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I like seeds in bread and Chad Robertson's Seeded Bread really intrigued me with the quantity and the variety of seeds in this particular bread. I have long given up on using Robertson's flour quantities and methods but I do use his creations for inspiration. The methods are right out of FWSY for the most part.

The levain was created out of 40 grams starter that had been fed the night before, 200 grams high extraction flour and 160 grams of water to make a 80% levain. I left that to rise for approximately 6 and a half hours at a room temperature of 74/76 F (the room got warmer as the day went by).

I toasted the following seeds in a frying pan:

100 g flaxseeds

100 g sesame seeds

100 g poppy seeds

50 g sunflower seeds

50 pumpkin seeds

50 g caraway

The flax seeds and the caraway were toasted separately from the rest because the flax seeds needed to soak in 180 g of hot water and the caraway seeds were to be coarsely ground after toasting. The remainder were toasted together in the frying pan. Once the flax seeds had cooled down somewhat, I added the rest of the seeds and let them absorb all of the liquid.

Autolyse consisted of:

300 g high extraction flour

400 g all unbleached all purpose flour

100 g wholegrain wheat flour

26 g of wheatgerm

42 g of vital wheat gluten (I added this because I thought that with the weight of all of these seeds, the dough needed all the help it could get)

660 g of water at 85F

I let this autolyse for one hour. Then I added:

22 g of salt

1/2 tsp yeast

360 g of the above levain

I mixed everything well by hand and let the dough rest for 10 minutes. Then I added the seek soaker and a bit more water because the dough seemed a bit dry. I didn't measure the water but it was probably a few tablespoons. I really had to work to get all the seeds incorporated in the dough. It was a huge quantity of seeds. My dough temperature ended up being 77F.

I did four sets of stretches and folds a half hour apart. The dough was slightly more than doubled about 3 hours later. It was very poofy (is that a word?) and felt awesome!

I divided the dough, shaped it and put it in the baskets. I didn't use a bench rest. I tried to get a tight skin on the boules but I over floured my counter and the dough just couldn't get a grip. The result was very inflated boules that just about filled my baskets.

I used my little marked jar to estimate the rise but I got nervous when it reached about 1.5 times the volume. I did the finger poke test and it told me that the dough was ready to go into the oven. 

The oven with the dutch ovens was preheated to 500F so I sprinkled cornmeal in the bottom of the pots, dropped in the loaves, spritzed the loaves with water and sprinkled seeds on top. I usually put the seeds in the proofing baskets but I forgot and in hindsight, my baskets are pretty open weaved so I might have lost a lot of the seeds through the weave. 

The loaves baked at 500F for 20 minutes, then the temperature was dropped to 450F for 10 more minutes. I took the lids off and baked for another 25 minutes.

Notes: Spritzing the water on the loaves to make the seeds stick worked just fine. I didn't get a huge oven rise but it was decent enough to get a good crumb. I am not sure but I think that even with me watching the dough and my little handy dandy graduated proofing tool, I may have over proofed it a bit even though it looked like it has risen only one and a half times. The loaves spread out quite a bit when I turned them out and looked like they deflated a bit when dropped in the dutch oven. By the way, the taste is excellent in spite of the huge amount of caraway seeds in this combo. I must admit though that if I make this again, I won't be including the caraway seeds. They overpower the rest of the seeds in terms of flavour.

No, we aren't revisiting the Roaring 20's or peeking at undergarments here (at least not right now!).  Once more with a batch of the dmsnyder based Semolina Capriccioso, with a twist courtesy of alfanso.  Since these are capricious by moniker I decided to give them each a different look.  One long and one chubby batard, one and two scores across them respectively.  And two baguettes, single scored and four scored across these two scrawnier runts of the litter.

This is a fairly high hydration dough at 80%.  Therefore the dough is "heavier" with more water to shed during the bake than a lesser hydrated dough which would have a greater preponderance of flours.  Add to that the sesame seeds, which even though quite minuscule in weight, still contribute to weighing down the moist dough on the "flap" that is destined to bloom, however much or little.

And I have a theory, unfounded as it may be for a high hydration dough such as this and the added weight of the seeds on the "flap"considered.   The shorter the score combined with the lesser girth of a shaped dough, has a direct influence on the bloom for that bread.  As you can see, the baguette with four scores had decent but quite modest bloom, whereas the single scored baguette did not suffer quite as distinct a loss of bloom.  Both of the batards have a significant amount of heft below the scores as well as long enough scores to support the upward oven spring.

These probably would have benefited from a more angled scoring by the lame than I did, but as we say in alfanso's hometown of Baguetteville-sur-Bronx "say luh V".

So...am I right?  Who the heck knows?  Tasty?  You bet.  Tastier than the earlier version which uses less durum, but also olive oil and sugar, both ingredients missing from these?  I haven't a clue as I can't do a side by side comparison, and I'm not capable of discerning what are probably subtle taste differences across bakes.  But I like these because it takes me back to the pure FWS than those with the oil and sugar added.

A few particulars:

• 2x600g batards, 2x~285g baguettes,
• 80% overall hydration,
• 75% hydration levain represents ~36% of non-levain flour and ~16% total dough weight.
• 60% durum flour, 23% bread, (10% AP, 7% WW & rye - all in levain)  flours.  
• Autolyse, hand mix, ferment  ~4 hours,
• cold proof for the better part of 30 hours, bake direct from retard.  Way longer than I originally intended.
• 460dF oven with a lot of steam for 13 minutes,
• 30 min. baguettes, ~35 min. for batards w/ 2 additional minutes for venting.

alan