Peter Reinhart's  Thin Wheat Crackers on p.291  in  Whole Grain Breads

My interpretation used Spelt Flour type 700 glatt (fine) with additional 30g flour to the recipe.

Twentyfour hour rest on the counter top before cutting into small shapes and making windowpanes.  Place on parchment and continue to thin out the crackers...  Keep a towel handy to wipe off oil.  If I do this again I will use two tablespoons less oil in the recipe.  I like mine without the salt wash, which does give the crackers a little more strength but the crunch is better without it.

1000 words:

I'm relatively new to breadmaking and I've been lurking here quite a bit. I think it's about time I made my first post, but since I want to show off my bread, why not make it a blog post?

^ Whole wheat sourdough ready for their overnight retard. Obama lurks in the background, waiting. Some 14 hours later, the boule pops out of the oven.

Lately I've been increasingly obsessed with baking (well, eating) the best damn whole wheat sourdough. WGB got me off to a good start, as did Laurel's but, ehh... something was missing. WGB was an amazing read, but its hearth bread made with sourdough... it was dense, chewy, and not at all what I wanted. The flavor was maybe not the right kind of nutty. So what it came down to was me searching this site inside out. There's quite a bit of valuable information around these parts! This last link also saved my sanity once or twice. :p

There were plenty of flat loafs in between, but I think I've got it.

^Bam.

I used 100% hydration sourdough starter that's ~3 months old. The final hydration was 82%.

I'm happy with how the loaf turned out. The oven spring was far better than I expected. I think the final tweak that made everything "click" was to not flip the dough onto a flat board for scoring, but into a shallow, parchment-lined bowl. The curvature of the bowl angled the dough in such a way that I got a flat surface to score. It made the dough look somewhat deflated and scoring actually harder without the surface tension, but somehow the "liveliness" of the dough was preserved better in the end. I scored the dough, then lifted it out by the parchment and dumped the whole affair into a covered 3.6 quart wide-lipped casserole. The casserole was also another great discovery. I dug it out of a thrift store intending to use the flat lid as a base, but found that using it right-side up gave the loaf juuust the right amount of structural support while still being largely free standing. I baked the loaf at 450 degrees for 30 minutes, and that was that.

^ The crumb.

I also whipped up some 115% hydration dough/batter for a shot at ciabatta.

^ The ciabatta posing with the boule in the back.

Like the round, I made an overnight soaker containing half the final flour and all of the salt and water. The ciabatta soaker was so hydrated that the water and flour gave up and separated into their own sedimentary layers. Not pretty. The next day I added the starter and remaining flour and stretch-and-folded it in the container with one hour rests in between. After the 3rd set of folding, the batter started peel easily from the container and I decided to divide dough into two and placed 'em in the fridge.

I wasn't expecting much of the ciabatta. It was just a side experiment, and the open vent on my aging oven makes steaming futile. I've gotten around on the boule with the glass casserole, but for the ciabatta, I just cranked my oven up to as high as it'll go and chucked in the ciabatta on the tiles for 10-15 minutes. There still managed to be pretty good oven spring.

So, how'd it do?

^ Damn. Either it was under-kneaded or flour simply wasn't meant to be this hydrated.

I ended up getting a cavern, and over-floured it while trying to shape it. Oh well; that didn't stop the bread from being some of the most deliciously airy and fluffy bread I've tasted with just the right tang. Once the excess flour was vigorously patted off, anyways.

So, there you go. If anyone would like the full recipe for the ciabatta, I'd be happy to post it. I'm still tweaking the hydration and so forth.

^ One last shot of the crust. Btw, apologies if the pictures seem washed out, poorly composed, or whatever. I'm not a photographer by any means.

Whole Wheat Sourdough

1. On the day before:
   • Refresh the starter and thoroughly mix the soaker ingredients.
   • Cover the soaker and let it sit for 12 to 24 hours at room temperature for an overnight autolyse.
2. Mixing and first rise:
   • Mix all final ingredients. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes, then stretch-and-fold in the bowl to ensure hydration is even. Cover the bowl, and let it sit at room temperature for 45 minutes.
   • I pre-heated an insulated proofing box (a cooler) with a heat pad set to "low". The ambient temperature should be around 90 degrees.
   • Stretch-and-fold the dough 3 times, with one hour rests following each iteration in the proofing box.
3. Shaping and final proof:
   • Pre-shape, rest 15 minutes, then shape. Place the dough in cloth-lined proofing basket and cover snuggly with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes.
   • Place the basket immediately in the refrigerator for a 12-24 hour overnight rise.
4. Baking:
   • Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let it rest for 90 minutes.
   • Meanwhile, preheat oven to 475 F with a baking stone and a covered 3.6 qt glass casserole.
   • Flip the dough into a shallow, parchment-lined bowl. Score the dough.
   • Place the dough in the casserole, cover it, and bake for 30-35 minutes at 450 F degrees.

Yeah! My Whole Wheat Pain au Levain turned out to be ever so delightful! I achieved some nice oven spring, a good color, and a decent scoring pattern! I do believe my patience is starting to pay off. Here is the crumb 11 hours after baking, the next morning.

And if your wondering, this is just a slightly modified version of The Whole wheat hearth bread from WGB, I just tweaked it to use 1 oz of medium dark rye in the soaker.

Thanks TFL'ers for helping me out with this wonderful (some times painful) experience known as bread baking!

...more to come soon of course!

As some of you may have seen in my last few entries, I have been working on whole grain breads and particularly working on when I can tell when my loaf is ready for the oven. My last whole wheat loaf turned out to be a bit over proofed, and the time before, my whole wheat levain was underproofed. But I did not get discouraged, in fact, I made an agreement to keep on baking a loaf minimum each week, whether it is a sourdough whole wheat bread or a overnight autolyse expedition from Reinhart.

This time I went with the Multigrain Straun from Whole Grain Bread. Nothing seperates this from the formula in the book, I followed it closely, substituted the honey for agave though, mixed, let it rise, shaped and preheated the oven and stone and carefully, carefully, paid attention to the bread to find out when it was ready for the oven.

I pushed my clock aside this time and watched it on and off while studying assuring myself I would catch the loaf at it's prime and place it in the oven then! So I poked it at 30 minutes, it didn't really do much, so I went back to studying. About ten minutes later I poked it, it sprung back a bit, so I decieded to check back in five, and sure enough, the loaf sprung back about half way. So, being frantic I hastily scored the top of the loaf (resulting in what I thought to be a poor score pattern) and placed it on the stone, steamed and baked.

The end result...a loaf I am quite pleased with! And look - No finger indentations this time!

And then the crumb...

And now with my skills just a bit more sharpened when it comes to proofed dough, I think this coming week I will try my hand again at Hamelman's Whole Wheat Levain, hopefully resulting in a wonderful loaf with much better scoring.

Oh, and I managed to bake a blueberry coffee cake with a cinnamon streusel topping, delicious!

Last week I baked one of my favorite recipes, Hamelman's Whole Wheat Levain from Bread. The bake turned out successful I would say, especially since I finally was able to use my two week old liquid levain starter and achieve a delightful tang when the bread was sliced and eaten. One thing though is my batard (and boule) seemed to explode in the oven! Was this because of an unsuccessful scoring? Or did I let it rise to long? Any help would be appreciated in this manner, though I do kind of like the looks of it.

And then the crumb...

And finally the boule, sorry no crumb shot, though I will say it turned out a bit tighter then I would have liked.

So what might I have done wrong in this bake? Any help would be appreciated since I am always open to advice and will always be baking weekly hoping to only improve my methods and results!

My next bake is going to be Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough with increased Whole Wheat. I will be attempting this tomorrow (hopefully) and pictures will follow soon!

I'm a long time lurker and first time poster.

Last week I finally got a decent sourdough starter going, based on the instructions in Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. I used it successfully to make Pierre Nury’s Rustic Light Rye and some Sourdough Waffles, both of which came out well with the clear instructions provided. I decided to try making some 100% whole grain bread, which I've never had much success with, and finally settled on jmonkey's recipe.

I used the stretch and fold technique for kneading, shaped it into a boule, and baked it in a 450ºF oven on a stone. Also, since I can only get soft whole wheat here, I added vital wheat gluten to the flour to compensate (around 2-3 tsp/cup).

It might be too caramelized for some tastes, but I liked the way it came out (thanks jmonkey!). I expected the crumb to be more open based on what the recipe said, but I think I may have underproofed the loaf a bit. Next time I will also put the stone lower in the over since the bottom took much too long to finish. As far as taste goes, it was delicious, one of the best whole grain breads I've had. What do you think?

Chris

I am totally new to this forum but have been baking white bread for a few years. Now I am keen to try whole wheat and other varieties. However, on checking out some recipes I am stunned to see the large amount of sugar, syrup, honey and other sweeteners they call for. Is there a good technical reason for this or is it just that the American palate has become accustomed to sweetness in bread? My favorite white flour breas recipes only use enough sugar to get the yeast going. Usually very small amounts. After reading "In Defense of Food" we are attempting to reduce by large proportions the amount of refined and processed products we eat.

So I recently got into baking and tried a few different recipes in hopes of finding a great whole wheat loaf to make weekly. I tried a recipe by one of the threads,

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/wholewheathoneybread

I decided to cut the ingredients in half to make one loaf. With success, I made a nice loaf with a semi-soft crust and dense crumb. Bland but a purfect texture. Aside from leaving the salt out of the first datch, I tried a second time only to get a much drier dough after neading. I had a feeling this would result in a harder crust and was right.(NOTE:) I used half/half in the second batch rather thant 6 oz. of evaporated milk as was added in the first. What went wrong this second time around? Was the half/half a bad sub for evaporated milk?

Soft Crust Loaf

Hard Crust Loaf

second endeavor after coming back to my electric oven after a month of wood fired brick oven adventures. delicious little rolls for pretty much anything, for me it was a dinner roll.

pretty good rise for a 100% whole wheat, but that seems to be the standard since switching to natural leaven, open crumb, super moist. i was quite pleased. the crust was pretty good too even for the electric oven, although my heart still has a brick oven sized hole...

Hi Everyone,

I'm fairly new here and am still searching my way through all the informative posts. So please forgive me if this is a repeat question and kindly point me to right discussion.

I am trying to find a recipe that would help me make soft sandwich roll (sub like / torpedo) from whole rye + whole wheat. I would like rye to be around 20% but given the whole rye nature, I don't mind going down to 15% or 10% even.

My problem is that any recipe that I have tried with Rye, results in hard caramelized crust with dense structure. (OK AP + 15% mild rye was not dense - it was fluffy but crust was still hard).

Can you please point me to right direction (except for exit !!!) as I said I am fairly new here and relatively novice in bread making. (been experimenting for last year or two in non-continuous fashion.)

Thanks in advance,

NM