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I have been in search for a light pumpernickel formule for quite sometime, until DAB sent me the one posted by our TFLer dmsnyder. You can find the original post here. 

below is the formula i used, which is basically the same as his but I have left out on Altus and did all the mixing n kneading by hand

Ive created lots of sourdough discard as a result of changing my starter to a Rye sour, I have used the discard with added flour and baking soda made them into a "nooks and crannies" English muffins. since the dough is really wet and it can hardly hold its shape, they arent shaped very nicely. 

I've just received a few pounds of organic sprouted red winter wheat flour and organic sprouted spelt flour. Anyone have any advice before I dive into it?

Hydration?

Gluten strength?

Flavor?

I'm excited to try it, but I'm still novice enough to worry that it will be a challenge.

This forum has been an inspiration and is full of great advice! Thanks!

Gail N-K

This was my second attempt at this loaf.  Intrigued by David's description of how good it tasted, I just had to give it a try.  My first go yielded a flat boule that was very, very sour and quite pale.  I let everything go on too long especially the final proof in the fridge.  Due to other commitments, it stayed in the fridge for almost 20 hours as opposed to the 12 that David recommended.

The second time round I shortened everything.  Instead of letting the starters ferment for 14 hours, I gave them 7 which is quite enough for our 30C temperatures we have been having recently.  I autolysed for 50 mins and retarded for 12.  

I pretty much stuck to David's recipe except that I only added 510g of water effectively making this an 80% hydration loaf.  If you notice any small discrepancies between the weights of the ingredients in mine and David's recipe it is only because I usually round everything off so it looks neater!

Total Formula

• 85g whole wheat levain
• 270g rye levain
• 510g water
• 140g whole wheat flour
• 545g bread flour

I whisked the levains into the water to ensure even dispersion and then added the flour.  I let this autolyse for 50 minutes then added:

• 17g salt

I hand kneaded until medium gluten development.  Although it was sticky at first, this dough came together surprisingly quickly for an 80% hydration bread.  It was easier to handle than the Tartine dough which is only 75% water.  Not sure why but guess that it might have something to do with the levain being more acid.  It was actually a delight to handle and not the nightmare I imagined.  The only reason I reduced the water to 80% was because I was wary of hand kneading such a wet dough.

I baked on a baking stone with steam for 15 mins and then uncovered for another 25 minutes.

I waited 3 hours before I cut into one of the boules and found the sour quite pronounced but not as sour as my first attempt.  Interestingly that sour mellowed out on the second day.  It didn't seem quite as sharp.  Not sure how that works, either.  Perhaps it was just because other flavors were coming through on day 2.  Whatever, I definitely preferred the taste on the second day.  

Will definitely try this loaf again, but think I might try white rye instead of whole rye and shoot for something a little less sour.  Having said that, this loaf tastes really great with a mature cheddar.  Just bread and cheese.  No butter.  Very more-ish.  Thanks to David for his detailed formula and write up.

Well after seeing dmsnyder's post on J.H.'s 5 grain levain from "Bread" i had to give it a go.  I also thought it would be fun to finally follow  a recipe from a book (or not).  Since i couldn't get Cracked Rye I couldn't resist but make a small modification.  

To keep the same percentage of Rye in the recipe (9.2%) I just used some Rye Sour as a portion of the Levain.  In place of this I used some Bulgar in the soaker.  

I ran into trouble quickly as the dough was much drier than I anticipated and i was hand mixing a 10KG batch of dough for trading. I added nearly 4% more h20 to get a dough i could manage. I used the pincer method followed by 2 s/f to make up for the lack of mechanical mixing.  The dough actually felt okay by shape time but I think it could have been better devloped.  Not nearly as nice looking as David's but 

The flavor and crust of this loaf are so good.   After baking the first set straight from the fridge I remembered Davids caution and paid the price and had a few loaves broken at the score that never really filled in.  The following I pulled 1 hour befoer baking and went much better. I will certainly make this again but increase the H20 by another 2-4%.  

Spring/Summer Market starts back up next week so I'll be getting back out to some regular trading.  

Happy Baking 

Josh

  Back in December, Varda posted a request for an authentic Portuguese bread recipe for Broa.  I did a quick search on the internet myself and came up with a couple of interesting options.  The one I baked the other day was very interesting in regards to how the dough is actually shaped which is what convinced me to give it a try.  After the dough bulk rises you divide and roll the dough around a bowl that has been filled with water and then lightly floured.  It was very simple and fun to try and came out pretty good.  The original recipe was posted here.

The recipe is not very specific in regards to all of the ingredients so I converted everything to grams and converted my starter to an almost 100% hydration one.  I usually like to bulk ferment the dough in the refrigerator but I decided to follow the recipe and let it sit overnight at room temperature which was around 68 degrees.  I think next time I would bulk retard the dough in the refrigerator to get some additional flavor.

This recipe also calls for a corn meal "scald and a multi-grain flour mix.  The original recipe used rye, wheat and barley but I changed it up a bit and used rye, spelt and red winter wheat.

I think the final baked dough came out pretty good with a nice sour tang and you can definitely taste the corn meal influence.  Give this one a try if for nothing more than to try the unique shaping technique.

Levain Directions

Mix all the levain ingredients together  for about 1 minute and cover with plastic wrap.  Let it sit at room temperature for around 7-8 hours or until the starter has doubled.  I used my proofer set at 83 degrees and it took about 4 hours.

Corn Scald

Pour 351 grams of boiling water over the 224 grams of fine corn meal and mix to form a mush.  Let it sit and cool for around 20 minutes.

 Main Dough Procedure

Mix the flours and levain with the cooled corn scald for a minute.  Next add the salt and the remainder of the water and mix for around 5-6 minutes until a soft dough has been achieved.  Remove the dough from your bowl and place it in a lightly oiled bowl or work surface and do several stretch and folds.  Let it rest covered for 10-15 minutes and then do another stretch and fold.  Let it rest another 10-15 minutes and do one additional stretch and fold.  Let the dough sit out in your covered bowl overnight for around 10-12 hours.

The next morning you should have a nice puffy dough that has doubled in size.  Carefully transfer the dough to your work surface and divide into 4 equal parts but be careful not to deflate the dough.

Prepare a large mixing bowl by filling it with cold water and pouring it out.  Next dust the inside of the bowl with flour so it is completely covered.

Now for the fun part!  Take the first piece of dough and carefully place it in the floured bowl and swirl it around for around 15 - 20 seconds until it starts to get roundish.  Place it on a parchment covered baking sheet and dust with flour.  Repeat for the other 3 pieces and cover with either a moist lint free towel or sprayed plastic wrap.Let the dough sit at room temperature for around 2 hours.  The dough should puff up and spread out so don't be alarmed.  Do the poke test to make sure you don't over-proof them.

Around 45 minutes before ready to bake, pre-heat your oven to 550 degrees F. and prepare it for steam.  I have a heavy-duty baking pan on the bottom rack of my oven with 1 baking stone on above the pan and one on the top shelf.  I pour 1 cup of boiling water in the pan right after I place the dough in the oven.

Right before you are ready to put them in the oven, add 1 cup of boiling water to your steam pan or follow your own steam procedure.

Immediately lower the temperature to 450 degrees.  Bake for 15-20 minutes and then lower the temperature to 400 degrees until the crust is nice and brown and the internal temperature of the bread is 210 degrees.

Take the bread out of the oven when done and let it cool on a bakers rack before for at least 2 hours before eating.

Lexi trying to score some flour.....

Sourdough challah is a familiar subject on this site, and there have been lots of recipes discussed and shared, with Maggie Glezer's probably in the lead. My only reason for revisiting the theme is that my version of challah, a sourdough adaptation of Jeffrey Hamelman's straight-dough recipe in Bread, is a bit away from the mainstream. To be blunt, nearly everyone who tastes my challah—thankfully, not my family—doesn't know what to make of it at best.

Here in Australia, most commercial and home-baked challahs seem to use a lot of what we call plain flour, a type designed for baking cakes and biscuits with gluten normally sitting in the 10% range. They're also often very sweet and heavily yeasted. The result is a puffy, cakey loaf that goes stale after two or three days and then makes sensational French toast. My impression is that challahs worldwide generally follow a similar pattern.

I was raised on this style of challah, and never liked it much except as French toast. The texture was too flabby and, despite my Polish-Jewish ancestry, I found the sweetness cloying. So when I started baking bread a few years ago, finding a challah recipe that worked for me was a priority.

Challah has become the bread I bake most often, a couple of loaves usually every two or three weeks. When I started out, I was really intimidated by the enriched dough, which at first always came out too sticky, and above all by the braiding (which remains a challenge, as you can see). Although I found the Hamelman recipe fairly early on, its main appeal was the detailed guidance on method. Even then, I could see it wasn't very sweet, with 8% sugar compared to a minimum 12% (and sometimes honey as well) just about everywhere else. I used to add some sugar because the proportion in the recipe seemed unnaturally low, even to my sweetness-averse palate. It was only after I began baking it regularly that I realised the Hamelman recipe was the answer to my discontent with mainstream challahs.

Mr Hamelman is entitled to his royalties, so I'm not going to pass on his detailed formula. The key aspects for me include how workable the dough is for kneading and braiding, and the low level of sugar, that I quickly learned to embrace. But above all, he specifies bread flour rather than lower-gluten alternatives, to the point of including some high-gluten flour, which isn't really available in Australia. The recipe makes for the kind of challah I was looking for: bread rather than a modified cake.

The only problem with it is that it's still a straight dough, and I'm into sourdough. For a long time, I tried adapting it by sticking to the ingredients and much of the technique, but taking over the sourdough components from Maggie Glezer's recipe, specifically 25% pre-fermented flour and proofing for five hours. The trouble with this approach is that the challah ends up noticeably sour. I like sourness in cucumbers, but challah is no pickle.

For a while, my remedy was to add two or three grams of instant yeast and sharply reduce the proofing period. Then I found I could go to a 20% pre-ferment and make some other adjustments and produce a challah without any obvious sourness. Recently, even the instant yeast has gone and my challah is now back to being a pure sourdough, slightly sweet but not sour.

For yesterday's bake, I made a few more changes more or less on a whim. Whether because of these or other factors, I'm very happy with the challah that came out of the oven. Yes, the air holes were too irregular and the braids hadn't fused perfectly, but the taste and the texture are where I want to be. Here's the crumb:

The ingredient formula is almost identical to the one in Bread (except that the percentage of eggs is slightly higher), as is a lot of the technique. The main features of the sourdough method I've developed through trial and error are:

• A stiff levain at 60% hydration built on 20% of sourdough culture also hydrated at 60%.
• Bulk fermentation at room temperature or slightly above for 100 minutes, including a light fold half-way through.
• Fridge-retardation in bulk for about 18 hours.
• The shaped loaves are proofed at room temperature for between 90 minutes and two hours (I'm a slow braider, so the first loaf finished tends to get the full two hours). I don't look for a rise of more than 50-75%. In my experience, oven spring is better with a shorter proof.

Well, most likely this isn't the kind of challah that many people will like. As I've discovered, the stereotype is too deeply entrenched in the challah-eating consciousness. Why bother with a sourdough that takes two fairly busy days to prepare? It's not as voluminous, not as sweet, not as differentiated from ordinary bread. You even have to wait a week or more for it to stale enough to make a satisfactory French toast.

But if you happen to share my discontent with mainstream challah, I hope my approach gives you something, so to speak, to chew on...

Like most of my bread friends, I purchased Chad Robertson's new bread book, Tartine Book No. 3, back when it came out over the holidays, however, I only got around to baking from it fairly recently. In Book no. 3, Robertson builds upon his basic country bread formula he established in his first book,Tartine Bread, with a focus on whole grain baking. I had been skimming the book for awhile and noticed a few things:

1. As with Tartine Bread, the photography is absolutely breathtaking. The book just forces you to want to bake bread by being so beautiful. In that way, it is very inspiring.
2. Robertson's take on whole grain baking is very different than most bakers. It seems as though Robertson is more interested in whole grain baking from a flavor standpoint rather than a nutritional one. Most of the breads actually contain a majority of white flour and Robertson uses and demonstrates a variety of methods for injecting other grains into the bread. He puts a focus on using grains that would not usually be used in bread baking(because of poor baking properties) and uses them as flavor enhancers.

I decided to put some of the methods described in the book to the test with a formula called "Oat Porridge Bread". This is one of the breads in the "Porridge Bread" chapter that involves cooking grains into a porridge(similar to making oatmeal) and then using it as an inclusion in the final dough. Robertson details using several interesting grains with this method but I decided to go with the most basic, rolled oats, because that's what I had on hand.

I actually attempted this bread twice with noticeable improvements on the second attempt. My process reflects the adjustments I had to make to get the results you see here. I must say that this is one of my favorite breads I've ever made mainly because of the texture of the crumb. It is extremely moist, custard-like and soft in a way that I haven't experienced in any standard sourdough I've made in the past(and I've made a lot). I'm thinking that this has to do with the porridge aspect. The flavor is also quite nice but I wouldn't say it is particularly "oaty". I think the key to this bread is making sure you have enough strength in the dough(by doing a lot of strong folds) and getting the proofing right. The first time I made this bread it was very gummy and chewy, most likely because of under proofing. Enjoy!

For the formula, process and more photos visit my blog at aBreaducation.

When I got more serious about baking several years ago, I created my own spreadsheets (or "breadsheets" as I like to call 'em) where I kept accurate track of formula tweaks, timings, etc. Over 200 sourdoughs, ciabattas, mixed grain pan loaves, pizzas, flatbreads, etc. 

Nowadays, even though I still weigh my ingredients, I "eyeball" things much more, and I rarely write my outcomes down....probably because for the most part, the outcomes come out consistently well. I haven't been baking a ton of breads lately, but my recent go-to's are:

• a mixed grain pan loaf with white, whole wheat, medium rye, and Bob's Red Mill 10 Grain blend. 
• a pizza with white, a bit of whole wheat and about 25% Caputo 00. 

I usually start with 500g of flour total, hydrate at about 70% (350g), and add yeast, salt, sugar, and fat as necessary. Doing the calculations in my mind is simple and easy. A 850g dough ball is convenient because it makes a good size loaf of pan bread, and makes 2 large pizza skins (or 4 individual ones). All kneading and clean up can be done in 15 minutes or so (I knead in a KA mixer). The shaped pizza dough balls go in the fridge overnight, so even less work to do than the pan loaves. 

Having the detailed formulas are nice when I'm trying to remember how to do a bread that I don't make regularly, but for my daily bread, I don't even think about it anymore...350g of water, add yeast (and sugar if desired), add 500g of flours (whatever I feel that day), add salt and fat as desired, knead in mixer, shape for bulk ferment, etc. watching the dough and not the clock. 

How about you, what recipes do you bake from memory these days?

About two months after baking my first-ever loaf of bread, I'm posting my first blog entry here. From raising my own sourdough starter to learning to handle ever wetter and slacker doughs, it's been a fun and action-packed couple of months. I've been edified and consoled many a time by this site, and I'm finally feeling confident enough to say hello.

At the moment, I have two major challenges. The first is learning to work with my cane banneton, which only seems to want to release my loaves 50 percent of the time. (The other 50 percent of the time, I am forced to tug at the dough until the loaf comes out warped.) I've read that some people use rice flour and others use semolina, but I haven't yet found time to experiment.

My other big struggle is my sourdough starter's newfound rye addiction, which I can't get it to kick. I originally started it on whole wheat flour before converting it to white, and all was going smoothly until I refrigerated it. When I tried to bring it back to life a week later, I found it sluggish and unresponsive. Well, a friend suggested I revitalize it with some whole rye flour, which worked like a charm (instead of doubling like it used to, the starter now nearly triples in 4-5 hours), but ever since it's tasted rye paradise, it doesn't want to go back. I keep trying to gradually wean it off rye, which seems to work, but the moment I cut it off cold-turkey, it goes on strike and stays that way for multiple feedings. I'm interested in solving this problem, of course, but also in understanding--if anyone has an explanation--why rye is so much more conducive to yeastly activity.

This past month I've been exclusively practicing variations on this Norwich Sourdough. I want to get all my basic techniques down before I branch out and play around. Still, I've made a few adjustments (halving the quantities and upping the hydration), and this is my current default formula (which produced both the loaves pictured in this post, the first one being my most recent effort):

510g white flour (I use about half AP, half bread flour)
350g water at about 74F
180g mature 100% hydration whole rye sourdough starter
12g salt

Mix/autolyse: 35 minutes
First fermentation: 2.5 hours, s&f every 30 minutes
Proof: 2.5 hours, retard overnight
Bake: 35 minutes at 475F on preheated baking steel

The original recipe calls for whole rye flour, which I don't add since it's already in the starter. I am quite happy with the flavor (the sourness is quite pronounced) and the crumb that I achieve with this method, but would prefer to get my starter back to an all-white state so that it's more versatile.

If you know how to handle wet dough (80%) and with the right flour, big holes are a breeze!!!

Happy baking

Thomas

www.campingchicago.com