Sept 26-28: A mix of inspirations

Well, for last week I got to do a bigger bake than normal, since I was baking not just for ourselves but also to take a few things out to my In-laws for dinner on Friday (there were some East coast relatives in for a visit, so a clan dinner was in order).

 It ended up being a very mixed bake, with a lot of inspiration from missing-but-now-happily-returned posters, as well as the steadfast posters who always give me something to try…

 I was first reminded by Yippee’s pumpernickel bake that I was getting frighteningly low on my favourite dark rye --- and, of course, was reminded of just how many of dabrownman’s pumpernickels had added their influence to my base recipe.  I prepared some chocolate and red rye malt following his instructions, cranked up my levain following his NMNF build, and then put together this recipe (for 3 loaves) on Tuesday, to bake over to Wednesday morning (and be ready for slicing on Friday or Saturday):

While I normally would do a 24-hour bake at 225 deg F, I referenced the pumpernickel recipe here https://www.thebreadshebakes.com/2014/08/baking-traditional-real-german-pumpernickel-bread/  and followed her bake schedule of 1 hour at 300 deg F, 13 hours at 250 deg F, and then an hour cooling with the oven off.  The loaves turned out okay, but didn’t have the full flavour and caramelization that I am used to with the longer bake, so I’ll go back to my old ways next time my stash gets low…

 My next need was a couple of small sandwich loaves, and I couldn’t help but basically just do a repeat of my last one, blogged about here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/52920/sept-15-66-whole-grain-porridge-loaves  These both went out to the clan dinner, so no pics of the crumb, but I did grab a couple of pics of the loaves:

 Oh yeah – and along with them, are the rest of my bake of that day, something totally new for me: baguettes!  Well, short ones (I can only do max 15" long right now), but still:

You see, I had ended up re-watching Alfanso’s video on the Bouabsa double-hydration baguettes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYvORu_oLYc while responding to a post on the fora.  Since I had been avidly following kendalm’s responses to Restless Baker’s quest to learn baguettes, I suppose that the idea had been simmering away in the back of my mind.  While I can’t really get in to the fresh yeast / French flour works of art the kendalm is creating (totally intimidating!), Alfanso’s return reminded me that it can be a lot of fun to put your own twist on any recipe or technique. 

 So – I put together a quick formula that I figured should be nicely extensible (spelt is my friend), was a bit lower in whole grains than I normally go (just 30%), and with a fairly low level of pre-fermented flour (so that I’d have lots of leeway in using the fridge).

 I got this going a couple of hours after I had the porridge loaves happening:

 This dough was insanely active!  I was anticipating fermenting at room temperature (a rousing 18 deg C) for at least a few hours, but it just took off.  I remembered Alfanso’s advice to someone a few months back to shape directly out of the fridge and then to fully proof in the fridge, too.  Well, I kind of followed it, by pre-shaping directly out of the fridge, but then let them bench rest a bit too long and had a hard time getting them to NOT stretch out to proper baguette length (I only have space to bake 15” long).  Telling them to “stop that!” as they stretched every time I moved the dough only worked somewhat…;)  The proofing in the fridge worked on the ones that I delayed,  while the room temp proofed ones madly over-proofed, so more fridge will be the plan for the next round…

 Oh, and there WILL be many more rounds of these!  We kept the two over-proofed ones, and had one of them polished off a couple of hours after they had come out of the oven.  The two better proofed ones went to the clan dinner (so no crumb shot), and the final over-proofed one was sliced up and devoured today:

 Excuse the lousy photography and lighting – the crumb really wasn’t that odd mix of colours, but even grossly over-proofed and shaped with very little skill, it came out good enough to make me pretty darned happy.

 These aren’t a whole lot of good for meal-type sandwiches, but are absolutely perfect for every other use.  The flavour was outstanding, and it was just plain fun to try shaping these tricksy little beasts!

All together, it was a fun few days of prepping and baking, and left me looking forward to playing some more this week.  Hope you all have just as much fun, and keep baking happy!