garden had volunteer daisies and Red Romaine lettuce growing side by side.

Lucy has been busy working on here new billion-dollar invention of bio-nanobots that you put into the flour after milling that would go to work as soon as you added water to mix for an autolyze and then tell you when to add the salt and leaven.  That sounded pretty good since I have forgotten to the salt before but she wasn’t done. 

 Then they would knead and bulk ferment the dough, pre-shape and shape it into what ever shape you specified so you could place it in the form and bag it for retard and then tell you when it is properly proofed to get it out of the fridge to unmold.

The bio-nanobots would talk to your oven to get it properly preheated for you to bake, slash the bread for you and then tell you when the bread was perfectly done.   I told Lucy that these new bio-nanobots don’t leave much in the bread making process for us poor humans to do in the future and I’m not sure we would like that very much.

Lucy said that she was just fixing the bread stuff humans, especially me,  do poorly.  All she had to do to prove her point was look at my bread blog which turned out to be the inspiration for her latest invention.  I thought that was a low blow even for a her and any Bread Baking Apprentice 2nd Class for that matter.  Her response was that the truth doesn’t change just because fools like me don’t agree with it.

It quickly went downhill from there.  I asked her if she knew that people used to eat dogs for Easter or if she knew that I was especially fond of dogs after that late night evening in a fine Korean restaurant in LA 25 years ago where Canine was King.  Well, you get the drift.  So she came up with this ridiculously complicated recipe for this week’s bake ……so….. I just ignored one whole days’ worth of it to get down to 4 days instead of 5 – after I forgot to start the recipe on time on Monday by starting the sprouts!

This one started with 9 grain sprouts for 50% of the flour with the other 50% KA bread flour.  Once the sprouts were dried, milled and sifted to get pout the 17% hard bit extraction we came up with 42 grams of them.  These were fed to the 3 stage levain build for the first 2 feedings with the high extraction sprouted flour making up of part of the 3rd levain build.

Normally we would retard the levain for 36 hours but this is where the 24 hour reduction came into the equation.  We dropped 24 hours of it and settled for a 12 hour retard.  Lucy also specified a weird Tang Zhong of a bottle of Full Sail Amber Ale and 100 g of KA bread flour.  Once it hit 158 F we took it off the heat to cool down

The 2 hour autolyze was all of the Tang Zhong, the rest of the bread flour and the remaining portion of the high extraction 9 grain flour with the salt sprinkled on top.  Once the autolyze was mixed we started on the 2 hour baked seed scald.

First we toasted the seeds and then ground them in the coffee mill into flour. Then we added twice their weight in water (160 g) and 40 g of the of the autolyse dough mix, with the red malt and white malts and baked this mass in the mini oven for two hours stirring every 30 minutes.

Finally got around to making that French classic, or Italian, Lettuce Soup that Reynard reminded me of not long ago,  This one had smoked sausage and grilled chicken in it too,

The we added the 15 g of extra water to the autolyze to pinch in the salt before doing the first set of 60 slap and folds to mix in the salt and get the gluten development going.  We then did 2 more sets of 20 slap and folds before adding in the baked seed, autolyse and malt scald on the first of 3 sets of stretch and folds from the compass points

Poblano and sweet corn kernel, Witch Yeast and YW corn bread takes a lot longer to make than the BP kind:-).

All of the dough manipulations were done on 20 minute increments.  We let the dough rest for 30 minutes before pre-shaping and shaping into a squat oval and placing it into a rice floured basket and bagged for a an 19 hour shaped retard in the fridge.

When we took the dough out the next morning we got the New BOB (Big Old Betsy) preheated to 500 F with the combo cooker inside.  We un-molded the dough onto parchment on a peel, slashed it twice and loaded it into the CC.

After 20 minutes of steam at 425 F we baked it for 5 minutes at 425 F convection with the lid off before taking it off the CC cast iron bottom to let it finish on the stone for another 30 minutes of baking till it hit 208 F – then temperature we like for a 50% whole grain bread.

Grilled chicken and cheese sandwich to go with a very tasty carrot, butternut squash and Swiss chard soup for lunch today.  

It spread a bit more than it bloomed and sprang but it did eventually brown and crisp up.  We will have to see how the crumb came out after it cools. It sure smelled good coming out of the oven.  Lucy nearly pulled out all of her bag of tricks to get this one to taste just right.  We shall see.   Well I'm kind of stunned that the bread isn't more open but It isn't totally dense either.  What saves it is the taste - It is delicious.  Plain, toasted with butter......the seeds really come through, very complex, hearty and earth earthy  ........  I've eaten a quarter of it just trying to figure out why it isn't as open as it looked like it would be.  I won't mind eating it with my eyes closed and dreaming about what should have bene:-).   Maybe I should ave baked at 475 to begin with instead of 425 F?  Any ideas?  .

Don't forget that salad 

We haven’t made any pizza for a while around her for some reason.  It isn’t like we don’t like pizza but it is pretty messy when it comes right down to it – at least it is when Lucy and I make it at any rate!  Flour, semolina, corn meal everywhere, frying the Sausage, chopping all the toppings…..Yep I’m guilty and Lucy looks guilty.

This pizza was different than our normal in may ways.  First the dough was a plain KA bread flour, water, salt and instant yeast made as a polish the night before.  No rosemary, garlic and sun dried tomato in the dough either.

It rose well in the fridge after 48 hours and when gently deflated made 2 pizza crusts that rose 3 hours on the counter in the bowl before forming.

Instead of retarding the dough for 12 hours we retarded it for 48 hours.  Instead of coating the formed pes in Mojo de Ajo before the sauce goes on ( a mistake in hindsight), we just sprinkled some dried garlic on it and no sauce either.  We put a thin layer of Monterrey jack cheese down first and no mozzarella to be found anywhere either.

The highly secret green crocodile Teflon coated, mini pizza roller.  Once you stretch out the dough and make the rim, this baby works great to get the middle paper thin without messing with the rim  but watch tyour fingers:-).

Instead of sauce we put some thin slices of salted and peppered of Roma tomato on top of the cheese.  No caramelized onions this time - just sliced red and green ones.  The normal sliced red and Poblano peppers, cremini and button mushrooms, thin pepperoni, grilled chicken and hot Italian sausage were still there.

The grated cheese on top were a bit different too.  Instead of Parmesan and Romano, we had a salty, sharp, hard, grating, goats milk cheese from Greece.   For the finishing touch after baking instead of just fresh Thai basil and arugula we had Thai Basil and dandelion instead.

The polish was 100 g of 100% hydration KA bread flour and water with a pinch of yeast that was left on the counter for 8 hours before mixing in 300 more g of KA bread flour and 200 g of water with 8 g of salt.  After developing the gluten with slap and folds we let the dough rest for an hour, folded it and then placed it in the fridge in a plastic covered, oiled bowl for 2 days.

This dough was not as extensible as an AP one, out favorite, but it also too manhandling better and was stronger so it didn’t tear either.  I liked it for stretching.  My wife didn’t like the taste of this dough and thought it was chewy. She is always right of course.  Compared to our favorite, flavored dough, this one is pretty boring and it is chewier than our usual AP dough and it didn’t get as crisp too – but I think that was due to the new oven and not getting the stone hot enough long enough first.

Without our usual zippy, zesty sauce, this pizza wasn’t as ‘hot’ or spicy.  I fixed mine with some red chili flakes on top – no problem.  I liked the pizza a lot and it was very good the next day when toasted for 5 minutes in the toaster mini oven.  Not having to cook so much stuff and not making a sauce sure makes the process much easier and time consuming…… but not that much cleaner!

And a different kind of pie - a strawberry, blueberry, banana and ginger galette.  Yum!

We have been making 50% whole grain, half sprouted bread the past couple of weeks and Lucy was about to have a conniption fit since we are out of the rye bread we like so much.  The whole grains were 70% rye and the rest wheat with half of them being sprouted.

This was also the last week of the multiple starters with half being potato starters.  We combined them all into one multicultural rye starter with the exception of the Witch Yeast which has to have a place all its own.  I asked Lucy why Witch Yeast gets a special place and she said that she doesn’t want to upset the Witches Union and possibly be turned into a frog or even worse Bernie Sanders.

Rather than bake this pumpernickel style, low and slow, we compromised on what we call Juergen’s High Temperature Rye, which still took 84 minutes to get to 205 F on the inside.  You preheat to 500 F add the Mega Steam and turn it down to 450 F for 11 minutes then 425 F for another 11 minutes.  Then the steam comes out and you turn the oven down to 350 F with fan for 22 minutes and then down to 325 F for the final 40 minutes.

Normally we would retard the 3 stage bran levain for 36 hours but this time we only retarded for 12 hours.  We would also do 3 sets of slap and folds and 3 sets of stretch and folds but this dough, with so much rye at over 100% hydration, would have been a real mess with all the slapping.  So we did 6 sets of stretch and folds, 30 minutes apart incorporating the seeds, prunes and nuts during the 4th set.

We did a 2.5 hour 150 F baked scald using some of the dough flour and dough water; 25 g of high extraction wheat, 50 g of high extraction rye, the BMS, molasses, the red and white malts with 90 g of water.  We stirred the scald every 30 minutes.

The autolyse was 1.5 hours long as the levain warmed up on the counter and consisted of the remaining dough flour, chocolate stout and water with the pink Himalayan sea salt sprinkled on top.  Once the levain and the scald it the mix we started the folding with a dough scraper and a few fingers of the other hand.   It didn’t really come together until the add ins were incorporated.

 We thought about putting this in a rice floured basket seam side down and baking it seam side up like we normally would do for a bread like this but changed at the last minute to our long narrower pan instead to get a cross section somewhere between a cocktail loaf and a regular wide sandwich loaf.  This is big lump of dough for one pan coming in at over 4.2 pounds – as heavy as a double minche!

Butternut squash, carrot and sweet potato soup. Yum!

We let the dough proof on the counter for 1 hour and then retarded it for 3 hours when life got in the way and we needed to get dinner on the table.  Just goes to show you that the fridge is your friend.  Once the tin came out of the fridge we got the new GE oven going for the preheat.

 When it beeped we put a double load of lava rocks in a the MagnaWare Turkey Roaster with water 2” high and let it get to Mega Steaming for 15 minutes before we loaded the tin.  We docked the loaf with a toothpick right before loading.  The tin was long enough to span the width of the roaster so we just put it on top of the roaster lip so the steam was directly below the tin – worked great.

When finished to 205 F, we let the loaf cool to 86 F on the surface before wrapping it in plastic to let the remaining moisture redistribute and soften the crust which came out pretty hard from the heat.  We will let it sit for 24 hours before slicing.  It smelled terrific when baking……so far so good.

This is the reason why rye bread is the king of all bread!  If you want a complex hearty, healthy, great tasting bread then this is the one for you.  I have a new favorite among many....It may be a more difficult one with the scald, bran levain, the add ins and the spruting but that is what makes this bread the king.

Lucy says yes .....you can have a salad with the Grilled Miso Salmon and even the smothered chorizo, breakfast burritos.

The first version had King Arthur and Winco Hi Gluten flours, 50/50, for the half of the flour that wasn’t whole and sprouted whole grain flour.  That bread turned out very well, open, soft, moist crumb, good spring and bloom with a well browned, thin chewy crust at a bit under 80% hydration.  The best part is that the 6 whole and sprouted grains really pumped up the flavor.

Normally Lucy and I don’t make bread with expensive bread and hi gluten flour and have always made bread with inexpensive AP flour with our favorite being LaFama at 11.2% protein.  This is higher than store bought Pillsbury, Gold Medal or even store brand AP at 10% protein.  Normally we don’t put VWG in the mix finding that LaFama performs perfectly well without the added gluten but, you never know what you are missing until you try something new.

Se we are doing a test to see if AP with added vital wheat gluten, to equal the protein of the bread and high gluten flour, makes as good a bread as the more expensive version.  Last week’s bake came in at about $1.50 and this week’s loaf came in at a buck - about 33% less – quite a savings but last week’s bread was one of our all time favorites too – a truly outstanding bread.

Adding VWG to AP can’t really match expensive higher gluten flours even if the protein levels are the same.  What makes these flours expensive is the red spring wheat that contain the most of the two proteins that form gluten in the presence of water.  My VWG is made from less expensive and much more plentiful red winter wheat that contains less of these two gluten forming proteins.  So no matter what the taste will be different because there is different base flour in the mix.

This week's stir fry, this time over home made rice noodles.

In this case, the amount of VWG necessary to get the LaFama AP roughly to the same amount of protein and the higher gluten flours we added 13 g of VWG assuming the VWG was 60% gluten.  Since it was homemade, we don’t know for sure how much gluten was in there but the average for commercial VWG is 55 to 65% so we used 60% and we needed 8 g of protein total and 60% of 13 is 8 g.

Right off the bat the first thing we noticed was that this week’s mix was slacker than last week’s when we did the slap and folds and stretch and folds.  This would make one think that there just wasn’t the same out of gluten forming protein in the mix even though we tried to compensate with VWG.  What it really means is that the LaFama just can’t take up as much water as the KA bread and Winco high gluten.

This week’s dough did feel just like it normally does at near 80% hydration and 50% while grains with half of it being sprouted which we make often enough to know.  The dough also spread more when it was unmolded and slashed.   The 3rd difference is that this was baked in a new GE Profile Electric oven.   The good news is that this bread bloomed, sprang and browned just like always and when I checked the temperature at the end of 33 minutes of total baking under steam and convection – the internal temperature came out at exactly the same as last week’s bake – 208 F

We will have to wait on the crumb shot.  Since last week’s bake didn’t spread when unmolded and slashed and it sprang better as a result, I would expect this week’s crumb to not be as open as the previous bake’s crumb which was exceptional for a bread of this type.  So far the nod goes to the non VWG version 1.  The crumb cam out almost identical to the previouus bake and the it is just as delicious.  I think If I would have adjusted the hydration by adding some more flour to this one it wouldn't have spread as much and would have been just as lofty.

The new Mega Steam is 2 pans, half full of water with lava rocks.  We did a test and Sylvia's steaming towels only put out half the steam of the lava rocks.  Lucy says it works best when you have two colors of lava rocks too.

So pick your poison and remember to keep the hydration a bit less if using AP and VWG instead of the high gluten, higher protein flour options.  Either method will make a fine bread.  One will save you time and be less of a hassle while the other will save you some bucks.

If you want to know the method and recipe for this bread check out last week’s post here

Sprouted 6 Grain 6 Starter Sprouted Half Whole Grain Bread

Lucy say's not to forget that salad.

Here we ae in the primary season in AZ and they have mailed out the early ballots to those who have signed up.  I was shocked to find that every candidate who was ever in the race on the Democrat and Republican side is still on the ballot ……even though many have dropped put.  But, there was one addition that no one knew was even running – the CEO of Apple Inc. – Tim Cook.  Who knew!  I’m guessing in he gets elected, Apple won’t be cracking open their phones any time soon.

We have been making a lot of multiple starter breads lately by using multiple whole and sprouted grains with plenty of seeds and nuts.  Usually we use LaFama AP flour for the white portion of these breads, if there is any in the mix, finding it to be perfectly fine for making bread with its 11.2% protein.

High gluten and bread flour generally have the same protein levels of 12-14% but the flour is milled from different types of flour.  While not higher in protein, high gluten flour has more of the proteins; glutenin and gliadin, that bind into gluten strands with water.

The wheat that has the most of these two proteins is Dark (Red) Spring Hard Wheat grown in the Northern climes, with White Spring Hard Wheat coming in a close 2nd, are used to make high gluten flour - mainly for bagels and pizzas.  Bread flour is usually a combination of these 2 Spring Hard Wheats and Red or White Hard Winter Wheat.

Both Bread and High Gluten flours cost 2-3 times more than the 30 cents a pound I pay for LaFama AP.  Many folks, including myself have used VWG as a cheap way to up the protein of AP flour into Bread and High Gluten range for a few pennies a pound.  This way is tough to beat economically.

The question is, do you get the same results using AP and VWG as using the much more expensive Bread or High Gluten flour for the white portion of bread mixes.  Since my bread usually contain 50% whole multi-grains with half of them being sprouted, this is the mix that I am going to use to see if it makes sense to spend more to get more and if that more is worth the extra expense.

We are also using Lucy’s SOP for making bread of late.  Multiple starters with half being SD.  Using the bran form the sprouted and whole grain flour to feed the levain first followed by the high extraction of whole grain  Using a 3 stage build over 12 hours with a 36 hour retard if the built levain.

Warming up the levain by stirring it down and then letting it rise 25 % before incorporating it into the autolyse of dough flour and water with the salt sprinkled on top.  Once the levain hits the autolyze we do 3 sets of 30 slap and folds and 3 sets of compass point stretch and folds all on 30 minute intervals.

Once the gluten development was finished, we let the dough rest for 30 minutes before pre-shaping and final shaping into a squat oval to fit the basket shape.  Since it is not a boule or a batard, Lucy calls this a batoule.  The dough was placed in to the rive floured basket, bagged and tossed into the cold fridge for 18 hours of shaped retard.

We love Panang Seafood Curry and Smoked  Dark Meat Chicken

The rested batoole came out of the fridge looking about 80% proofed.  I thought about starting up Big Old Betsy for the preheat to 500 F immediately but decided to wait 45 minutes before doing so.  The dough was ve y cold not much of anything g was happening on the proof side at this point.

Can't go wrong with a huge tray of Lemon Curd Bars

Once Betsy beeped saying she was at the set temperature. We loaded in the Mega Steam and set the timer for 15 minutes to let the stones catch up and get the steam really billowing before un-molding the batoule to parchment on a peel, slashing it quickly down the middle and sliding it into the oven for 18 minutes of steam bath at 450 F.

It has been at least 20 years since i last had my Mom;s Scalloped Potatoes that Granny used to make too.

Once the Mega Steam came out of the oven we turned the oven down to 425 F convection for 22 minutes of dry heat with the desert wind blowing. It really sprang and bloomed well under steam and browned up nicely without it.

We will have to see how the crumb came out but it looks promising using the Hi Gluten and Bread flour mix the 50% white flour.

The fix is in.  This bread is everything I want in a half whole multi- grain bread where half the whole grains are sprouted.  The flavor is complex, earthy and delicious.  The crust came out crispy but went soft as it cooled.  The crust was thin and became chewy chewy.  I think using 425 F, instead of 450 F when the steam came out to finish baking, was the difference.  The crumb was very open soft and moist for a bread with 50% whole grains.  We really love this bread.  We have made a few of these breads that were similar but none ever came out this good in every category.   This is the bread we want to take on a deserted Island if we could only choose one.  Can't wait to see what the VWG version does.

Lucy reminds us to always have a salad or two with all that other, less healthy, stuff we eat!