Beer Tang Seed Zhong Half Whole Sprouted 9 Grain SD with Baked Scald

The garden had volunteer daisies and Red Romaine lettuce growing side by side.

Lucy has been busy working on here new billion-dollar invention of bio-nanobots that you put into the flour after milling that would go to work as soon as you added water to mix for an autolyze and then tell you when to add the salt and leaven.  That sounded pretty good since I have forgotten to the salt before but she wasn’t done. 

 Then they would knead and bulk ferment the dough, pre-shape and shape it into what ever shape you specified so you could place it in the form and bag it for retard and then tell you when it is properly proofed to get it out of the fridge to unmold.

The bio-nanobots would talk to your oven to get it properly preheated for you to bake, slash the bread for you and then tell you when the bread was perfectly done.   I told Lucy that these new bio-nanobots don’t leave much in the bread making process for us poor humans to do in the future and I’m not sure we would like that very much.

Lucy said that she was just fixing the bread stuff humans, especially me,  do poorly.  All she had to do to prove her point was look at my bread blog which turned out to be the inspiration for her latest invention.  I thought that was a low blow even for a her and any Bread Baking Apprentice 2nd Class for that matter.  Her response was that the truth doesn’t change just because fools like me don’t agree with it.

It quickly went downhill from there.  I asked her if she knew that people used to eat dogs for Easter or if she knew that I was especially fond of dogs after that late night evening in a fine Korean restaurant in LA 25 years ago where Canine was King.  Well, you get the drift.  So she came up with this ridiculously complicated recipe for this week’s bake ……so….. I just ignored one whole days’ worth of it to get down to 4 days instead of 5 – after I forgot to start the recipe on time on Monday by starting the sprouts!

This one started with 9 grain sprouts for 50% of the flour with the other 50% KA bread flour.  Once the sprouts were dried, milled and sifted to get pout the 17% hard bit extraction we came up with 42 grams of them.  These were fed to the 3 stage levain build for the first 2 feedings with the high extraction sprouted flour making up of part of the 3rd levain build.

Normally we would retard the levain for 36 hours but this is where the 24 hour reduction came into the equation.  We dropped 24 hours of it and settled for a 12 hour retard.  Lucy also specified a weird Tang Zhong of a bottle of Full Sail Amber Ale and 100 g of KA bread flour.  Once it hit 158 F we took it off the heat to cool down

The 2 hour autolyze was all of the Tang Zhong, the rest of the bread flour and the remaining portion of the high extraction 9 grain flour with the salt sprinkled on top.  Once the autolyze was mixed we started on the 2 hour baked seed scald.

First we toasted the seeds and then ground them in the coffee mill into flour. Then we added twice their weight in water (160 g) and 40 g of the of the autolyse dough mix, with the red malt and white malts and baked this mass in the mini oven for two hours stirring every 30 minutes.

Finally got around to making that French classic, or Italian, Lettuce Soup that Reynard reminded me of not long ago,  This one had smoked sausage and grilled chicken in it too,

The we added the 15 g of extra water to the autolyze to pinch in the salt before doing the first set of 60 slap and folds to mix in the salt and get the gluten development going.  We then did 2 more sets of 20 slap and folds before adding in the baked seed, autolyse and malt scald on the first of 3 sets of stretch and folds from the compass points

Poblano and sweet corn kernel, Witch Yeast and YW corn bread takes a lot longer to make than the BP kind:-).

All of the dough manipulations were done on 20 minute increments.  We let the dough rest for 30 minutes before pre-shaping and shaping into a squat oval and placing it into a rice floured basket and bagged for a an 19 hour shaped retard in the fridge.

When we took the dough out the next morning we got the New BOB (Big Old Betsy) preheated to 500 F with the combo cooker inside.  We un-molded the dough onto parchment on a peel, slashed it twice and loaded it into the CC.

After 20 minutes of steam at 425 F we baked it for 5 minutes at 425 F convection with the lid off before taking it off the CC cast iron bottom to let it finish on the stone for another 30 minutes of baking till it hit 208 F – then temperature we like for a 50% whole grain bread.

Grilled chicken and cheese sandwich to go with a very tasty carrot, butternut squash and Swiss chard soup for lunch today.  

It spread a bit more than it bloomed and sprang but it did eventually brown and crisp up.  We will have to see how the crumb came out after it cools. It sure smelled good coming out of the oven.  Lucy nearly pulled out all of her bag of tricks to get this one to taste just right.  We shall see.   Well I'm kind of stunned that the bread isn't more open but It isn't totally dense either.  What saves it is the taste - It is delicious.  Plain, toasted with butter......the seeds really come through, very complex, hearty and earth earthy  ........  I've eaten a quarter of it just trying to figure out why it isn't as open as it looked like it would be.  I won't mind eating it with my eyes closed and dreaming about what should have bene:-).   Maybe I should ave baked at 475 to begin with instead of 425 F?  Any ideas?  .

Don't forget that salad