Since many white artisan type recipe do well from refrigerating the rise over time, I wonder if I might get anything from doing the same with my multigrain?

Has anyone tried or using refrigeration for the rise, then letting the dough come to room temp before baking?

Hi Everybody,

I am a newbie at bread making. A transplant from Southwest Florida. I am a little confused about the amount of flour needed to knead dough by hand. I followed the recipe that I had, but I kept needing to add flour and then I ran out of flour. The recipe called for 4-4 1/2 cups of flour, but I know that I added about 6 cups and it was still sticking to the counter top.....as well as my hands. When I ran out of flour, I just threw it in a bowl and now I am hoping for the best. I read in one book that kneading by hand will take more flour than if using a mixer. I wonder if someone could confirm this for me. And......if the dough is still sticking to the counter top and your hands, do you continue to add flour until it is no longer sticking to anything?......even if you end up using WAY more flour than the recipe calls for?

Thanks for the help.......looking forward to spending time with you all.

Debbie

Hi,
I have recently gotten quite obsessed with baking new and delicious types of bread (I moved to a rural village in Alaska and have little else to do). But I was interested in recipes using rye, barley, and oat flour, as I have ten pounds of each and no idea what to do with them.

Any good recipes?

I have a bread baking blog where I posted some information about sprouting wheat berries at home, then dehyrdating them and grinding them to bake bread.  I posted a topic called WHY SPROUTED WHEAT?

http://valeriejaquith.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-sprouted-flour.html#comments

Someone posted a comment to my topic saying that there was a good chance that my berries where in fact DROWNED and not sprouted!  Here is an excerpt from that posted comment:  "...and of utmost importance, they conduct the falling number test to determine that the grain has been sprouted and not drown...all steps that cannot be done in a home operation. Based on convention wisdom about how to sprout grains, most of the grain is being drown and not sprouted"

I conducted a test to see how many of my sprouts had actually sprouted and to see if any of the berries did not sprout, indicating that they are drowned I suppose.  I could only find a few berries that may not have sprouted after 24 hours of sprouting following a 10 hour soak.  Here is the photo of the sprouts:

I plan on waiting another 24 hours to see if the berries that are questionable did develop a full blown sprout.

Can anyone provide me with some more information on this topic?   

Hello everyone,

If you bake with sprouted flour and have some tricks to share, I would greatly appreciate it.  I made my first bread with sprouted flour today, Multigrain Struan from Reinhardt's Whole Grain Baking.  It is a recipe that uses biga and a soaker, and proceeds to combine the two with other ingredients (flour, yeast, honey, oil, salt) during the final dough mixing.  then bulk fermentation, dividing the dough and final rising.  The loaves start out in 425F oven with normal steam, but once the loaves are placed there, the temperature is lowered to 350F.  Loaves bake about 40 min and are rotated half-way through the bake.  I followed the recipe and baked on quarry tiles.  I made two loaves (one batard in La Cloche and one loaf in a loaf pan) with organic stone-ground whole wheat and two with organic sprouted (also one batard in La Cloche and one loaf in a loaf pan) for comparison. 

Sprouted flour loaves of either shape did not rise much in the oven, and the scored area sort of sank in.  Stone-ground flour loaves of both shapes had great oven spring and the scoring worked out fine as well.  Now, the taste...  Sprouted loaves were chewy and a bit "wet" to the taste, a bit sweeter than the stone-ground ones, with a more pronounced nutty flavor.  Yummy and delicous is the only word to describe them!  Now if I could only make them more visually attractive.  So, if you have secrets to share, I am eager to learn! Thank you so much in advance.

Kroha

Hello! I had some problems with a recipe yesterday and would like to know if you all can help. I made a new recipe from a new German baking book which seemed a bit strange. The recipe called for:

500g spelt wholemeal flour     250ml buttermilk, warm

250g rye flour                 1T "Brotgewürz" (mixture of fennel, caraway, etc.)

30g yeast                       2T salt

100g sunflower seeds

This seemed like a lot of flour for only 250ml of liquid, but since I had a whole 500ml of buttermilk, I decided I could add more if needed. The mixture as in the recipe turned out very dry, more like streusel, so I ended up adding the rest of the buttermilk and another 100ml or so of water! The bread turned out okay, but it made me wonder if something was left out of the recipe or if I should have handled it differently. The only thing I changed was that I added flaxseed and sesame instead of the sunflower seeds, albeit much less in weight than 100g, probably closer to 50g and used wholemeal rye as well as the wholemeal spelt called for.

Sacrilege, I know, but...  I love the idea of these, because of the low carb count and the fact that they are sturdy enough (but not tough or hard) to hold even sloppy Joes.  However, if you have ever tasted them, you know they taste like chemicals, compared to homemade breads.

I would like to make these, but don't have the foggiest idea where to start.  I know they are docked, at some point before baking, but would you do that before a final rise or after?  Would you roll out the dough and cut?  What type of a whole wheat or whole grain recipe would you use to make sure they hold up? 

Where to start...

I'm new to this blog and thought maybe someone on here could help. I just started to make my own bread using store bought flour. I can not afford a mill at this time and am trying to find already milled hard winter white flour. Does anyone know where I can find that without splitting my pocketbook open?? My girlfriend makes the best bread using a 2-1 hard red and hard white ratio, but she has a mill. So I need help! If hard white is not to be found can I use bread flour in lieu of the hard winter white?? Any helps would be great!!

Hope

I have been grinding Hard White Wheat to make my pan loaves for sandwich bread for a few months. Recently all of the loaves baked are sinking in the center. Does anyone have a suggestion for the cause of the sinking. Belo is the recipe that I use.  Kent

3 Cups Warm Water
½ Cup Raw / Unpasteurized Honey
2 Tbsp Yeast
1 Tsp Salt
1 Tbsp Vinegar
1 Large Egg
½ Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/3 Cup Gluten
2 ½ Cups Soft Wheat Berries
2 ½ Cups Hard Red Spring Wheat Berries
Place your water, honey and yeast in your mixing bowl to let proof
for about 5 minutes. While your yeast is proofing place both your
soft and hard wheat into your grinder and grind on fine. Makes a
little over 6 cups of flour, Add in your salt,vinegar,egg,oil, gluten and
2 cups of flour to your water and yeast mixture and mix together with
your dough hook just to combine. Now add the remaining four cups
of flour one cup at a time and continue kneading until you have a nice
soft dough that is just pulling away from the bowl into a ball.
Continue kneading your dough in our mixer for 8 minutes or hand
knead it if you like a good workout:) Turn your dough out into a
greased bowl and cover with a towel letting it rise until doubled.
Remove your dough from bowl and punch down, form into 2 loaves
of bread or buns and let it rise again in a warm spot for
approximately 1 hour, bake for 20 minutes at 400° F.

Tonight I went ahead and started to bake my Whole Wheat Hearth Bread from WGB by Reinhart. I followed the recipe precisely, and had the biga and soaker ready when I came home from work that I prepared the night before. I added the final ingriedents, mixed well, kneaded, let rise till at least 1 1/2 times the original size (ended up being one hour as suggested in the formula) in my 4 Liter container with markings to get a near precise measurement to the best of my ability. Then went ahead, shaped it into a batard, dusted with flour and let rise for 40 minutes covered on my counter before I poked it. This is where I ran into issues. As I stated in my last blog my batard seemed to burst open at the score due to what I believe after help from (sorry can't remember your name) someone who pointed out it might be due to under proofing. So this time I wanted to make sure that wasn't going to happen. Since I did bake a loaf of Vermont Sourdough with Increased whole grain and the same issue happened two days ago; pale crust, extra large burst at the scoring.

So I searched for what 'should happen' when you poke a loaf when it is ready for baking. I came up with many different answers, mainly; The dough should spring back slowly, or the dough will not spring back...

I couldn't figure out what it should be, so I decieded to put it in the already heated oven since it appeared to be almost 1 1/2 times the size now. The oven was already at 500 degrees and the stone had been in there the whole time. I proceeded to carefully place the loaf on the stone, score it (I realized now I didn't do it deep enough or was it over proofed??) and threw some ice in the oven and squirted the bread twice. After twenty minutes I rotated the loaf, and to my surprise on the other side of the loaf low and behold, my two poke marks were still in the loaf...

So...did I under proof, over proof and just fail all around : /

And here is a picture of the batard lengthwise to get a better visualization of the scoring if it helps any more.

Any thoughts on the matter? They'd be much appreciated! And tomorrow morning after I slice it and have some for breakfast I'll give some input on the crumb and taste.

Arlo