Yeah! My Whole Wheat Pain au Levain turned out to be ever so delightful! I achieved some nice oven spring, a good color, and a decent scoring pattern! I do believe my patience is starting to pay off. Here is the crumb 11 hours after baking, the next morning.

And if your wondering, this is just a slightly modified version of The Whole wheat hearth bread from WGB, I just tweaked it to use 1 oz of medium dark rye in the soaker.

Thanks TFL'ers for helping me out with this wonderful (some times painful) experience known as bread baking!

...more to come soon of course!

As some of you may have seen in my last few entries, I have been working on whole grain breads and particularly working on when I can tell when my loaf is ready for the oven. My last whole wheat loaf turned out to be a bit over proofed, and the time before, my whole wheat levain was underproofed. But I did not get discouraged, in fact, I made an agreement to keep on baking a loaf minimum each week, whether it is a sourdough whole wheat bread or a overnight autolyse expedition from Reinhart.

This time I went with the Multigrain Straun from Whole Grain Bread. Nothing seperates this from the formula in the book, I followed it closely, substituted the honey for agave though, mixed, let it rise, shaped and preheated the oven and stone and carefully, carefully, paid attention to the bread to find out when it was ready for the oven.

I pushed my clock aside this time and watched it on and off while studying assuring myself I would catch the loaf at it's prime and place it in the oven then! So I poked it at 30 minutes, it didn't really do much, so I went back to studying. About ten minutes later I poked it, it sprung back a bit, so I decieded to check back in five, and sure enough, the loaf sprung back about half way. So, being frantic I hastily scored the top of the loaf (resulting in what I thought to be a poor score pattern) and placed it on the stone, steamed and baked.

The end result...a loaf I am quite pleased with! And look - No finger indentations this time!

And then the crumb...

And now with my skills just a bit more sharpened when it comes to proofed dough, I think this coming week I will try my hand again at Hamelman's Whole Wheat Levain, hopefully resulting in a wonderful loaf with much better scoring.

Oh, and I managed to bake a blueberry coffee cake with a cinnamon streusel topping, delicious!

Last week I baked one of my favorite recipes, Hamelman's Whole Wheat Levain from Bread. The bake turned out successful I would say, especially since I finally was able to use my two week old liquid levain starter and achieve a delightful tang when the bread was sliced and eaten. One thing though is my batard (and boule) seemed to explode in the oven! Was this because of an unsuccessful scoring? Or did I let it rise to long? Any help would be appreciated in this manner, though I do kind of like the looks of it.

And then the crumb...

And finally the boule, sorry no crumb shot, though I will say it turned out a bit tighter then I would have liked.

So what might I have done wrong in this bake? Any help would be appreciated since I am always open to advice and will always be baking weekly hoping to only improve my methods and results!

My next bake is going to be Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough with increased Whole Wheat. I will be attempting this tomorrow (hopefully) and pictures will follow soon!

I'm a long time lurker and first time poster.

Last week I finally got a decent sourdough starter going, based on the instructions in Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. I used it successfully to make Pierre Nury’s Rustic Light Rye and some Sourdough Waffles, both of which came out well with the clear instructions provided. I decided to try making some 100% whole grain bread, which I've never had much success with, and finally settled on jmonkey's recipe.

I used the stretch and fold technique for kneading, shaped it into a boule, and baked it in a 450ºF oven on a stone. Also, since I can only get soft whole wheat here, I added vital wheat gluten to the flour to compensate (around 2-3 tsp/cup).

It might be too caramelized for some tastes, but I liked the way it came out (thanks jmonkey!). I expected the crumb to be more open based on what the recipe said, but I think I may have underproofed the loaf a bit. Next time I will also put the stone lower in the over since the bottom took much too long to finish. As far as taste goes, it was delicious, one of the best whole grain breads I've had. What do you think?

Chris

I am totally new to this forum but have been baking white bread for a few years. Now I am keen to try whole wheat and other varieties. However, on checking out some recipes I am stunned to see the large amount of sugar, syrup, honey and other sweeteners they call for. Is there a good technical reason for this or is it just that the American palate has become accustomed to sweetness in bread? My favorite white flour breas recipes only use enough sugar to get the yeast going. Usually very small amounts. After reading "In Defense of Food" we are attempting to reduce by large proportions the amount of refined and processed products we eat.

So I recently got into baking and tried a few different recipes in hopes of finding a great whole wheat loaf to make weekly. I tried a recipe by one of the threads,

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/wholewheathoneybread

I decided to cut the ingredients in half to make one loaf. With success, I made a nice loaf with a semi-soft crust and dense crumb. Bland but a purfect texture. Aside from leaving the salt out of the first datch, I tried a second time only to get a much drier dough after neading. I had a feeling this would result in a harder crust and was right.(NOTE:) I used half/half in the second batch rather thant 6 oz. of evaporated milk as was added in the first. What went wrong this second time around? Was the half/half a bad sub for evaporated milk?

Soft Crust Loaf

Hard Crust Loaf

second endeavor after coming back to my electric oven after a month of wood fired brick oven adventures. delicious little rolls for pretty much anything, for me it was a dinner roll.

pretty good rise for a 100% whole wheat, but that seems to be the standard since switching to natural leaven, open crumb, super moist. i was quite pleased. the crust was pretty good too even for the electric oven, although my heart still has a brick oven sized hole...

Hi Everyone,

I'm fairly new here and am still searching my way through all the informative posts. So please forgive me if this is a repeat question and kindly point me to right discussion.

I am trying to find a recipe that would help me make soft sandwich roll (sub like / torpedo) from whole rye + whole wheat. I would like rye to be around 20% but given the whole rye nature, I don't mind going down to 15% or 10% even.

My problem is that any recipe that I have tried with Rye, results in hard caramelized crust with dense structure. (OK AP + 15% mild rye was not dense - it was fluffy but crust was still hard).

Can you please point me to right direction (except for exit !!!) as I said I am fairly new here and relatively novice in bread making. (been experimenting for last year or two in non-continuous fashion.)

Thanks in advance,

NM

I made the Reinhart 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich bread (the first one in the book, I'm pretty sure) and it came out flat like a Ciabatta.  I tried to make a Batard, per the instructions, and it just didn't come out.  The dough lacked the strength to hold its shape for very long so it flattened out while proofing.

I used a Kitchenaid dough hook to do the mixing.  I am thinking that the dough needed to be stretched and folded somewhere in the process, maybe, to build up strength in the dough.  Anyone had any experience with this and know where I might be going wrong?

I'll post a picture of the pancake tonight. :)

I tried to include a picture, but I'm not adept enough with my photo editor and the online host.  Maybe another time.  But, trust me, they look and taste good.

They're the Four-Seed Snack Crackers on page 122 of Brother Juniper's Bread Book by Peter Reinhart.

Grind 1 cup each sunflower and pumpkin seeds into a flour in the blender.  Also grind 1/2 cup flax seeds in the coffee grinder.  He has you grinding all three seeds together, but the flax seeds did not break down properly.  Mix with 3-1/2 cups ww flour (or ap if you must), 1 cup sesame seeds, 1 teaspoon salt, 5 tablespoons honey, and 1/2 cup oil; add 6-8 ounces of water as needed to make a ball of dough. Knead about 10 minutes "until smooth, firm, but elastic, satiny rather than tacky" about 10 minutes.  Then place in an oiled bowl covered with plastic wrap for at least 10 minutes (I left it overnight).**

Divide into six pieces.  I rolled each piece into a ball and flattened it.  Then I placed five of the flattened balls on a cookie sheet in the freezer for a few hours before placing them in a freezer bag.  They'll keep up to three months.  Roll today's dough out to about 1/8 inch thick.  (It was still stiff from the refrigerator, so I nuked it for a few seconds before rolling.)  I found that my Sil-Pat (little brother to the Roul-Pat) was adequate because the dough was oily enough, but he warns that you should re-flour as needed.  Then he has you use a biscuit cutter or a pizza roller knife to cut out round or diamond shapes, but I used a plastic dough scraper - gently - on my Sil-Pat and cut out random shapes.  I just wanted crackers and wasn't trying to impress the bridge club.

Finally, you can mist the top of the crackers with water and sprinkle with more sesame seeds or other toppings, but I didn't.  I just baked in a 340-degree F oven for 20-25 minutes until they're light golden brown.  You're warned to let them cool for at least 20 minutes so that they'll crisp up.

My first batch is now almost gone.  When I'm ready, I'll pull out another piece of dough, defrost it, and repeat.  I can keep the crackers coming with just a little effort.

Rosalie

**EDIT:  PLACE IN REFRIGERATOR - Details! Details!