spelt

I got an awesome fathers day gift from my daughter this year. She is going to New York University so she has been running around the Big Apple for a couple of years now. One of her favorite spots to pick up bakery items is Amy's Bread, which sells a book with some of their recipes, and that was my gift :-)

I have been slowly going through it, reading about their general take on the art of baking bread and perusing the recipes trying to decide what to bake first. I've been on a bit of a spelt kick lately, so I decided to start out with the Organic Whole Grain Spelt with Flax and Sesame recipe.

Notice the white streaks on the crust? I have been having a problem with this for a very long time, but it has only shown up intermittently. I have made all sorts of adjustments to my methods, ingredients, and physical baking apparatus to try and figure out the source of the whitening of the crust to no avail. This book may have the answer!!!! In fact, at the end of this very recipe the book states that white streaks can occur due to INSUFFICIENT STEAM. Hallelujah! Definitely makes sense because the results were never consistent... perhaps I'm depending on how quickly I manage to close the oven door after applying the steam or how long my steaming apparatus was preheated? I got very excited after reading this and when I baked this bread, I made a number of adjustments to my steaming method to try and increase the amount of steam that I got. I definitely got more steam than usual, but the bread still has white streaks. Looks like I need to make further improvements. I also bought a large foil roasting pan to try the covered "self steaming" method, but it wouldn't work for this bake, which included two large loaf pans. Has anyone else had this issue? If so, how did you solve it?

Whitening aside, the crumb was quite dense, moist, and had a nice whole grain taste. However, it was also quite sour... almost too much. This is undoubtedly due to the modifications that I made to the recipe. The original recipe called for commercial yeast along with a levain. I've been spurning commercial yeast lately, so I decided to leave it out. However, I left everything else the same. This necessarily meant that the time tables would be stretched out by quite a bit. Also, in the original recipe, the bread is baked on the same day that the final dough is assembled. I said nuts to that! I'm sure that the long retarded proof that I gave it was the main reason for the kick that it had. It is 100% whole grain after all! If I were to do it over again, I would probably bake it on the same day. I may even add commercial yeast. I guess the recipe was written that way for a reason ;-)

I am leaving to Austria for two months, there will be no baking... Can't possibly imagine how it must feel: no kneading, no feeding your sourdough, no messing up in the kitchen. And my poor starter... I have just thrown it away in the bin, since none of my relatives seemed eager to look after it.

Anyway. I obviously could not leave my family without fresh bread, so I baked 5 loaves in just a couple of days: 2 pain au levain with whole-wheat, dark silesian rye,

rye with walnuts and

yeasted spelt loaf with mixed nuts and seeds

(original recipe belongs to Zorra from kochtopf.twoday.net and I should thank her for that!). However, I used a mixture of nust and seeds and since I had only dinkelvollkornmehl, that's what I used. Probably that is why I ended up with using about 200 gr of water in the final dough.

Even though, I have become quite a fan of sourdough breads and avoided baking with yeast only for a long time, I really enjoyed this one. It had a slightly sweet flavour and mixing the dough was really fun - I love the fact that it goes kind  of purple due to spelt.

So , I finally have one I want to share in my first post!  I have only been baking steadily for a couple of months now, and since I successfully captured some wild yeasties, have been using them exclusively.  I have also tried to simplify things as much as possible, hence have tended to keep my sourdough starter roughly the same hydration as my final dough.  As I have a regular day job, but don't want to limit my baking to weekends, I have been working on a means of fitting my baking into a regular day's schedule, and have come up with a technique that seems to work for me (made specific for this loaf):

The night before baking, I take the ~1 cup of starter that I have in my fridge out, and add 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup water and ~1/3 tsp salt.  I typically use rye or whole wheat, but this time I used organic spelt (the existing starter was ~80% spelt, 20% AP).  Mixed alltogether and left on the counter overnight.

Morning, 5:45am before going to work, added 3 cups organic AP flour, 1 1/2 cups water, 1 and a bit tsp salt.  Mixed together, and put down in the basement where it is a bit cooler.

Went to work.  Returned ~5:00pm.

Had roughly doubled.  The challenge has been to find a spot in the house that is the right temperature to leave the dough all day.  This has been a cool spring, so some days the basement is too cold, and I get almost no rise. Recently it has been a lot hotter, and I can get over-fermentation.  This still to be refined.  Nevertheless, today things worked out perfectly!

Cut ~1/2 cup of dough off to save as my next starter, stretched/folded/rested/formed a boule and let it sit in the colander for a couple hours to proof.  Next used the handy cast-iron dutch oven method, and results were most satisfactory.  The starter got fed (tripled) and immediately put in the fridge.

I have varied quantities of starter from batch to batch, and this quantity (~1 cup doubled the night before and then more than doubled the next morning) has given me the best flavour yet!  Not so sour that the wife won't eat it, but not as lightly-flavoured as I have been getting with half the quantity of starter.  Mmmmm.

Bit of an explosion on the crust, despite a cramped (as it was in the dutch oven) slashing with my handy straight razor.

Just a little sign of life to say hello and to show that I'm still happily baking, not as much as I would like too but still enjoying it very much.

The pictures show a freshly egg-washed Zopf and my spelt multigrain boule.

Thomas

Hey All,

Just wanted to tease you a bit.  I don't have pictures yet, but here is the recipe for something I will call the "Everything Levain".  I pretty much had all this stuff laying around in my kitchen, so I wanted to make a bread using all of it...  Here is the recipe below.  I will post pictures later this weekend.

Edit: So I finally cut into it.  A friend whom I gave a loaf said the crust was too crusty, and the inside was a bit "dense"...  My loaf, while it was very "crusty", I found the crumb to be pretty OK.  As for the taste, it's pretty OK.  There were so many things it it, that I can't really place any of the flavors individually...  I prefermented 50% of the total flour, with most of it being the mixture of bits.  Maybe next time I will preferment less, up the hydration, and bake it for a shorter amount of time...  Overall, I am pleased with this "bold" bake...  Enjoy!

Tim

3/16/10 - Everything Levain

Stiff Levain (60% Hydration)

440g - Bread Flour

70g  - Rye Berries (freshly ground)

70g  - Spelt Berries (freshly ground)

70g  - Hard Wheat Berries (freshly ground)

70g  - Millet (freshly ground)

70g  - Jasmine Brown Rice (freshly ground)

70g  - Cornmeal

70g  - Graham Flour (Bob's Red Mill)

70g  - 10 Grain Cereal (Bob's Red Mill)

600g - Water

100g - Firm Sourdough Starter (60% Hydration)

1700g - Total

Final Dough

750g - AP Flour

250g - Bread Flour

760g - Water

36g -  Kosher Salt

¾ Tablespoon - Instant Yeast

1700g - Stiff Levain

Yield - 3500g dough

3/16/10

Stiff Levain

7:30pm - Grind all grains

7:50pm - Mix all with wooden spoon until combined, knead with wet hands until rough dough is formed, cover and let rest.

11:30pm - Knead into ball, transfer to oiled container, cover and let rest on counter.

3/17/10

1:00am - Transfer to refrigerator overnight.

8:30am - Turn dough, shape into ball, return to refridgerator.

3/18/10

12:52pm - Take levain out of fridge, place on counter and let rest.

1:00pm - Mix flour/water from final dough, place in oiled container and let rest/autolyse in refrigerator.

6:04pm - Take dough out of fridge.  Measure out salt and yeast.  Cut up stiff levain into pieces and place onto dough, sprinkle with salt and yeast, knead 5 minutes and rest for 30 minutes, covered.

6:50pm - Knead dough 1 minute, cover let rest for 30 minutes.

7:20pm - Turn dough, cover let rest.

9:00pm - Divide dough into 3 equal pieces, shape, place in linen lined basket, covered with towel.  Proof for 90 minutes.

9:30pm - Arrange 2 baking stones on different  levels, arrange steam pan, turn on to 550F with convection, preheat for 1 hour.

10:30pm - Turn off convection, place 1 cup of water in steam pan, close door.  Turn boules out onto floured peel, slash as desired and load directly onto stone.  After last loaf is in, add 1 more cup of water to steam pan, close door.  Lower temp to 460F and bake 1 hr with no convection, rotating and shifting loaves between stones halfway through bake, lower to 430F for remaining half of bake.  Loaves are done when crust is deep brown, and internal temp is 210F.  Cool completely before cutting.