I am planning on making the Waterford Soda bread from Dan lepard's The Handmade Loaf. The ingredients say 'Soft Wholemeal Flour' which I know means not the Strong Bread flour. I have Stoneground Wholemeal flour (Allinsons) and need to know if I can use this as is or should I sift out the bran before using it? I have made so many Soda Breads, using the standard recipes, that could have been used as door stops that I am really keen on getting this one right.

Someone please help.
Regards
Una

usank001

 

Posts: 1

Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2011 8:41 pm

My husband I own a mill in Statesboro, Georgia.  I am learning to use whole wheat flour in my cooking.  It is all-natural and not bleached, and much different than store-bought flour.  I've found that I can bake delicious zucchini bread, and I'm looking forward to trying the 10-minute banana bread I found on this site!

After realizing that we preferred tangy sourdough breads to milder fruit yeast loaves, I banned my apple yeast water into the no-see area of my refrigerator - the place where stuff goes that is hardly ever used. Bad conscience made me feed it together with my other two starters before I went on my trip to Germany, but after I came back I forgot all about it.

Leafing through Jan Hedh's "Swedish Breads And Pastries" again, I felt enticed by his "Pain au Levain with Bran and Vinegar" and rummaged in the fridge for the sorely neglected apple yeast water. Halfways expecting it had perished due to starvation, I opened the lid of the recycled sour cream container. It smelled still sweetish sour, but had some suspicious little white specks floating on the surface.

I poured most of the fruit water into the sink, retaining only the "sludge" on the bottom. From this I took a spoonful to build up my levain, wondering whether it was still alive. Amazingly, it was. It fermented through all 3 steps as it should, it took only longer, so I left it overnight on the counter (NOTE to all other abusive fruit yeast parents: your offspring is way more resilient than you think!).

Adding the other dough ingredients to my lively fruit yeast levain, I realized what an enormous amount of bran was to go into the breads, about 48% (= 250 g bran per 518 g flour for 2 loaves). But it was the first time I was going to make this bread, so I obediently followed the recipe.

From my former experiences with Jan Hedh's recipes I knew better than to stare at the kitchen timer, but let the dough and the shaped loaves proof at their own good time. With former fruit yeast breads I had been too impatient to wait that long - and they had grown "horns" and done other weird things in the oven (see my blog).

I also knew that the baking times in the recipes were often much longer than the breads actually needed in my oven. So when my loaves went into the oven I kept an eye on them. They had some oven spring, and didn't act out like their older siblings, but it was obvious that they would not turn out quite like the loaf shown on the picture in the book:

Jan Hedh's Pain au levain with bran and vinegar - as it is supposed to look like (in the book): light and airy, with some little brown specks.

My bread was anything else: brown and dense - it suffered from a severe case of bran-o-mania!

This could not just be one stupid German baker's screw-up - I wonder whether there was a zero too many in the recipe: 25 g bran instead of 250 g?

What it did have, to my surprise, was a really good taste: slightly sweetish (no sweetener added). Much different from an almost whole wheat loaf - what it basically was.

I would like to put back some bran and wheat germ into my white flour bread recipes.  Does anyone know what that translates to in terms of additional water per cup of flour?

I'm looking get a grain mill and was wondering who had them, what kind and what they think about it. I know I could have just done a search for that but I have another question: is there a semi-easy/efficient way to remove the bran only? I'd most likely mix milled flour with aged bread flour and if I could add bran back in on a whim I'd be able to make a 'frenchier' bread with a higher percentage of milled flour. So what mills produce flour that can have the bran removed?

3,2,1, GO!

Since I have a wheat grinder and lots of wheatberries (hard red, white and soft), I want to grind my own all purpose flour - not buy it in the store.  I have been searching and searching for a real recipe on how to grind your own all purpose flour for baking (not bread baking).  So far I have found out that it is a mixture of soft wheat and hard winter white wheat.  Is it 50% / 50%???  Can someone share their recipe?  And do you then sift out the bran with a hand sifter to make a lighter flour for pastry and cake? 

Thank you so much!

evelyn

I am a newbie who loves to experiment.  From my reading and experimentation I have learned that successful breads roughly have a 3 to 1 ratio of flour to liquid.  And that dough can tolerate a certain amount of "additions" such as nuts, raisins, sundried tomatoes, etc.  Most recipes that call for additions have 1 to 2 Tbs. per cup of flour.  So, my question is. which of these things function as flour (have to be counted towards the hydration) and which ones are additions? 

1. flax seed meal
2. rolled oats
3. steel cut oats
4. fine ground cornmeal
5. coarse cornmeal
6. cooked brown rice
7. toasted wheat germ
8. toasted wheat bran
9. cracked wheat
10. bulgar wheat
11. all seeds are "addition"?
12. all nuts are "addition"?

 Also, can anyone provide guidance on incorporating Greek yogurt in recipes? I want most of my breads to be high protein and high fiber.  THANK YOU.

Hi Everyone!

I made banana muffins the other day with unprocessed wheat bran. Now I have a big bag of it leftover. Does anyone have recipes that call for this? Also, how should I store it now that the bag is open?

Thanks!
Beth

Sunday again, at my house this time. And once again I need a pan loaf for sandwiches! I started flipping through Bread Baker's Apprentice looking for my next target. The Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire caught my eyes, without so much as a picture! People who know me probably wouldn't be surprised by this, because as much as I love various artisan breads, whole wheat or multigrain anything will make me sit up and take notice. And no, I don't eat cardboard in my spare time.

The first step was to figure out what grains I was going to use in the bread. The recipe called for 3tbsp of either corn meal, amaranth, millet, or quinoa; 3tbsp of either rolled oats or wheat, triticale or buckwheat flakes; and 2tbsp of wheat bran. I decided to go with 2tbsp amaranth, 1tbsp millet, 2tbsp rolled oats, 1tbsp buckwheat cereal (not as small as flakes, but who's counting?), the 2tbsp of wheat bran, and 1tbsp of flax meal.

I'd also decided to deviate a bit from the recipe and make it sourdough. I already had my starter out to refresh (Friday night), and I had some leftover that I wouldn't be able to use for anything else, so why not right? I used the starter to make a small stiff levain (which I meant to build Saturday, and forgot). I wasn't particularly following a recipe for that part, so I wrote down the amount of flour and water I used so I could account for it in the recipe for the loaf.

I gathered together the rest of the ingredients:

And not shown here: honey, cooked brown rice, and water. They went in after the levain descended on the milk.

Mixing time! The dough was much gummier and stickier than I was expecting. I think a lot of that gummy/stickyness came from the starches in the soaker. As I emptied the grains into the dough I noticed the somewhat stringy goop of starch conglomeration on the bottom of the container.

After a bit more mixing, adding a little bit of flour, doing some stretches and folds, the dough finally reached a point where I could actually handle it. It still was quite sticky and gummy though, definitely unlike other doughs I've dealt with so far.

As I mentioned, I forgot to do a build of the stiff levain I made for this loaf. So it took a very long time to rise, in fact, at one point I wasn't even sure it was going to rise. What made it especially hard is that my sourdough starter really doesn't do most of the rising until the oven. So, I gave the dough plenty of time and a few more folds, it had finally grown some and didn't spring back on a poke test, so I shaped it into a loaf and plopped it into a pan.

In the loaf pan it didn't take quite as long for the second rise, but it was getting late and I really needed to get to bed, so that was all the rising it was going to do!

Into the oven it went, it did get a nice little bit of oven spring (but not as much as I was hoping for, and nowhere near as little as I was dreading). I think next time I'll make it with regular yeast, or make sure I remember to have a build of levain before I start the loaf! It smelled really wonderful when it was baking, in fact it smelled amazing when it was rising too! Never had a loaf that smells that good during bulk ferment and proofing. It was a great combination of yeasty, sour, sweet, and grassy/grainy. I assume the aroma must have come from all the grains in the loaf, but I don't really know for sure. This is definitely one bread I want to make again, and soon! I'll probably experiment with switching it over to whole wheat too, if that turns out well I think I may have found my dream sandwich bread...

Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge

YeastSpotting

I baked this very large, rustic Italian loaf (pagnotta) a couple weeks ago from Daniel Leader’s wonderful new book, Local Breads, page 197.  He states that it is to bake until almost black or charred for the most authentic loaf.  I didn’t go quite that far but you can see it developed a lot of color which I always prefer in my loaves.