A Toast to Toast - Multigrain Sandwich Bread
Now and then I need toasted bread. The supermarket varieties are, of course, off limits. A loaf that yields without putting up any resistance to my probing finger is not worthy of a Schwarzwald ham or Fontina topping. I want my toast delicately softening when I spread it with butter - not disintegrating into mash!
One of my favorite breads for toasting is the Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire from Peter Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice". But it does need some adjustments! As usual the original is much too sweet for my taste - I use either 19 g honey or brown sugar, as the mood strikes me, not the suggested 28 g honey plus 42 g (!) sugar. Also, I found that 6 g instant yeast works just fine, it doesn't need 9 g.
Another curious thing - the original recipe calls for too much liquid: 113 g buttermilk plus 230 g water. Even though I substitute 100 g of the bread flour with whole wheat the dough is still far too wet for this kind of bread. Today I added only 170 g water, the dough was very tacky, soft, but firmed up nicely.
I also changed the technique a bit, including buttermilk and more flour in the soaker, and either pre-fermenting most of the bread flour in a biga, or doing stretches and folds. And, as usual, I bulk retard the dough in the refrigerator overnight.
The result is a very tasty, unsquishy bread that really deserves the goodies I put on top - even when it's untoasted.