Last bread for the day - Polish Cottage Rye from Leader's "Local Breads." This is another of my personal favorites. Today, I made it with a rye sour fed with whole rye rather than the white rye Leader calls for. I like it both ways.

David

This was a delicious bread! It was everything I hoped for (thank you David!). This massive loaf had a delightful sourness with a nice rye flavor, a well-developed structure without any hint of heaviness, and a wonderful aroma. I would definitely make it again.

This was a three-build bread: I made the German rye sourdough Thursday night and the rye sourdough Friday night. I used KA bread flour and home-ground unsifted rye (the formula called for white rye so this was a substitution). Everything ticked along exactly as expected. I put the final dough mixture together Saturday morning and mixed it in my Kitchen Aid on speed 4 for 14 minutes (again, thanks for your help on this David!), scraping the sides down twice. After I literally poured the mixture into a dough bucket, I let it ferment at room temperature for about 2 1/4 hours. Meanwhile I scoured the house for an appropriately sized proofing basket for my 2 1/2 pounds of dough finally turning up a basket from a closet.

After rubbing a considerable amount of rye flour into a flour-sack couche, I emptied--again almost poured--the dough into its center. The dough was too slack to shape, so I just lifted the whole thing into the basket, covered it with plastic wrap, and let it proof for another 1 3/4 hours during which time it nearly doubled. I then placed a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet, sprayed it with PAM, placed it over the basket, flipped it over and watched the dough come tumbling out.

After three quick scores about 1/2-inch deep, I slid the spreading mass onto a preheated oven stone on the middle rack, plopped 3/4 cup of ice cubes in a skillet beneath the stone for steaming, shut the door, and hoped for the best. As I watched through the oven window I was delighted to see a lot of oven spring. The dough expanded both upwards and sideways increasing in volume nearly 50%. I was very pleased and hopeful. I threw a piece of foil over the loaf after 20 minutes because I worried that it was getting brown to quickly and then checked it to see if it was done at 40 minutes. It registered 96º C. so I removed it to a cooling rack. I was very happy to feel that the loaf was wonderfully light. I knew I had a winner.

Notes: I used the rye sour from Leader's book. It had sat in the refrigerator un-refreshed for a month but seemed to perform just fine after only one feeding and 12 hours on the counter (actually, I let it sit on the counter for 24 hours before using it); no doubt, this is a testimonial to the rehabilitation properties of rye flour.

You can see the hole in the top of the loaf where I injected the helium.


I took some more pictures but didn't have the CF card in the camera so I'll post more tomorrow.

Here are some more pictures. Vodka is the traditional accompaniment.





This is a picture of about one-third of the loaf in its proofing basket; I'm including it so you can see how really large this massive loaf was.

After our dinner of sausages, grilled red peppers, and sautéed onion relish, we enjoyed a fre$h cherry pie. The pie's crust was perfectly flakey and delicious owing to the incorporation of a small amount of solid Crisco with the butter (as usual, I promised myself that this was absolutely the last time I would use the white stuff!).

--Pamela

Baker Beware!

I'm making a blog entry to document my experience with Leader's Corn-Rye Rounds from Local Breads. The recipe was simple enough and the little rounds seemed to turn out as described by the recipe, but they tasted just awful. I was so disappointed that I didn't even take a picture of these little round rock-like things with a very odd and inharmonious taste of corn and rye. I threw them all in the trash.

--Pamela

This is a very tasty bread with a light crumb and nice crunch from the soaked seeds. I would make it again. In spite of the German rye sourdough incorporated in it, which was very sour tasting, I don't really taste any sour. It is a lovely, soft sandwich-type bread with only a hint of rye flavor. I can't imagine anyone, including children, disliking it. There are a number of errors in the recipe. I have pointed those out below, and indicated my experience when making this recipe in case someone else wants to try it.

This sunflower-crusted rye gets great chew from the flax, sesame, and sunflower seeds inside. Flax isn't familiar to most people, but it is one of my favorite bread-baking ingredients. The glossy, tiny golden brown seeds have a wonderful sweet nuttiness. Until I saw this bread at Tobias Maurer's bakery in Stuttgart, I wouldn't have believed it was possible to put so many seeds into one loaf. I had seen how an abundance of seeds can draw moisture from dough, drying out the bread as it bakes. Tobias showed me how an overnight soak softens the seeds, turning them into a gelatinous mass that does the opposite, moistening the dough as it bakes (Local Breads, p. 282).

From Leader's Local Breads:

50 g German rye sourdough

28 g flax seeds

28 g raw, white sesame seeds

28 g raw sunflower seeds

525 g water* (I will probably either reduce the water by 50 g the next time I make the bread)

5 g instant yeast

300 g unbleached bread flour (I used KA Bread flour)

200 g whole grain rye flour (I ground my own)

10 g salt

Topping: 28 g raw sunflower seeds

Soak seeds, except topping, in 175 g water and make German rye sourdough 12 to 24 hours before mixing dough. (I did not find that these formed a gelatinous mass after soaking overnight, but whatever they formed seemed to work perfectly.)

On baking day: Pour remaining 350 g water in mixer bowl and stir in yeast, soaked seeds, bread flour, rye flour, salt, and German rye sourdough. Using the dough hook, knead the dough on speed 2 for 8 minutes, let rest in bowl for 10 minutes, resume kneading for another 8 minutes. I had to incorporate a substantial amount of extra bread flour during the final kneading time owing perhaps to errors in the amount of water* specified in Leader's recipe, which is different in the ingredients column than in the text.

Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled container with a lid and let rise until double, about 2 hours.

Divide the dough in half, shape, and place in two 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch pans. (I got two, 1-1/2 pound loaves out of the recipe, but Leader indicates there would be two 17 ounce loaves.) Mist the loaves with water or brush with egg wash and sprinkle with remaining sunflower seeds. Cover loosely and let proof for about an hour until nearly double (mine were doming the pans).

Preheat the oven to 400º twenty minutes before baking and place the oven rack at the lower middle position.

Bake the loaves for about 35 minutes. (I got a lot of oven spring.)

German rye-sourdough: mix 50 g liquid levain, 100 g water, and 75 g rye flour. Let stand at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours. It is ready when it has doubled and tastes very tangy. It is alright to use if it has deflated (this was the case with me). This makes more sourdough than you need. According to the recipe, you can store the unused portion in the fridge until you are ready to use it again.

I haven't baked the Polish Cottage Rye from Daniel Leaders "Local Breads" for a year! In the past, I have used First Clear Flour or another high extraction flour as a substitute for the bread flour called for in Leader's formula. This time, I followed the formula exactly.

The dough was very wet and sticky, even with very good gluten development. I actually enjoyed working with this dough, which must indicate I've reached a new level of comfort with slack doughs. In spite of the slackness, it had enough integrity to take my slashes without any dragging. I think proofing the loaf in a linen-lined banneton resulted in just enough drying of the surface.

The resulting bread was similar in profile to the Polish Cottage Ryes I had made before, but the crumb was much more open and chewy. I attribute this to the flour I used, in large part, but also to the better gluten development.

This is a "sourdough rye." There is no added yeast. It is made with a rye sour. I made my sour from my usual starter by giving it two feedings with whole rye flour. All the rye in the dough is from the rye sour.

Polish Cottage Rye -2-1/2 pound boule

As you can see, this bread has a rather low profile. The slack dough spreads once it is dumped from the banneton onto the peel. It has only moderate oven spring. I should have put a ruler on the cutting board to provide a sense of scale, but this bread is just about 11" across. 

Polish Cottage Rye - Crumb close-up

As with most sourdough rye breads, this one benefits from deferring slicing until at least 12 hours after it has baked. I am so proud of myself! This is the first time I actually had the self-control to leave the bread uncut for 12 hours!

The flavor of this bread is marvelous. It is moderately sour with a complex flavor. The rye flavor is very much "there," but it does not dominate. 

I recommend this bread to any rye-lover who wants to explore beyond "Deli Rye" but isn't quite ready for the 70-100% ryes. Because it has a high percentage of bread flour, the dough acts like a "regular" sourdough, not like the sticky dough of a high-percentage rye. I also recommend it to any sourdough lover. There are so many things to be said about adding some rye flour to a "white" sourdough, the topic deserves it's own entry.  For now, I'll just leave it at, "Try it! You'll like it!"

David

Today's bake was Daniel Leader's Whole Wheat Genzano Country Bread, from his Local Breads book.  This bread combines a biga naturale for flavor with yeast for shorter, more predictable fermentation times.

The formula is straight-forward: the biga, water, equal parts whole wheat and bread flours, salt and yeast.  Final hydration works out to about 77%.  Based on Leader's description of the dough, I was expecting something almost in the ciabatta realm.  It turned out to be less gloppy than a ciabatta dough, perhaps because of the extra absorbency of the whole wheat flour.  Still, it was definitely better handled by the mixer than by hand.  I'm a little leery of his mixing directions, though.  First, he recommends an 10-minute run at speed 8 on a Kitchen Aid, followed by an 8-10 minute run at speed 10.  I didn't run it quite that long, or quite that fast, since I was seeing good gluten development.  Plus, the dough was clearing the sides of the bowl, even though it was very sticky.  The directions indicated that it probably cause the mixer to walk.  Hah!  I had to hold it down, what with the ball of dough slapping and releasing from the sides of the bowl.

After the mixing/kneading stage, the dough is dumped into an oiled container for 1-1.5 hours until it doubles.  It is then treated to a series of stretch and folds in the container (I used a plastic bowl scraper for this exercise), then allowed to double again.  Having finished bulk fermentation, the dough is scraped out onto a floured counter, divided in two, and (very gently) shaped into rough, rectangular loaves that are placed on bran-strewn pieces of parchment paper for their final rise.  The risen loaves go onto stone in a preheated oven, with steam.  The initial temperature is 450 F, which is dropped to 400 F for the second part of the bake.  Oven-spring was good.  The crust color is a deep brown, but not the near-black color promised in the formula.

The finished bread looks like this:

The crust is thin and crackly, although I expect it will soften because of the internal moisture.  The flavor is very good; closer to that of a yeasted bread than to a sourdough but with some complexity that isn't usually present in a straight dough.  There doesn't seem to be the bitterness that sometimes shows up in whole wheat breads.  The crumb is moderately open, though nothing like the big holes of a ciabatta.  That's not bad, since this will be used primarily for sandwiches.  The breads are relatively light in weight for their size, another indicator of an open crumb.  I'll have to get a crumb shot, later.

I will definitely make this again, although I may experiment with leaving out the yeast.  That should swing the flavor profile in a whole 'nother direction.  Before getting to that, though, I have my eye on a couple of different rye recipes from Local Breads.

Paul

I'm getting worried about my Méteils au Blue. The dough was suppose to double in 4 hours. It's been almost 4 hours and it's only risen a tiny bit. Should I just give it more time?

--Pamela

Since I'm not having any luck with making rye chops, I'm going to try Leader's Little Blue Cheese Rye Loaves from Local Breads. I see some discussion about this bread from a couple of years ago. Are there typos in Leader's recipes or just typos in posts for his recipes. I read something about Mini Oven and a red pen. Mini, if you could help me out here, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Pamela

My usual sourdough starter is semi-firm. I make it at a 1:3:4 ratio of starter to water to flour. Many of the sourdough bakers on TFL favor a 1:2:2 ratio, but fewer seem to use a true "liquid levain" which is more like 125% hydration. I was curious to try a pain au levain using a liquid starter and found the Pain au Campagne recipe in Leader's "Local Breads."

This recipe calls for a 50% hydration dough to which you add 62% (baker's percentage) liquid levain, ending up with a moderately tacky dough. The levain is added after the flour and water are mixed and allowed a 20 minute autolyse. The autolyse mixture is very, very stiff, and it takes a lot of mixing to get the very liquid levain incorporated into the dough. 

The resulting bread has a very nice flavor, but not significantly different from the pains de campagnes I make with my usual starter.

Of greater interest was the final shape of the loaves. They are formed as boules, and I proofed them in round, linen-lined wicker bannetons. I scored them with 3 parellel cuts, as Leader recommends. The loaves took an oblong form even before I could load them in the oven. This is a graphic illustration of the effect of this pattern of scoring on loaf shape, as described by Suas in "Advanced Bread and Pastry" and referenced in my Scoring Tutorial. (See the TFL Handbook.)

http://tfl.thefreshloaf.com/handbook/scoring

David

Today I tried the Genzano Country Bread recipe from Daniel Leaders's new book "Local Breads"

Even though he talked about how very wet this dough was, nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. (See attached pictures below)

Following the recipe, I kneaded the dough for about 25 minutes in a standing mixer, let it ferment for the appropriate time, poured it onto the counter and shaped into loaves. The dough was so wet I actually ended up have to use Bertinet's dough slapping method to shape it into anything resembling a boule.

Any ideas what went wrong??

(sorry these photos are sideways!)