With my bread supply almost depleted and my neighbors arriving for their monthly visit to there retreat… I charged up my stiff Levain and was ready to conquer another recipe from Local Breads for my weekly bread. I thumbed through the chapter with stiff dough levain recipes and to my complete surprise, I baked them all! I did not have time to convert the waiting stiff levain to a liquid one…so I went into the pantry to inventory my baking supplies and discovered I had lots of high extraction flour, spelt and an unopened bag of quinoa (never used it before in pain).  And with that the experiment was on.  The first thing that came to mind was a giant Poilane-inspired Miche with mixed flours …. while the other side of my brain was saying “try something sure-fire, something to share with your neighbors.” Well -- throwing caution to the wind -- I went for the Miche! I wrote out the recipe and doubled it substituting some (approx. 1/3) of the whole wheat flour for the spelt and quinoa…and then adding a smidgen of rye.  After an hour of antolyse, and another 15 minutes of slapping and smearing a very slack dough into workable dough, I took a breather and wiped the sweat for my brow.

When I returned to my experiment rejuvenated by a good cup of strong French style coffee, I uncovered the dough to find the once taut boule was now, shall we say, relaxed and spread out on the counter . . . ugggh.  As I started to panic I heard a voice in my head saying “you can never over knead a dough by hand”.  So I continued the French kneading for another ten minutes, did a window pane test, and it passed the test!  I threw the still slack dough into a bowl for one hour to ferment, crossed my fingers and hung my laundry out to dry. After two series of stretch and folds in the bowl, I covered it back up and put it into the 76° proofing chamber for two hours before shaping. Shaping the slack dough into a miche was a little more artful than I had planned for…but these loaves gently made their way into the linen lined bowl and banneton for the final two hour proofing. And that was my big mistake!

When I finally looked in after two hours, it had more than doubled and looked like a pillowy, bowl of loose Jell-O full of air bubbles. Because of the size of the boules…and the size of my oven…I put the smaller one in the fridge to slow things down, and gently turned the other out onto a piece of parchment paper, slashing it swiftly with four crossing lines. The only thing that comes to mind when trying to describe the sensation of slashing the miche,  is the feeling you have when running over a nail on your bike…first you hear the pop and then you see it slowly deflate.  Sound familiar?

Feeling a bit deflated myself…I placed the miche in the awaiting, steamy oven for its trial by fire!  As I peered through the glass of the oven door, I was a bit relieved to see the loaf making a bit of a comeback.  Although it did have a little oven spring, it wasn’t what I was hoping for.  Though it wasn’t a pancake, let’s just say it had a low profile, something more similar to a Pointe-à-Callière Miche!  After baking the other loaf and letting it cool, I cut into the small loaf to see the outcome. The tan crumb was riddled with small even bubbles, the crust was crisp and brittle….and the taste was even better than I expected. It had a very moist, creamy mouth feel with a bit of a tang, but not too much for my French neighbors' pallets …they really enjoyed it.  I will be very curious to see how the flavor transforms over the next couple of days of eating. This is one I definitely will have to revisit again!

Thing to remember next time:

• Try pre-fermenting some of the spelt and quinoa...
• Hold back some of the water in the initial mix (I knew that), you can always add it to get the necessary consistency.
• May be leave out the autolyse?
• Either lower the temperature for the final proofing or cut it back to one hour.
• AND: DO NOT TAKE A NAP DURING THE FINAL PROOFING!

If you want to see the recipe and MORE pictures...you are just a click away... Weekendloafer.com

Hi there, hope you can help me. I am living in the Andes of Ecuador, so I am doubly challenged where bread-making is concerned. I have to deal with very high altitude, AND a total inavailability of bread flour/gluten. On the latter, I am wondering if quinoa flour (which is a cheap staple here) could be a possible solution. I know nothing about it, I'm afraid, but having read that gluten is a wheat protein, and having read that quinoa is very high in protein, could adding quinoa flour help to achieve the stretchy, spongy texture that I so love?

Thanks so much!

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Hi,

I am about to bake my first loaf bread in the oven. I will do sourdough soon but for now I wanted to just bake something up quickly.

I am looking at spelt flour bread recipes on the internet. I have a big bag of wholemeal spelt flour.

I am just weighing up whether to use half whole half white for lighter bread, or whether mixing quinoa and whole spelt would work??? If so how much (50/50??)

Thanks

I just thought I would share the recipe I came up with for the quinoa flour. I incorporated it into one of my other recipes I created a while back. It isn't a high percent of quinoa, but it sure does come through in the bread. This is not a gluten free recipe.

Honey Grain Bread

2 3/4 cups water (1/4 c. used to proof yeast)
1 T. Salt
5 T. Butter or Olive Oil
5 T. Honey (use 1 T. in proofing yeast)
3 cups Bread Flour
1 cup Quinoa Flour
1 cup Flax Flour
2 1/2 cups White Whole Wheat Flour
1 1/3 cups Quick Cook Oats
5 t. yeast
2 T. vital gluten

Set to ferment over night or longer
2 1/2 c. water
2 1/2 c. white whole wheat flour
2 c. bread flour

I proofed my yeast in 1/4 c. warm water, 1 T. honey, 5 t. yeast.

I proof the yeast while I am adding the other ingredients to my mixer bowl that has the fermented flour in it. Sometimes depending on the amount of moisture in the air I have had to add an extra 1/4 c. of flour.

I set my mixer to mix for 12 minutes, but keep an eye on it. I have noticed that when I have let my fermented flours go for longer then 12 hours or so then it takes a lot less mixing to work the gluten up.

Once the dough has been mixed and is looking smooth and stretchy I like to scrape it out of the mixer bowl and kneed if for a little bit to see how it feels. Even though I enjoy my mixer I still like to kneed the dough. It is a great way to releave stress. Anyways, I set it aside now in a greased bowl and cover and let rise for 2.5 to 3 hours, until it doubles in size. I have been told I should let it rise twice before shaping it and placing on a baking pan or in a bread pan, but so far I have only done a single rise before placing in the pans. Then I slit the tops with a razor blade and let rise covered for 1 hr. (Next time I am going to try a little longer rise in the pans and also try a double rise before shaping.

I had put them in a cold oven and turned the oven to 400 degrees for 10 minutes, turned it down to 350 degrees after that and let bake an additional 25 minutes. They did not get a spring in the oven at all so I think I will put them in a warmed oven next time because that is how I normal do it, but wanted to try something different this time.

The bread was not heavy at all and has a delightful nutty flavor and when toasted it melts in the mouth and has a great crunch to it. We have not been able to keep the bread very long as it is gobbled up long before I usually make my next batch of bread. I might double this recipe for 4 loaves instead, but I do enjoy baking.

A few things I want to try with this next time as well is getting a stone for the oven and doing artisan loaves with it again. This might sound strange, but the artisan loaves had much more flavor then the loaves in the pan.

I went down to our local mill and purchased some exotic flours the other day.  I want to use them as additions to our favorite whole wheat recipe.  I was just wondering if anyone else has worked with these flours and has some good recipes for them.  I started out today by adding some quinoa to the recipe and it came out dense, but boy was it good.

Thank in advance.
Lydia

So today i started a double batch variant of a multigrain hearth bread in the PR delayed fermentation/epoxy style. I decided to add 12ozs of cooked brown rice, quinoa, and amaranth grains for extra protein; i've also found that the quinoa sometimes gives a pleasant little *pop* if you happen to catch a grain between your teeth while eating the bread. It's "retarding" now; meaning I got lazy, and didn't want to bake it tonight so i left the bowl in the cold basement to do its thing.

I just pulled my Quinoa Struan out of the oven a little while ago, and I'm rather pleased with the results.