spelt

Springtime is outdoor time.  Meaning less baking time :-(.  So I'm pleased to have worked up this 36h labor-lite levain.  It has very satisfyingly complex flavor, surprisingly light crumb and an irresistible crust when baked boldly.  Prep is facilitated by using the same flours (a modified Rubaud mix) for both levain and dough.  Many thanks to Ian(ArsP) via PiPs for novel (to me) process pointers.

Click the table below to go to a working Google spreadsheet

First Morning    
1.  Mix final levain build in 25˚C (77˚F) water.  Incubate @ 25˚C (77˚F). If possible (not essential), aerate levain and let rise 1-2X before using.                    
2. Mix final dough's flours in RT water.  "Enzymatically preferment" at 20-22˚C (68-72˚F).

First Evening
3.  Mix salt and levain into autolysed flour with pincer & FF until dough comes together.                     
4.  Bulk ferment ~2h @ 25˚C (77˚F) w/2-4 folds early.  Rest, shape & refrigerate.

Second Evening    
5. Proof 1-2h @ 20-25˚C (68-77˚F).                    
6. Bake 20' @ 230˚C (450˚F) w/steam, then 12' @ 215˚C (420˚F) with convection  (watch it), longer for loaves > 750 gr.

The "Rubaud*" flour mix is a slight modification of Gerard Rubaud's formula.  My "*" version is

35% AP
25% Bread Flour
30% Whole Wheat
7% Spelt
3% Rye

The process exploits Ian(ArsP)'s "enzymatic preferment" during Day 1.  In theory, this saltless soaker is intended to release free amino acids by proteolysis from seed storage proteins, enhancing Maillard activity in the oven.  It also performs as much conventional autolyse as any dough could ask for.  Aerating the levain (stirring it down) releases more free amino acids in the levain, and it's interesting to see it grow back up, in the couple of bakes (weekends) where I actually had a chance to do that.

As Ian(ArsP) points out in his blog, it's convenient to start the levain build and enzymatic preferment at the same time.  Easily done before leaving for work in the morning.  Mixing, folding and bulk are performed that evening, with the dough rested, shaped and refrigerated before bed.  The dough moves slowly during the 24h fridge retard, but comes back to life when retrieved to warm up while the oven is doing the same, or a bit longer. 

Earlier bakes (below) with this process were at 78% hydration.  Cutting back to 75% unflattened the profile nicely.

This one's a keeper.  I'm anxious to apply this process to formulae I've previously come to know and love.

Happy Baking and Happy Spring!

Tom

My apprentice says that sane German bakers don’t usually try to do a pumpernickel style bake of; slowly reducing low temperatures over a long baking time, when baking white bread of any kind.  But, I figured that if professional bakers can call a bread with only 25% to 30% of rye flour in it a rye bread, then we should be able to DaPumperize a white bread too.  

I have to admit this is about the whitest bread we would usually make, but thankfully, only my apprentice is a German baker and she doesn't count when it comes to new and exciting things, bread wise, around here most always.  Now, if the bake goes horribly wrong, then it is all her fault - I mean she is only an apprentice.  She also looks ridiculous in that full body hair net when she bakes anyway.  So who could take what she says seriously looking like that?

We had to break the recent trend of 100% whole grain bakes or risk falling into the dark abyss.  Even though the dark side breads are fantastic and tempting, being stuck there forever is a little much if you aren’t a German bread baker,

We do like breads in the 25% - 30% whole grain range and they make fine sandwich breads.  Sandwiches, as some might know, are right up there with home made amber lager beer, as far as, my apprentice’s way of thinking goes - which admittedly isn't very far or even deep for that matter.

So, mainly out of boredom with a touch of insanity and a touch of spite, I decided to try to DaPuperize a white bread and see if the tremendous boost in flavor this technique usually provides would work with white bread too.  It was worth a shot even though a long one – otherwise you would think people would be doing it all the time as a matter of course – but they don’t.  Maybe it’s the 6 hour bake time that puts them off?

To give the bread a chance at being decent, we included bread spice seeds and the other usual other seeds we have recently been using, to give this bread a chance the bread at some depth and chew like our whole grain breads we DaPumperize.

Since this bake was planned to be 80% wheat we decided to use our new Not Mini’s Ancient WW starter ( a very powerful one)  to go along with a WW Yeast Water one and make separate levains.   All 25% of the whole grains are in the levains and are made up of a mix of WW, rye and spelt.

We upped the whole grains some using 100 g of wheat berries for the scald along with the Toadies and home made red and white malts.  We dropped the molasses and barley malt syrup for this bake. For much of the dough water we used the excess scald water. Aromatic seeds were the usual coriander, fennel, anise and bi-color caraway that we buzzed up a little after roasting this time.   The meaty seeds were also roasted and they included; black and white sesame seeds, cracked flax and 50 g each f pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

We followed usual routine of late by building the levains over 3 stages with the Not Mini’s Ancient WW one doubling every 3 hours from the first build on while the YW one took 4 hours. For the last build – its best showing.  We autolysed the dough flours, salt, malts and Toadies  for 3 hours before adding in the levains. 

10 minutes of Slap and folds followed when the slack dough really came around on the gluten development side.  After a 20 minute rest we stretched out the dough to do an envelope fold and dropped all the seeds and scald onto it and folded it up with a few S&F’s.   We did 2 more S&F’s on 20 minute intervals to further develop the gluten and to distribute the add in seeds thoroughly.

After a 30 minute rest we took half the dough and shaped it into a loaf and placed it into a large loaf tin, filling it less than half full and covering it with plastic.  The other half of the dough was left in the oiled and plastic covered bowl. Both were then refrigerated for 8 hours overnight.  They didn't expand much in the fridge.

In the morning, both were placed on a heating pad, covered with a cloth and allowed to warm up for 1 1/2 hours.  The bulk retarded dough was them shaped and placed into a basket for final proof on the heating pad with the tinned loaf.

After another 2 hours the tinned loaf was 1/2” under the rim.  We covered it with aluminum foil and placed it into the preheated 375 F mini oven for its 6 hour baking schedule where the bottom of the broiler pan was full of water to provide extra steam.    We didn't put any oat bran or poppy seeds on the top of the loaf because we wanted to see how dark a white DaPumpernickel could get in 6 hours.  The baking schedule follows:

375 F - 30 minutes

350 F - 30 minutes

325 F - 1 hour

300 F - 1 hour

275 F - 1 hour

250 F - 1 hour

225 F - 1 hour

For some extra thrill for my apprentice and a comparison baseline for me, we decided to bake the other half; the boule, as one would expect a loaf like this to be baked - just in case the DaPumpernickeled half was a total failure.

We decided to bake it in a hot DO but it took another hour and a half before we thought that it was ready for the oven.  After a poor slash job and lowering into the DO with a parchment sling, this boule was baked at 450 F for 20 minutes with the lid on and another 5 minutes with the lid off at 425 F convection before removing it from the DO and placing it on the lower stone to finish baking - another 10 minutes – 35 minutes total baking time.

We then turned the oven off and left the bread on the stone with the oven door ajar for 5 minutes to help crisp the crust.  The boule baked up nice and brown, blistered and the crust was crispy before went chewy as it cooled.  It smells terrific.

The loaf is now through with its slow and low bake and hit exactly 210 F at the end of 6 hours in the mini oven.  We will slice into this loaf after it has rested for 40 hours. Luckily we have tasted the boule and it is a fantastic loaf of bread.  The crumb is so soft and shreddable, glossy and open like it had butter, eggs and and cream in it - just delicious!   This bread cannot be sliced thin and 1/2" thick, or maybe a little more is its sweet spot. This is another bread could eat every day.  Already ate a quarter of the boule!.Can't wait for the loaf to be ready to slice thin.  It will have to go a long way to be better than the boule.

We got 33 slices oiut of the 83/4" DaPumpernickel loaf.  It wasn't as dark as a black pumpernickel about a couple of shades darker than the other part of this two way bake.  The flavor wasn't as deep or rich as a 100% whole grain pumpernickel but it tastes totally different than the regular baked boule.  This tastes like half a pumpernickel and is much more powerful a taste than the boule.  We like this bread a lot too!  For those that don't like pumpernickel but want something stronger than a rye then this loaf  might be the one for you!

Formula

  After returning from a great weekend at the first ever The Fresh Loaf get together just outside of Boston I ended up with some left over starters that I had brought with me.  I decided to use most of the corn flour/AP starter along with some AP starter to make my next bread.

Now that Spring has arrived I wanted to get into the mood so I used some chopped tomatoes in this one along with some cilantro roasted onion olive oil, Kamut flour and Turkey Hard Red Wheat flour and some Spelt flour.  I added some mashed potatoes to add some extra softness to the crumb.

I followed my normal procedure below for making the bread and I must say I was very happy with the results.  You can really taste the tomatoes and the specialty olive oil I added.  The nuttiness of the Kamut, Spelt and Turkey flour really combined to make a nice complex flavored bread.  The crumb was nice and open for such a whole grain bread and the potatoes really did help make the crumb nice and moist.

Directions

Starter Build 1 (Corn/AP Starter)

95 grams AP Flour (KAF)

55 grams Corn Flour (Bob's Red Mill)

50 grams Seed Starter at 65% hydration (If you use a 100% hydration starter you need to adjust the water amount and flour amount to compensate)

90 grams Water at room temperature.

Mix all the above ingredients together for about 1 minute and cover with plastic wrap.  Let it sit at room temperature for around 4-8 hours or until the starter has doubled.  I usually do this the night before.

Starter Build 2

75 grams AP Flour

25 grams Corn Flour

75 grams Water at room temperature

Mix all the ingredients into the starter from step 1 until they are incorporated.  Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit for 4-6 hours or until doubled.  You can then refrigerate for up to 1  day or use in the main dough immediately.  Note: You can either use all of this starter or per the recipe below use only 300 grams and combine with 125 grams of a AP starter at 65% hydration.

Main Dough Ingredients

300 grams Kamut Flour

150 grams Turkey Red Hard Wheat Flour

130 grams Whole Spelt Flour

200 grams Mashed Potatoes

130 grams Diced Tomatoes Drained (I used a can and drained very well)

18 grams Seas Salt

28 grams Cilantro, Roasted Onion Infused Olive Oil

415 grams Water

Main Dough Procedure

Mix the flours, and 365 grams of the water together in your mixer or by hand until it just starts to come together, maybe about 1 minute.  Let it rest in your work bowl covered for 20-30 minutes.  Next add the salt, starter (cut into about 7-8 pieces), oil, and tomatoes and mix on low for a minute.  Add the rest of the water unless the dough is way too wet.   Mix on low-speed for another 3 minutes.  Remove the dough from your bowl and place it in a lightly oiled bowl or work surface and do several stretch and folds.  Let it rest covered for 10-15 minutes and then do another stretch and fold.  Let it rest another 10-15 minutes and do one additional stretch and fold.  After a total of 2 hours place your covered bowl in the refrigerator and let it rest for 12 to 24 hours.

When you are ready to bake remove the bowl from the refrigerator and let it set out at room temperature still covered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  Remove the dough and shape as desired.  Place your dough into your proofing basket(s) and cover with a moist tea towel or plastic wrap sprayed with cooking spray.  The dough will take 1.5 to 2 hours depending on your room temperature.  Let the dough dictate when it is read to bake not the clock.

Around 45 minutes before ready to bake, pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees F. and prepare it for steam.  I have a heavy-duty baking pan on the bottom rack of my oven with 1 baking stone on above the pan and one on the top shelf.  I pour 1 cup of boiling water in the pan right after I place the dough in the oven.

Right before you are ready to put them in the oven, score as desired and then add 1 cup of boiling water to your steam pan or follow your own steam procedure.

After 1 minute lower the temperature to 450 degrees.  Bake for 35-50 minutes until the crust is nice and brown and the internal temperature of the bread is 205 degrees.

Take the bread out of the oven when done and let it cool on a bakers rack before for at least 2 hours before eating.

Lucy hard at work

Locked up indoors while mending from some winter crud, Saturday night I took my recently refreshed liquid levain and made two preferments. One whole wheat and one whole spelt. Sunday morning I added them to some water, then added bread flour, salt, and yeast. Fermented, stretch fold, ferment, shape, proof, bake. Seems no matter what I do, the sharp edges of the spelt bran never soften. Energy bread,s surface I make using spelt, feels like 220 grit sandpaper. I fined nothing wrong with it, but find spelt is the only whole grain flour wwhere I experience  rougher the texture.

This bake was similar to the last one with a few additions.  We added some spelt and rye upping the whole grains to 60%.  We upped the water roux another 40% or so because we liked the last bake so much and 40 percent more of fine tasting has to be teeth dropping,.  We added aromatic seeds including coriander, anise, black and brown caraway and fennel.  We also put in some pumpkin and sunflower seeds and some pistachio nuts.

Since this bread got larger and more weighty, we decided to make a boule instead of a loaf and hope to be able to turn it out into a round cake pan before putting it into the hot MagnaWare turkey roaster.

This bread is even wetter than the last one, in the very high 70’s at least and we didn’t want it to spread out too much so, the cake pan would have been useful to hold the boule together and keep the spread to a minimum but it wouldn't fit.

We stuck to the 4 and 40 hour method of the last bake hoping the extra whole grains wouldn’t cause the loaf to ferment too much in the fridge.  After 24 hours it looked fine so we cross our fingers and hope that it will hold up after the last loaf over proofed.

This time we will bake this bread cold out of the fridge hoping to catch it before this one can over proof.  Since we had so much add ins to incorporate, we divided them into 3 separate adds – one for each S&F.  The scald went in first followed by the aromatic seeds and then by the rest of the seeds and pistachios all 15 minutes apart.

Also trying to keep the bread from over proofing, instead of an hour of ferment on the counter after S&F’s and  after shaping we cut these down to 30 minutes each.  And instead of S&F’s this dough was so wet we did French swlap and folds to incorporate the add ins instead.  It is really weird to have an apprentice speaking French with a German accent.

The bread un-molded easily onto parchment that was lowered after a quick T-Rex slash into a cold aluminum DO.  The DO was placed into a cold oven that was set for 450 F.  When the beeper went off (about 20 minutes later), saying the oven was at temperature, we set the timer for 25 minutes of steaming woth the lid on. 

After 25 minutes we took the lid off and turned the oven down to 425 F convection this time.  5 minutes later we took the bread out of the CO and placed it on the stone where it hit 205 F on the inside in 6 minutes.  Total time in the oven cold and hot was right at 56 minutes. 

We let the boule crisp on the stone in an off oven with the door ajar for 10 minutes.  Can’t wait to cut into this bread because the smell off the aromatic seeds is quite nice and near intoxicating.  I was hoping to wait 24 hours to cut this bread open but ……

Sadly, this bread also had little spring and bloom but it didn’t collapse either – just like the last bake.  It may be that the 40 hour retard is too much when using a YW and SD levain in conjunction with a biga and Tang Zhong.  That is the great thing about bread.  With a baseline established there is no telling what might be possible.

Janet's mash with the whole multi-grains and 3 yeast boosters, seeds nuts and scald really made this bread taste fantastic.  If you were stranded on an island this is the bread you would want to take with you.  I thought the last batch was tasty but this puts it to shame. the aromatic seeds really put it over the top.  The crumb isn't as open as the last bake but this one is more glossy and it has way more whole grains that we love so much.  My apprentice finds it much more difficult to eat holes anyway.... and this bread is plenty airy enough as it is.

Formula

A commuter-friend travelling with me to London on the train used to live in Ravensburg, in a region in Germany called Oberschwaben.

One day he told me he really misses a speciality from there called Seelen.

They are rolls with an open crumb and a slightly chewy crust, sprinkled with caraway and coarse salt.

Searching the internet I found a number of recipes, and some descriptions of the "original": a roll made with spelt, using high hydration, long fermentation, and a wet, hot bake.

The recipes I found were all nothing like the original description, so I decided to improvise, and I am very happy with the result:

Here the formula and instructions (1000g for 6 rolls):

Google spreadsheet

** UPDATE **

Here some pictures of the production process from a bakery in Schwaben:

http://www.seelen-wie-frueher.de/Bilder/bilder.html

In addition to Breadsong's post and Toad.de.b's post, I have a couple more loaves to add from Ken Forkish's Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast.  

I have to say I've really been enjoying baking from this book, it has opened up my repetoire to include a style of SD bread featuring low levain amounts (only 10-12% of the main dough flour is used to build the levain) and extended bulk ferments.  This style is different from Hammelman, and bears some resemblance to Chad Roberston's loaves, though Mr. Forkish seems to be a better teacher and to include more of the details needed for a novice to succeed.  The only drawbacks- and they are small compared to the deliciousness of his breads- are the narrow scope of recipes (no soakers, high percentage rye, brioche, baguette or long loaves, olive bread, fruit & nut bread, croissants, etc.) and the "supersize" scale of both levains and recipes (every recipe is made with 1,000 grams of flour).  

First up is the Bacon Sourdough, which I have to say is one of the best tasting loaves that has ever graced my kitchen.  I followed this recipe to the T, even mixing up the large levain.  Since I like bread best on the day it's baked, I generally prefer to bake smaller amounts more frequently and am not set up for this quantity of dough, so it was a bit of a hassle to find or jerry-rig enough containers, baskets, dutch ovens, proofers, etc.  But the incredibly moist crumb and crisp, red-brown crust on this loaf were superb, and the bacon hit just the right note- plenty to appreciate, but in balance with the crust and crumb flavors.  The photos on this are only of a small demi-loaf made of dough that I siphoned off of the two larger loaves; I wanted a small loaf to try the bread, as the two large loaves were given away as gifts.

The glossy, translucent walls on the larger holes:

The bubbles on the crust:

Next up is the Overnight Brown, a pure levain dough with 30% whole wheat.  For this bake, I decided to scale things back and also tried some whole grain spelt instead of traditional red wheat for the 30% whole grain portion of the dough.  For the scaling, I only made one loaf (50% of the main dough) and scaled back the levain to just a little more than what I needed for the main dough (150g of levain or 15% of what was called for).  Not sure that spelt was the right choice for this bread, it was good but not great.  I'd like to try it again with red wheat.

Here's the loaf, which Forkish doesn't score but rather bakes seam side up for a gnarly, rustic look.

The crumb:

And the bubbly crust that comes from his long room temp ferments:

Pizzas
I also made the levain pizza dough and the high-hydration poolish pizza dough, but my renditions did not turn out as well as the loaves.  They both seemed a bit over-fermented, in that they ended up a little too dense, without enough oven spring, and the flavors were a tad off.  These may be my fault, I suspect both my SD starter and my (commerical yeast) poolish were a little more ripe than was ideal, so I plan to try them again, being more careful to follow the times and temps exactly.  They were both a little harder to shape (elastic) than most of the pizza doughs I mix, which I attribute to the extra acidity from the long ferments.  In the case of the poolish, my pre-ferment only doubled in 12 hours, rather than the triple that is specified, so I let it go to 14 hours (recipe states 12-14 hours) in hopes of getting a bit more rise, which never happened.  This experience has taught me that with Forkish's recipes, it is better to err on the side of underfermenting than the other way around.

All in all, a great book that I've thoroughly enjoyed.

Round one of this fight can be found at this blog post.

The problem I had the first time was insufficient hydration. I certainly solved that problem...

I changed a bunch of things around this time, resulting in a far superior flavor (IMO), but going completely overboard on hydration to the point that it was more like ciabatta than bread. Here's what I did:

• First, instead of the spelt poolish, I mixed 1 ounce of my KA New England sourdough starter at 1:3:3 with whole milled spelt. After that sat overnight, I fed it again roughly 1:1:1 to get the volume for my poolish.
   
• Second, I made a soaker with water, all of the durum flour, and 100g of the spelt flour that was called for in the final dough. I didn't sift any of it -- though I did sift to 85% the final addition of spelt the next day. The soaker sat on the counter overnight. I did add the yeast called for into the final dough, so it wasn't a 100% sourdough fermentation.
   
• Third, I added a bunch of extra water to get the hydration up. Too far up, as it turned out. As you'll see below, the dough just spread out after having stuck to the banneton...

The taste came out fantastic. I still have half a loaf of the first round I baked of this, so we could do side-by-side tasting. It's not as sour as something done without any commercial yeast, but the tang is still there. So, for round three, I'll repeat everything except the flood of water and see how it comes out.