My Rus-ian bread journey
My Rus-ian bread journey
I've always been interested in Yippee's posts about CLAS and I've done a couple of CLAS bakes with good results. Most of the detail on CLAS is to be found on Rusbrot's blog [1] and in his YouTube videos [2]. What caught my eye recently was his post about Russian Monastery bread [3]. This is presented as a rye/wheat bread made with a custom built starter. The starter is made with coarsely crushed rye malt and raisins, followed by a rye flour build, so I'm guessing it is a composite of a raisin yeast water and sourdough. I didn't have any rye malt, but Rus suggests you can use coarsely crushed rye grain and malt extract instead, so I ordered some malt extract, but it never came. Back to plan A mkII - make my own rye malt! This is the guide [4]I followed, but much simplified as I was only making 200g. A few days later it was ready and I kicked off my Monastery bread build.
I followed Rus's process to make a rye/wheat Mischbrot. All went OK and I ended up with an OK bake. It was a bit solid, (like all my rye bread is!) and had a lot of cracks in the crust - not sure why.
After this, things got more interesting. Rus suggests that you can save some of the dough to make a ripe dough starter - pate fermentee, I guess. So I did this and used it to make a high extraction wheat flour big boule.
Levain build 1
10g rye malt coarsely crushed
10g Red Lammas wheat grain coarsely crushed
10g BF
10g Red Lammas flour
12g ripe dough
40g water
5 hrs 28C
Levain build 2
10g levain build 1
100g WW flour sieved
75g water
12hrs 25C
Main dough
200g WW flour #40
200g WW flour #50
100g Manitoba flour
350g water
autolyse 20m
106g lev build 2
10g salt
mix, 2 folds
3 hrs 45m bulk
NB: remove 70g dough as a ripe dough starter and store in frij
shape to one big boule
FP 1hr 10m
And what a great bake it turned out to be! Super oven spring, good loft, nice open and moist crumb
Just to make sure this bake wasn't a fluke, I did a similar bake, but to two small boules and one tubby batard again nice looking loaves:
So go on - why not give it a try! If you have a proofing box, you are good to go!
Lance