I liked the Buttermilk-Whole-Wheat-Bread which I baked just a couple days ago so much that I decided to continue with 100% whole wheat. The Buttermilk-Whole-Wheat-Bread was very soft and light, I have never seen a whole-wheat bread like this.

I adapted the recipe I used the last time. It was, for my taste, somewhat to sweet and it lacked a real crust. And I decided to substitute the buttermilk by a yoghurt-water-blend, because that's what I always got on hand here. (Whereas plain buttermilk is often hard to get.) And I increased the hydration by a lot. And I used this time a preferment, with sourdough - In order to get a deeper, less sweet flavor.

A lot of changes, you see. I wasn't to worried that anything could go wrong, because I think the reason why this bread came out so light is, first of all, proper kneading, and secondly, some acidic dairy products.

Yoghurt-Whole-Wheat-Bread

Preferment:
20 g mature culture
175 ml water
250 g whole-wheat flour (I always use home-ground flour)

Final dough
580 g whole-wheat flour
25 g vital wheat gluten
17 g salt
1 teaspoon dry yeast
20 g honey
30 g butter
150 g yoghurt (I used 3% fat yoghurt)
320 + 100 ml water

 

1. I mixed the ingredients of the preferment and kept it over night in a warm place (I put it into the microwave, with the door a little bit open - this way, the light stays on and I get a temperature of ~81° F)
2. The next morning, I let the remaining flour autolyse for an hour. (I mixed the flour with the gluten first, then with all of the yoghurt and 320 ml water.)
3. Then I mixed the preferment and the flour-water-dough with the remaining ingredients (not the last 100 ml water though) and I kneaded it by hand using the Bertinet method for 15 minutes. While kneading, I incorporated another 100 ml of water. The gluten was perfectly developed, even better than the last time.
4. first fermentation: until doubled, it took me about two hours. Then I degassed the dough very well and shaped it into a boule again.
5. second fermentation: until doubled, it took me about 1.5 hours.
6. I divided the dough into two pieces, preshaped them and let them rest for a couple minutes. then shaped them into sandwich loaves, rolled them in rice flour (I use whatever I've got on hand . . . coarse wheat, bran, oats . . .) and put them into bread pans.
7. final fermentation: until the loaves reached well over the edges of the pans, about one hour.
8. I slashed the loaves and put them in the 220° C hot oven and steamed well. After 20 minutes of baking, I took them out of the pans and baked them until done on a baking sheet. (another 20 minutes.) I covered the loaves with aluminium foil for the last ten minutes.

I think the bread had about as much volume as the last time, I'm very pleased with that. It has quite a sour flavor. It's definitely a good flavor, but for my taste it's somewhat to sour for being a sandwich bread. I will change something about that. The bread did well with the higher heat and I think that I'll bake this kind of recipe in these settings in the future. It still didn't have a crunchy crust, but that's not what I'm looking for in a sandwich bread either. I will reduce the amount of water somewhat, because it simply was harder to shape with a hydration of 86 % and the result wasn't significantly better. Maybe something around 75-80% the next time? I'm happy with the reduction of sugar though!

I think, the next time I'll bake this bread with a yeast preferment and simply add a little of sourdough to the final dough. Or should I include some whole rye for a deeper flavour? I'd like to experiment with some further additions to the dough, like soaked wheat chops or some seeds (incorporated in the dough when the gluten is developed). I'll do some more experiments, I promise!

Salome

I thought I would introduce myself here, having been lurking, occasionally commenting and learning more than I thought was possible. (Most notably, sourdough pancakes. Wow!)

I've been baking bread almost since I can remember -- my mother used to make an amazingly sloppy wholemeal loaf that received no kneading and generally ended up brick like; I forget what it was called. Most of my baking was based on Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and Bernard Clayton Jr's The Complete Book of Breads (with a hatred for volume measures every time I used it).

Sourdough called to me about 20 years ago, maybe less, when the food writer of the Independent newspaper, Jeremy Round, published a sourdough recipe that contained a mistake. Several people wrote to complain and the paper published a correction. I thought, if it is that important, I ought to try it. And I did. Round, who is tragically under-represented on the internet, died in 1991, and he was still alive when I made my sourdough, so it is at least 19 years old. The same one. We've been through some ups and downs, my sourdough and me, including a relocation from Somerset, England to Rome in Italy.

Round's approach was very simple. You made a starter, made some bread with it (as I recall 18 oz flour to 12 oz water) removing 8 oz of the dough after the first rise and kept it in the fridge to use as next time's starter. No feeding in between. And that suited me fine until this past summer, when my dough became horribly, horribly sticky.

That's when I came here first, and discovered that the problem was almost certainly a combination of too high a temperature, too weak a flour and too long a fermentation.

Since then I've gradually worked on each of the variables, feeding the starter, working with percentages, and am now once again making reasonable bread.

But the dough is still impossibly sticky, even at 60%. I've read about stretch and fold, and French folds, and watched the videos, but I still cannot handle the dough without it sticking to my hands, the steel work surface, everything. I've got a batch rising now, but I really think this is going to be the last time I try to do without kneading, and enough flour to stop things sticking. I cannot believe that people go out to 65% and 70% dough. Mine wouold be a sticky, structureless, freeform mess.

Is there any way I can manage this sticky dough?

At the moment I stretch it and fold it with the help of a scraper, but it is impossible to shape and I end up just plopping it into tins to prove. I shudder what to think would happen if I tried a loaf in a banneton.

I already have a blog, where my I chronicle my baking;, and I see no point in duplicating all that here. So my second question is:

Is it acceptable to just post links here to my personal blog?

Thanks for listening.

Jeremy