man_who_eats_bread's blog

It's been a while since I've been here, but not since I've made bread. I've got a pumpernickel on the counter, a sourdough slow fermenting in the fridge, and a soaker/biga combo for a whole wheat sesame sandwich loaf I'll make tomorrow. With nothing to do I'm considering making a partial whole wheat hokkaido milk roll...

In any case, I'm realizing that I'm just not the sort of person to faithfully keep a baking log. But perhaps I can give an impressionistic account of the current state of my bread baking journey.

My last post concluded "getting comfortable with commercial yeast and ultimately returning to sourdough." Since then I've been going through a lot of commercial yeast!

My favorite loaf has to be Peter Reinhart's "oat broom" bread which I make with 4 oz. of roasted sesame seeds mixed in. I was making some great loaves in my pullman pan, but the last couple haven't been as lofty. I had been using a bag of Robin Hood whole wheat I picked up in Canada over the holidays, but now I'm back on King Arthur. There may be something to this Canadian flour conspiracy theory.

I've also been dipping my toes in tangzhong. Stella Park's bagel recipe once, and a few different hokkaido milk bread recipes. I've made this one a couple times, but I've got to scale down the recipe because it makes too much dough for me. That's what brings me here today... I'm thinking of branching out to whole wheat hokkaido milk roll (partly to use up this flour, partly because I've got nothing to do right now). But I'll leave that to another time. I've got too much going on today. 

Besides Hokkaido, there's been plenty of enriched white breads that often end up slathered with chocolate goo. The whole wheat hokkaido would let me have my cake and not feel guilty too. 

I haven't been doing as much sourdough... Louis's health hasn't been great, but inactivity hasn't helped any. So I'm working on that. Probably I just have to stop associating sourdough with "artisinal" boules and just start making levain sourdough so I can have a healthy throughput of flour running through him.

In any event, that's what I've been up to lately. 

I've officially retired Louis I (i.e. unceremoniously dumped him into the trash). He was smelling like a prison distillery by the end. Fortunately, one of his offspring (Louis IV) has taken over as my go-to wheat starter.

Since getting home from the holidays I've been busily baking bagels, brioche, and boules. Also pizza. 

Most recently out of the oven was the Pain Au Levain with mixed sourdough starters from Bread by Jeffry Hamelman. This one took a stiff rye starter and a wet wheat starter, for an overall mix of 84% bread flour, 8% whole wheat, and 8% rye, at 68% hydration (1.8% salt). 

Before that (by a couple hours) was the Serious Eats pan pizza.

Thursday was bagels following the recipe in Bread Baker's Apprentice with some vital wheat gluten added. Very good!

Last weekend was a Pain de Campagne from FWSY, and the Overnight Brown from FWSY.

And I started the new year with a batch of brioche (recipe from Bread Baker's Apprentice) that was turned into cinnamon buns and doughnuts.

Overall the last couple weeks could be summarized as "getting comfortable with commercial yeast and ultimately returning to sourdough." 

Earlier this week (I'm 80% sure it was Tuesday), for some reason, I mixed up two full size (~1.5kg) batches of dough. The FWSY country brown, and the Tartine brioche. Last night I started a Westphalian pumpernickel from The Rye Baker.

The brown:

I baked the brown into boules last night (one for the week and one for the freezer). I made the mistake of starting the dough immediately after feeding my starter. Following FWSY method I mixed the white and brown flour with water, then smacked my forehead. I put that dough in the fridge to slow down and added starter a few hours later. The dough had really congealed nicely! After giving that an hour on the counter it went back in the fridge and just came out the next afternoon. 

The resulting dough seemed extra sticky 

The brioche:

I don't know why I made 2 kilos of brioche... I've still got half the dough sitting in the fridge. So far I've made cinnamon buns, chocolate babka, and (chocolate filled) donuts. For the babka filling I used a recipe from the NY Times. It's basically a fancy ganache. 

The donuts are really why I wanted to make this dough. They came out tasty, but under cooked. To make the 3 donuts I made yesterday, I portioned out the dough (I can't remember the size, but it was a touch too big.) into 6 pieces, shaped each (more or less) into a ~4" disk, then sandwiched a spoon full of cold (solid) babka filling between each pair. They rose for something like an hour, then I fried them at 350 for a minute on each side. The dough didn't cook all the way through, and the outside was dark brown, so I definitely made them too big!

I was thinking I'd use the rest to make a couple loaves of bread, but then I remembered that one of my loaf pans is in the dishwasher and the other is in the oven making pumpernickel... which means I won't be able to do anything with the oven till tomorrow!

The pumpernickel:

This one is currently in the oven. And boy is it dense! The hydration is about 66% and it's unleavened. Last night I did "the scald" which involved combining equal parts of pumpernickel meal (a coarse rye meal) and boiling water. Cover with foil and leave out overnight. It was supposed to stay out for 16-18 hours, but I made the mistake of starting too early in the day. So I had a 22-ish hour soak. Then it went into the mixer with a bit of extra rye and some salt. The recipe said to use the paddle attachment, but the dough was so dense I switched to the dough hook half way. And even then I had to keep pushing the dough back towards the hook. 

In to a cold oven set to 300 for 40 minutes, then temp lowered to 220 for 24 hours! 

Starter update:

Louis has still been smelling extra pungent so I moved him into a clean mason jar so I could clean his usual yogurt tub. He's in the fridge now, but seems to smell a lot better! I might have to start incorporating regular container moves for starters. That said, Louis II (the all rye starter) still seems okay. Still, I'll move him into a new container soon.

I took the Tartine Country Rye recipe and added whole wheat.

Ingredients:

• 300g bread flour
• 115g whole wheat
• 85g rye flour
• 400g water
• 100g mature levain 
• 10g salt

After combining (yesterday afternoon) and a few turns in the bucket, that dough sat in the fridge overnight. This morning I went to shape it and had a hard time working with it. Just that little bit of Rye really made it sticky. But the good news is that my starter did just fine!

It was tough to get it to hold it's shape, but the dough seemed fully proofed, so I did what I could. I scored an X, but as you can see, I got a basically random split in the crust that I actually like a bit better. The size of the loaf was smaller than I'd hoped--I had to reshape at the very end so I lost some gas

But the flavor is pretty good, the crust is very nicely crispy-crunchy. And the crumb isn't so bad...

Big takeaway this weekend: Rye is tricky! I've got to get a copy of The Rye Baker and work through this tub of rye flour...

It's been a busy couple weeks since I've posted. Two notable things have happened: Louis has been misbehaving, and I took a brioche/challah class. 

Dec 4th: I can't remember what this was, but I'm guessing a 50% whole wheat overnight boule.

Dec. 8th: This was the night of my brioche/challah class. It was a lot of fun! Miscellaneous photos are uploaded here. Here's some challah for those not wanting to click over to the imgur gallery:

(My leftovers were turned into baked french toast the next day.)

Dec. 11: Sunflower and Flax 70% Whole Wheat catastrophe

Following the Tartine recipe I ended up with a normal-ish dough covered in tons of slimy flax seeds. It was really weird. The dough also behaved strangely. After a night in the fridge, the dough just wasn't coming together so I tried chucking it in the stand mixer. I'm not sure if you can tell from the photo, but the dough was runny. It didn't smell strange, but my starter (Louis) does seem to smell extra acidic lately. 

Ultimately I tossed that dough and I've been giving Louis extra attention the last few days. 

Dec. 13th

While Louis gets bed rest, I did a batch of brioche. 

Some was turned into rolls that were too big for the muffin tin I baked them in:

And 6 100g pieces were combined into two braids, which were then artlessly stacked into a loaf pan:

Last night was all about rolls, but I've got a meatloaf in the oven right now, so I'm carving into this brioche loaf for sandwiches. Here's the crumb:

I did two batches of FWSY overnight brown modified to be (approximately) 50% whole wheat. (I also took a similar loaf out of the freezer to make into stuffing which turned out fantastically!)

The first batch was turned into rolls. The flavor was good, but I didn't spend enough time shaping them... they didn't rise nicely. I used some of the leftovers to make a french toast casserole (i.e. lazy man's bread pudding).

Because of the funny looking rolls, the next batch was made into boules, one of which I tried to coat with sunflower seeds. That loaf is really just a regular boule plus a bunch of over-toasted sunflower seeds scattered all around it on the counter.

That was followed up with a post-thanksgiving loaf: the Tartine brown (70% whole wheat), with sunflower seeds incorporated in the dough! It's been performing admirably for Turkey sandwiches. The sunflower seeds are a nice addition. I wasn't precise with my seed addition, so I'm just guessing that I put in around 1.5 C of seeds for two boules. It could take more pretty easily.

I don't have any crumb shots today, but stay tuned. This weekend I'm hoping to make something new (possibly on the whiter end of the scale).

In preparation for Thanksgiving I wanted to figure out dinner rolls, so I portioned off half my dough, and turned that into 6 buns (two of which didn't last long enough to make this photo).

The dough was the Overnight Brown from Flour Water Salt Yeast (78% hydration, 30% whole wheat). I followed the recipe (more or less) exactly for the loaf.

For the buns, I baked on a pizza stone for 15 minutes, which worked pretty well. The buns were each about 140g, but I think that's a bit bigger than I'm looking for. Next time around I'll aim for around 100g.

Crumb shot to follow...

Same technique as last time, but this time with salt!

250g whole wheat
250g white (King Arthur AP)
375g H2O (actually, 384g)

Autolyse for about 40 minutes, then add in:

124g levain
12g salt

Stretch and fold 4 times, adding in 117g of raw pumpkin seeds (from Trader Joe's) on the 3rd stretch/fold.

After about 3 total hours at room temperature, leave it in the fridge over night (this time that meant about 21 hours in the fridge).

Let the dough warm up on the counter, then after a couple hours shape the loaf and leave to proof on greased parchment paper in a bowl. 

After another hour and a half, score the loaf and put into a preheated 500F dutch oven with the lid for 25 minutes, then without the lid for another 13.5 minutes.

And after cooling over night, here's the crumb shot:

Sunday

6:32am Mix by hand:

250g white flour
251g whole wheat flour
372g room temp. water

7:13 Add in 124g active levain (80% hydration, 20% rye).

Stretch and fold 4 times over two hours, adding 117g (~1 C.) pumpkin seeds during 3rd S&F.

9:30am into the fridge.

Monday

4:00pm out of the fridge

5:40(ish) shape and proof on greased parchement in bowl

6:28 score loaf, then into a 500F dutch oven for 25 minutes with the lid, then 10 without.

7:03 I just pulled it out. Here it is:

Crumb shot will post to the comments after it cools!

This recipe was from The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg.

I made this Monday, but haven't taken the time to post. Ultimately, it was pretty unexciting. But these are the dues I've got to pay if I'm going to get a great loaf out of this massive tub of Rye flour before it goes bad...

The rise sucked and the crumb is super dense. But it does smell nice and rye-y. Actually, now that I'm trying it again (I've been eating walnut wheat all week), I sort of like its chewiness. I think it'll be good with a smear of cream cheese and some pickled herring.

Anyways, here's how I did it:

Sponge:

170g med. rye
170g H2O
17g mature rye starter

Mixed Monday morning and left for about 12 hours.

Dough:

Add in:

50g bread flour
285g warm H2O

Mix into a slurry then add:

250g bread flour
65g med. rye flour

Mixed in the Kitchen Aid and left to rest before adding:

9g salt
1g instant yeast

Then 30 minutes with the dough hook! Followed by about 3 hours of fermentation. After shaping on a well floured surface and proofing for only 10 minutes (recipe's orders) it went into a 430F oven for 15 minutes with steam, followed by 390F without steam for an amount of time I didn't write down. I think it was something like 40 minutes.

Because my loaf wasn't holding a nice shape, I ended up baking it in a steel bowl. I tried to get a pseudo-dutch oven effect by topping the bowl with a sheet pan to try to hold in the bread's own steam. The boiling water I poured in the steam pan has hardly noticeable when I pulled it out, so I don't think I missed out on anything.