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Kuret's blog

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Kuret

Seeing as rye breads are all over this place nowdays I decided to share some loaves I have baked the last weeks. First up is the 80% rye with soaker from Bread. This bread is really great! I made two of these 850g breads and they lasted a week each, with some saved in the freezer for the next time I make the Horst bandel black pumpernickel.

This is how one of the loaves looked when ready for cutting. A little overfoured I have to admit..

          

I am really fond of the cracks that appear when you make properly proofed rye breads. When I cut the loaves open I found a much more open crumb than what I am used to when handling this kind of high percentage rye, to me the crumb looks more like a 60% rye than an 80%. This combined with a robust rye flavor made for great open face sandwiches with cream cheese and chives. Who whould say no to that?

           80% rye crumb

I also baked some "american pumpernickel", I do not really know what classifies a bread as pumpernickel though. This loaf is a 40%rye made with finely ground rye flour with some ground up caraway and fennel added, the color is homemade caramel coloring. The tomato is a tomato..

          

          

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Kuret

It is my girlfriends birthday today so I decided to make her a special breakfast! I had eyeballed the butter scones from Advanced Bread and Pastries before but seeing as how they are so rich I didn't want to make them save for a special occasion. Here in sweden a scone is more akin to Soda Bread than the sweetish style scones you get in Britain och America.

I managed to make them up the day before without my girlfriend noticing and refrigerate them overnight so that I could bake them for here first thing in the morning. I think they turned out pretty good, and my girlfriend did like them so I'm set!

Butter scones

 

I have also finally taken the plunge and aquired a Pullman pan for myself, maybe a 1.5kg loaf of tasty toast bread is too much for a two person family but maybe a 2.5kg loaf of Vollkornbrot might not be enoguh? hmm.. might have to share any attempts at Vollkornbrot with friends or there will be leftovers for ever! Here the pullman pan Is shown beside my regular breadpan.

and here is how a loaf of sourdough sandwich bread turned out, tasty! This is the same bread I have blogged about earlier, with a formula developed by me. Unfortunately the picture is insanely yellow, but that is due to poor lighting when I took the picture.

This is a secret too, but I have also made two mini cheesecakes for tonights dinner wich I am making for my girlfriend, hope that they are tasty..

 

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Kuret

There is not that much talk here about enriched sourdough breads so I thought I should try a writeup on a loaf od bread that I have been baking for the last 6 or 8 months every couple of weeks. The loaf is a kind of "Bran Sandwich" bread, a soft whiteish bread all leavend with sourdough starter. I have been making this mostly for my grandma who likes to eat hommemade bread but is not that big a fan of ryes and other "heavier" breads, she also is very fond of toasting and I feel that this bread is great for toasting!

This bread cointains a preferment with milk wich I know some people might have som disagreement with . However you can leave the milk out and then use dry milk in the final dough if you remember that milk is about 85% water thus all fluids must be lowered 15% and that amount should be replaced with dry milk.

Bran Toast 1 loaf

Step One, Making the preferment:

Combine:

  • 30g starter (100% hydration)
  • 30g coarse rye
  • 10g wheat bran
  • 60g AP flour
  • 100g milk.

This is what it looks like before mixing:

before mixing

 

I let this mixture sit out for about 10-12 hours, until you see the signs of your culture beeing mature for leavening. The aroma of this preferment is very interesting, sweet and sometimes a bit like cheese.

When mature:

Mature

 

Dough:

  • All of the preferment
  • 275g AP flour
  • 170g milk
  • 30g hard fat (butter, lard, shortening..)
  • 8-9g salt
  • 15g sugar

before first ferment

I leave the butter out of the mix until I have gotten some gluten developed and then work it in, the percentage is roughly 7.5% so it isn´t necessary but I do so anyways. The dough should be easy to develop due to the acids in the preferment.

I let dough ferment for 2.5 hours, wich I think is sufficent as the prefermented flour amount is 29% and this makes for a short ferment and proof.

After fermentation shape the dough into desired shape, loaf pan or rolls or even free form. My pan measures 4 1/4" X 11" X 2.5".

ready for proofing

Then proof for another 2.5 hours. Before baking do a couple of snips with a pair of scissors down the middle of the loaf as seen here: http://www.broodaandebasis.nl/content_images/bakkeninbeeld/30.jpg

The bread is placed in a 400F oven and baked with steam until done, 40-45 minutes roughly. This is how my loaf came out, a little bit under proofed you can see from the overly enthusiatic oven spring but all in all a fine piece of bread!

Baked

 

I hope that someone will bake this, enjoy and all in all be as happy with this bread as I am. If there is any desire for it I can post pictures of the crumb but seeing as this is a sandwich loaf it should be fairly close textured without beeing dense. You can find larger versions of the pictures at this adress: http://s298.photobucket.com/albums/mm260/Kuremyr/

 

 

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Kuret

This is what I pulled out of my oven today, a good 2kg of dough worth. First a small batch of light rye rolls made somewhat according to the instructions for making sourdough italian bread that was posted here earlier by Dmsnyder i think. The formula does only call for white flour but as I live in sweden I find that breads should contain at least a small portion of rye!

I made the dough with 20% rye flour wich gives you a dough that handles exactly like a wheat dough but with greater taste and also a somewhat drier feel, due to the high ash content of my whole grain rye flour, I also topped them with a mixture of wheat bran and rolled oats so they resemble the kind of "fake healthy" bread you can buy in stores and bakeries here in sweden.

The other breads were two sunflower ryes as per BBA, made with 30%rye starter and really coarse rye meal for the rye content in the dough. Lightly toasted sunflower seeds make for a lovely taste, can´t wait to open these babies! I have started tt get a bit better at shaping since I studied Marks videos, that technique is far superior to my prevoius attempts. Now I only have to make room for the loaves in my freezer! '

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Kuret

Here is some of my recent baking, two of the batches are from the SFBI book and both are really good like alla formulas from that book. The first batch pictured is the whole grain bread with sesame- ,sunflower- and flaxsseds and also some oats. This bread is a really tasty hearthy whole grain bread wich I think should be made a bit larger than the ones pictured, they are about 2-2½" across and weights 450g each as suggested in the book. I do however think that a 2# loaf of this bread baked for a bit longer in the oven whould be perfect for making hearthy sandwiches. The crumb is rather dense as you whoud suspect with this kind of seeded whole grain bread but over all pleasurabe to eat.

The other formula I tried was the one for carrot rolls, I decided to top most of them with cornmeal doing it the same way as floyds kaiser rolls ie. proofing them seam side down on cornmeal and then inverting them. Some of them I also topped with anise and caraway seeds, great flavor! The dough was very slack and contained an good amount of seeds/grains, the formula instructs you to use 10 grain cereal mix but I used bulgur. The high ratio of seeds makes for a very slack dough but after good mixing and folding it turns out a great feeling dough.

The cornmeal looks more yellow in person but lack of natural lighting made me use the flash, he crumb is also yellow and lovely!

Last weekend I made this, a swedish take on Erics Rye with anise, fennel and caraway flavoring, great recipe that is going to become standard repertoire, maybe.. after ALL other formulas I have are tested.

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Kuret

This weekend I decided to make some Swedish style breads reminded of a conversation Ive had in an arlier thread about the ultimate book on baking ryes. So instead of rushing out to get the "holy grail" of rye books I decided to make some from a Swedish baking book that I own.

The rye bread Is actually one of the best ryes I have ever made although the method seemed strange to me. First of you make a sourdough preferment with an hydration of roughly 60-65% wich is really dry for a whole rye dough. This is left to ferment for at least 12 hours after wich the final dough is made with a small kicker of commercial yeast, the recipe calls for fresh yeast wich is availble all over Sweden so that is what I used. The dough then ferments 60 minutes and is punched down once during fermentation after wich it is shaped and left to ferment for 45-60 minutes more before going into the oven for 50 minutes. Really great bread, can´t stress that enough!

The barley flatbread was a big faliure, It was far too salty and that resulted in to slow fermentation and though salty crumb. I then re read the recipe and realised that there must be a mistake, the authour specifies 2.3% syrup and 3.3% salt (roughly) which I think is a mix up the salt seems much more resonable at that level. Will probably try them again some day as I love the taste of them with some hot bean stew.

EDIT: Ho hum! Here is a pic! The loaf on the right has been man handled a and that is the reason for the flour being a bit splotched over the top of the loaf but the other is as beautiful as a newborn baby, whitch it is in some regard...

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Kuret

Yesterday i decided to make two batches of bread, one jewish rye style bread and also the standard SFBI WW sourdough. When preparing the rye bread I made a big mistake and used a formula that I had written down wich was way off the original formula. This one contained 75% prefermented flour, giving me a dough with absolutley no structure. However I managed to have it hold together using heavy flouring and S&F manouvres, the end result however was very flat but tasty rye bread.

Ugly rey bread

The colors are way off due to a bad camera, in reality the bread is light brown in the slashes and wery floury white all over.

I also made two loaves of WW bread from the SFBI advanced bread and pastries book, I first made 1000g of dough and then divided into two pieces and kneaded in some cut up figs in one of them. I let these two small doughs ferment overnight in my fridge. As I love the taste of sesame seeds I decided to roll the fig loaf in them wich gave it a very appealing look.



The colors on this one is off too, but I hope you get a decent idea of how the bread might look in person.

The formula for the WW bread is as follows:

Starter: 67g sourdough (50% H) + 42g water + 70g AP flour + 10g WW flour + 5g rye flour Let this ferment until you feel its ready, dependinggreaty on the speed of your culture.

Final dough: Starter + 183g bread flour + 275g WW flour + 350g water + 12g salt + 110g dried figs cut into small pieces (roughly 6 figs)

1 hour before preparing the final dough; cut the figs into small pieces about the size of raisins and put them in water to soak. When making the final dough pour off the water from the figs and use this as water in the dough if you want to increase the fig flavour. Mix the dough without the figs until its almost done. Now you have a choice of either incorporating the figs using your machine or incorporating them using a folding type method. I prefer folding but this may led to unevenly distributed figs inside the bread.

After incorporating the figs you should have a firm dough wich easily ruptures if the figs get too close to the surface, don´t worry though this can be remedied later. Let the dough ferment for ½h and then put in you refrigerator. I left it there for 11h, and also an additional ½h in room temperature prior to shaping.

Preheat your oven to 480f, divide your dough into 550 g pieces and preshape trying not to break the skin of the dough with any fig pieces surfacing. When shaping your dough try not to use to much flour as this will result in difficulties when you try to coat the bread in sesame seeds, after shaping roll the loaves in sesame seeds and then proof in brotforms or similar "mock up" (bread pan lined with cloth) for 45minutes. The sesame seeds helps the skin of the dough as they are preventing sticking, also due to how I incorporate the figs there is usually dough skin underneath the figs too so therefore the structure does not get too disturbed by breakage as long as it does not end up in sticktion.

Bake the bread at 480 for 10 minutes steaming rigorously at the beginning of the bake, then lower temp to 440f for five minutes and then 400 until the loaves are done, they will brown quite a lot due to the sugars from the fig-water that is the reason for the lower temperature. After the bread is done leave it in the oven for 10 more minutes with the door open and the heating turned off.

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Kuret

As the bread bin seemed to empty this weekend I decided to make two loaves of sourdough, having eaten 100% rye and 60%WW bread for a couple of weeks I felt I wanted something a bit different, although last weekend I made a absolutley lovely toasted oat and honey bread. This weeks baking became a 35% WW 5% toasted oat dlour and the rest bread flour. I bulk fermented and also retarded the shaped loaves in my refrigerator until I had tome to bake them. The result was a lovely small loaf and a somewhat bigger boule with those small blisters that you get from refrigerator proofing. The main taste is the sourness of the starter and I don´t detect any WW or Oat flavor, but seeing as i regularly bake WW I suppose my taste buds want more. Sorry to not have any pics of the whole loaf but my boules often get cut up into either four or two pieces after cooling overnight, 2 persons cant eat it all before its stale so half of the boule went into the freezer.

 Sourdough boule with 5% toasted oats

Sourdough boule: Sourdough boule with 5% toasted oats

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