Horst Bandel mess
I read the posts, I was ready. Even unto adding 10% for my slightly larger Pullman pan. What happened? I wish I knew. The poor thing is proofing at the moment. Long story short, "the dough should be of medium consistency but not wet, and it will be slightly sticky." Ha! "Add high-gluten flour as needed if the mix is on the wet side." Try 500 grams! Whatever I have it's not Horst Bandel's Black Pumpernickel, having vastly changed the ratio of rye to wheat. Even with the additional flour it was still wet and sticky.
Some descriptions of my process:
Being aware of the extra 10% noted by txfarmer I checked the calculations and found that the home column, listed in oz. is slightly less than 10% of the metric professional formula, so I figured to use the calculated metric column as my guide. For instance, 9.6oz. in the home column translates to 272 grams, whereas the metric column, which produces 10 loaves, is 3kg and 1/10th of that is 300grams... roughly 10% more than the home column. So I went with 1/10th of the metric column as my ingredient quatities.
My initial starter wasn't quite ripe so I added a few extra grams, using 20 instead of 15. My rye culture was tripled by the time that I checked it after 13 hours. That threw me into a bit of a panic modes since I, at that time, reread the recipe and realized that the old bread soaker was supposed to soak for 4 hours. That seemed odd to me, I mean bread seems to soak pretty quickly, so I cut that time to 1 hour, figuring that my rye sourdough starter would be less over-developed in 1 hour than in 4 and I only needed an hour to cook the rye berries.
Once the old bread had soaked for an hour I strained it with cheesecloth as best I could. I thoroughly drained the cooked rye berries as well.
For high-gluten flour I added 12 grams of 75% Giusto's VWG to 238 grams of 12% Bob's Red Mill organic white flour to get a 14% mix at 250 grams.
For rye chops I used Bob's cracked rye. For rye meal I used Giusto's Pumpernickle rye.
I added none of the final dough water reserved from straining the soaked old bread.
For 20 grams of fresh yeast I substituted 7 grams of instant yeast.
I did my mixing by hand.
It wasn't pancake batter consistency, but maybe waffle batter. Very wet and very sticky. Even with the additional 500 grams of my high-gluten flour mix it was still wet and sticky and difficult to handle. I imagine it will bake up into something. I put the extra into a glass baking pan and covered it with aluminum foil. After reading the exciting posts about the upcoming book I felt I couldn't waste anything, even it was to dump it in the compost pile. Maybe whatever it is will be tasty and I can pass the little one off to the neighbour.
All the possibilities that I can think of are:
- I made some gross miscalulation in ingredient amounts
- The rye sourdough was over-developed and moved into proteolytic mode
- Mixing by machine might develop the dough in a way that is much more difficult to achieve by hand
- I left WAY too much water in the old bread soaker
- The cracked rye that I substituted absorbs water way differently than the rye chops specified
I'll try this again in a while. I'm thinking that I'll use the KA mixer next time and do my damnedest to get the soaked bread well strained. I'll also cut down the ripening time on the rye sourdough. Any more ideas greatly appreciated.
:-Paul