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I have about 100 recipes and counting I want to try from old cookbooks as well as new cookbooks, not to mention all the recipes I have saved from various blog posts and websites.  Having said that I decided to experiment on my own instead and came up with a variation of Peter Reinhart's San Francisco sourdough using durum flour, stone ground barley flour and some roasted wheat germ as well.  I was very happy with the results with the exception that I didn't do a great job of shaping the loaves and they became slightly misshapen.  I do have to say though that the malformed shapes fortunately did not affect the taste.  The crumb was a little tighter than I would have preferred, but overall the bread had a nice nutty sweet flavor and went well with my wife's bow-tie pasta and chicken in a cream sauce she made tonight for dinner.

If anybody decides to try this for themselves, I would love to hear about your results.

Ingredients

15 ounces 65% Hydration Starter Refreshed

2.5 ounces Stone Ground Barley Flour (I use King Arthur Flour)

10 ounces European Style Flour from KAF (or Bread Flour)

5 ounces Extra Fancy Durum Semolina Flour (King Arthur Flour)

2.5 ounces Roasted Wheat Germ

14 ounces Luke warm water, 90 - 95 degrees Fahrenheit

2 1/2 Teaspoons Sea Salt

2 1/4 Teaspoons Instant Yeast  (you can omit the yeast if desired and let the dough sit for 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours before refrigerating)

Directions

Using your stand mixer or by hand, mix the water with the starter to break up the starter.

Add the flours, salt, yeast (if using), and mix on the lowest speed for 2 minutes.  Let rest for 5 minutes.

Mix for 4 minutes more on medium speed, adding more flour if necessary to produce a slightly sticky ball of dough.

Remove dough to your lightly floured work surface and need for 1 minute and form into a ball.

Leave uncovered for 10 minutes.

Do a stretch and fold and form into a ball again and cover with a clean moist cloth or oiled plastic wrap.

After another 10 minutes do another stretch and fold and put into a lightly oiled bowl that has enough room so the dough can double overnight.

Put in your refrigerator immediately for at least 12 hours or up to 3 days.

When ready to bake the bread, shape the dough as desired being careful not to handle the dough too roughly so you don't de-gas it. (If you did not use yeast, let it sit in your bowl for 2 hours before shaping).

Place it in your bowl, banneton or shape into baguettes.

Let it sit at room temperature for 2 hours covered with oiled plastic wrap or a wet cloth.

Pre-heat oven with baking stone (I use one on bottom and one on top shelf of my oven), to 500 degrees F.

Slash loaves as desired and place empty pan in bottom shelf of oven.

Pour 1 cup of very hot water into pan and place loaves into oven.

Lower oven to 450 Degrees and bake for 25 - 35 minutes until bread is golden brown and internal temperature reaches 200 degrees.

Let cool on cooling rack and enjoy!

This post has been submitted to the Yeast Spotting Site here: http://www.wildyeastblog.com/category/yeastspotting

Please feel free to visit my other Blog for older posts at: http://www.mookielovesbread.wordpress.com

I baked this bread yesterday evening.  Sliced it this morning and left for the day and most of the evening.  My grandaughters 20th birthday is Sunday and I had some shopping to do with my daughter after seeing my oldest grandson off to his rowing club race..it was a lovely day and I didn't cook...for a change.   When I returned.  Mike had eaten almost half the loaf.  He was probably starving, because he doesn't cook or maybe he really liked this bread...I'll find out tomorrow.  I tasted it and thought it was delicious.  I haven't had much time lately for baking and look forward to making this one again soon, using the bulghur wheat gives a lovely texture to this nice sandwich or toast pan bread.  This a keeper for nice wholesome sandwich house bread.  

The formula I used was only tweaked a little from the orginal...I tend to do that..  all was hand mixed.   

If you would like to see the whole recipe...it's written out very nicely on 'bewitchingkitchen.com' blog' or better yet..Rose Levy Beranbaum 'The Bread Bible' is an excellent bread book I highly recommend.

The proofed loaf is brushed with clarified butter before baking 

Sylvia

Make your own Greek yogurt and then use the drippings to make great bread by substituting the yogurt whey water for the water in your bread.

Get stuck with too many Red Pears and and Blueberries?  Make a chocolate crust, lemon and blueberry cheesecake and a blueberry, ginger and red pear Italian fruit tart with home made Puff Pastry that's what !!!!!

After finding out the Pierre Nury's Rustic Light Rye didn't have much if any rye taste or earthy taste either, I decided to try and see if I could get more rye taste and earth flavor without totally compromising Pierre's fine SD bread completely.

The changes include home grinding whole rye berrys and adding 25 grams more to make 75 total, adding 50 gramsof home ground whole spelt berries and deducting 75 grams of bread flour to keep everything in balance.  I also  lightly slit the loaves before they went into the bag for final rise to try to get them to rustically split on top. 

I really like this bread with these small changes. It kept all the great character of Pierre's original but produces more and deeper rye flavor and sour.  The spelt also gives the bread a very nice speckled brown crumb - something a Brownman appreciates :-)

Here are some Pic's

My next attempt at learning something new about bread, I decided to bake off David Snyder's SFSD that he is trying to perfect like the rest of his fine breads, with Pierre Nury's light SD Rye that I ran across in zolablu's fine blog.  Thought I would make them both as directed and bake them off in the same oven at the same time now that is is clean after my San Joaquin adventure even if it was a fiasco.  I used a compromised temp, steam and time since they didn't quite line up perfectly.  I did shape the Nury loaf and lightlu slashed it before in went into the final rise to try to get it to swell and split naturally somewhere on the top.  I used my new parchment containment system to control a very wet dough from spreading and ....It worked just fine.

David's small SFSD boule went into a heavily flowered basket that should have been floured more sanely.  I used 50% rice flour for this heavy handed dusting.  I have never done this before so, was flying a little blind and had read that they will stick when the basket is new.  Plus this basket was never meant for bread in the first place.  When I went to slash David's boule, it was pretty hard and my razor just sort of bounced off.  I finally butchered it with a big serated knife.  My slashing skills are quite primitive and weak to begin with even though I have seen many folks live, and on video doing it like it was easy as pie.  I think they are showing off knowing my slash challenged bread making skill :-)  David's didn't spring because of its tougher exterior and Nury's nearly exploded.  Both browned up nicely and I did bake the boule 5 minutes longer to get that deep dark skin.

The crumb was slightly more open on the boule but both were fine with holes of all sizes.  The weird thing was that I couldn't taste any rye in Nury's and I wanted to since I love rye.  Couldn't taste it in David's either.  In fact both the breads tasted the same to me. and both had the same sour undertone probably because they both used the same rye, spelt, WW and AP starter and levain.

David's won the taste test the next day as the crumb got , the sour revealed itself and it became more complex.  I can't wait for David to get it perfected as he is sure to do.  I have my own changes to make to Nury's 'Non Existent' Light Rye so that will be more rye like and complex in taste.  Here are some Pic's.

Pizza is one the special favorites we make when my daughter brings her sorority sisters home from college for pizza night.  What they don't expect is a very thin crust that is sourdough, has whole wheat and garbanzo flour, sun dried tomatoes, fresh rosemary and garlic in it.  They also can't believe that they can make their own from a wide range of toppings, most of which are home made including spicy sauce -  and they can load it up with worrying that the crust will not be able to handle it.

This baby is loaded!!!  Lots of sauce, caramelized onions and mushrooms, roasted red green and spicy peppers, home made Italian sausage, pepperoni, Pecorino, Parm and Mozz cheeses, olives and a few other things hardly worth mentioning - except the fresh opal basil on top after the pie came out of the 500 degree oven.  The key is to pre bake the pie crust on a stone for 3 minutes before taking it out, quickly brushing on a thin coat of garlic oil before letting folks load up what ever they want  on top - before chucking the fatso back into the oven for 4 minutes or so to finish browning it off.

Before TFL came into my world, I had a multi grain, seeded, SD challah that I baked every week for my daily sandwich loaf. I called it my made up name Brachflachen Mehrere Vollkombrot. It was the standard; mix about 20 ingredients, kneed for 10 minutes let rise, punch down, let rise in the loaf pan, egg wash, slash and bake a 350 until 205 F. It took about 8 hours from start to finish - and I thought that was slow bread!! After finding out the slow bread was really 3 days - not 8 hours, I converted my old recipe to make it take nearly forever to make - instead of just a really long time :-) Now it is a 12 hour levain build, long S&F ferment, long retard and long after fridge rise bread. I really like the way it came out. Nice dark crispy, crunchy crust with Nijella and sesame seeds, soft, moist, small holed crumb with subtle SD taste that made great tasting toast too. It is still my favorite sandwich challah loaf .

The second shot of the crub says a lot about me and my foodie nature.  Home made; challah, dijon mustard, pickles, cheese, meat and home grown; lettuce and tomatoes.

The 3rd shot means it is home made Aranchello, Minneochello and Limochello time too !!!!!

My first attempt at making SD using S&F, long retard and David's parchment paper technique.  The only change I made was using 50 g of home ground WW berries instead of the rye that David used.  No rye to be found anywhere.  I also used a WW, and AP flour build for the levain.  I'm not sure what David's was but I am guessing he had some rye in it.  I was very happy with the  results.  Nice exterior crust, great open crumb and fine taste.  It was better the next day too.  I liked it with oiive oil, fresh basil, pecorino, parm and pepper.  On Davids's blog you see my ordeal trying to bake the San Joaquin.  He said my saga proves his recipe is bullet proof :-)  It is bullet proof too!   There is also a photo of my second recipe of my home made Puff Paste Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid inspired by the one on TFL with bread instead of puff paste.  What a great site for bakers like me!!!

Mischbrot variations

In earlier experiments with breads having a higher percentage of rye flour I found that adding spelt, emmer or semolina complemented the rye very well.

With this bake I wanted to compare the effect of substituting the wheat part with emmer and spelt in breads with 70% rye. The flours are all from Shipton Mill.

The outcome:

I used my tried and tested Mischbrot formula as a base, this time using a rye starter with 100% hydration. The starter is made with dark rye, while the remaining rye in the formula is light rye.

Here the formula:

At the current cooler temperatures (about 23C / 73F in my kitchen) the starter took 16 hours to mature.
With 70% rye the doughs / pastes are very sticky and require only a short mix/knead so that all materials are mixed well.

After 100 minutes of fermentation at 23C / 73F I shaped rounds with very wet hands (in mid-air), and put t hem into baskets (floured with light rye) for the final rest..After 60 minutes the rounds showed cracks, a sign that they are ready for the bake.

The bake (on a stone, with steam) started at maximum temperature (ca.  240C / 464F), after 15 minutes I turned the loaves and lowered the temperature to 210C / 410F, After another 20 minutes the bread was ready.

I am very happy with oven spring and bloom. All three breads performed equally well and were indistinguishable from the outside.

After a day I cut into the loaves. The crumb is quite similar in all three loaves, the bread containing wholegrain emmer  is a bit darker and more dense.(The wheat bread got a bit of a shadow - bad photography!)

Although the crumb looks fairly dense, the breads actually feel light.

The crust could be thicker, but that's my oven – not much I can do about this at the moment.

The taste of the three breads is also very similar – quite complex with rye dominating, and a distinctive tangy after-taste. The emmer bread has the most complex taste.

There are a few things I would like to try with this formula:
1. using all wholegrain flours
2. going back to the original German way: using all medium rye and refined flours (which would be called ”Berliner Landbrot”)
3. Reducing the amount of rye sour and using some of the wheat/emmer/spelt in a stiff starter as a second preferment
4. using a wheat/emmer/spelt poolish as a second preferment
5. adding spices

Lots to do!
Juergen