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JonJ

A few years ago, Dan Ayo posted here about his experience with using chocolate malted barley from the brew shop in a bread. It made a big difference to the colour of the bread and the flavour of it too.

Thinking the same, I made small taste testers using three different kinds of barley malt that I picked up from a craft brew supply store.

The malts that were tried were called: BEST chocolate malt, BEST caramel Munich I, BEST biscuit malt. I assume, from the names that the original source is Bestmalz.de. You can see the theme that all of the names of the malt promised a different flavour experience, although that would be with beer!

Taste testers in this case were seven different doughs each made with a base formula of 100g white bread flour, 65g water, 20g levain and 2g salt. I tried two different concentrations of each malt - 2% and 0.5%, and made a seventh dough with no malt in it for taste comparison. Credit is due to Paul for the idea of the 100g sample loaf.

In this pic you can see the testers after baking. In columns, from left to right, they are: chocolate, caramel, biscuit. The top row is at 0.5%; the bottom row at 2%. And the lone one on the far right had no malt added to it.Called the whole family to taste and we had a pleasant time sniffing and tasting each sample. As you can see the chocolate malt one was quite visually distinct, even at 0.5% but especially at 2%. It had a taste like 'coffee' and not chocolate. The other two didn't bring in enough flavour to notice, but they did improve the dough and bread texture, especially the biscuit malt. If you sniffed them very carefully you could pick up some interesting malt notes even with the pale malts.

In conclusion I'd say that the chocolate malt was worth the try and can see why Dan found it interesting too. There are many other interesting malts used by brewers that I'd like to play with as well, obviously there are rye and wheat malts, but also curious to know if anyone has opinions on whether things like an acidulated malt or a malt with high dextrins that might have an effect on the Maillard reaction would be a worth a try. And then there is the approach of including the grains themselves in the bread which might be a better way to go.

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JonJ

If you think about it, the spicing used in falafels (cumin & coriander, garlic, cardamom...) is like a recipe for a bread spice. The thing is though, how would you put a falafel into a bread. Home made falafel mixture, with freshly minced chickpeas, fava beans or lentils? Even better still why not use a box mix which has already been dehydrated and they've done part of the work for you already!


There's a really pretty falafel mix that I've been buying lately that has the potential to be really pretty in bread - the 'crazy' blend with beetroot and poppy seed. A bit like putting falafel in bread - crazy. This is my second try with it, and I do know that if you don't mix it in super well you could potentially get pretty patterns from the included beetroot. But, the first time I tried this mix I also had home-made humus in the bread and although tasty (and pretty) it didn't come out as open as I would have liked this.



This time around, I used the falafel mix in the main dough (in the saltolyse, or should I say falafelyse), and this had the benefit of creating a stronger dough with a less gritty texture to the final bread. Alas however, the beetroot effect was largely lost and all I got was a general pink and yellow ethereal glow to the loaves rather than the pretty patterns from my first go at it. Some VWG was added to the dough to compensate for the falafel mix, and who doesn't like their bread bouncy?


Was it worth it? It certainly made a very interesting bread. Obviously, great with humus. Obviously! These 'bread spices' brought in some wonderful flavours, and especially with a cheese and tomato sandwich I had some great taste moments. Might reduce the salt a touch on the next bread as it was a little salty.

Method was as follows:

    50m saltolyse, complete with salt and falafel mix

    Added levain using the dough hook for 2 minutes only.  Completed this with 35 slap and folds

    30 minutes later added bassinage of 50g of water that had been held back, bringing total water to 600g. Also added 4g of leftover falafel mix here.

    20 minutes later bench fold to close the dough up

    At 4 hours 45 min after adding levain pre-shaped into rounds

    20 minutes later final shape

    20 minutes later into fridge

    (next day, 16 hours later) baked the first bread - 230C with steam for 20 min, then 200C without steam. Second bread had an hour in the proofer extra time whilst the first one baked


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JonJ

When it comes to omelette fillings the combination of miso paste and hummus is complementary and comforting, although I suspect I'm the only one who tries something like that with their eggs. And, it is true that miso, and hummus, when spread on hot buttered toast are simply delicious. So, my thinking was that together they could make for a great combination in a bread, even if it is difficult to imagine!

The recipe is a combination of Benny's miso bread (which used 10% miso) and Txfarmer's hummus sourdough. Txfarmer used quite a lot of hummus - 265g per 340g of bread flour, and she also, quite importantly used home made hummus. Although I do make my own, for convenience sake I bought tub of hummus which unfortunately only gave me 187g of hummus (so I used less than txfarmer), and halfway through I was worried that using a commercial hummus wasn't so smart as the sorbic acid in it might negatively affect the sourdough culture, but it seems to have been okay. For miso, I used this lovely "marumu inaka" red/brown miso.

The final dough had 340g bread flour, 187g hummus, 34g miso paste, 152g water (plus an extra 30g water added later as bassinage), 100g levain, 7g salt and 10g vital wheat gluten (as "insurance"). I didn't reduce the salt, as Benny also didn't, but he also didn't add hummus, and my final bread was fairly salty. I'd say to reduce or even leave out the salt if you're going to try this bread. The final dough was mixed for 5 minutes on the dough hook followed by 30 slap and folds. My notes say it 'bounced' when I tried to slap and fold, so was not really as stretchable as a regular dough. As stated above, I did add an extra 30g of water 30 minutes after that too, and once again it didn't handle as it normally does, my notes also say that the dough was slow to get a good gluten stretch, and it is these unusual dough characteristics that should have kept me alert to the moisture in the dough.

I messed up the baking! Because the dough felt fairly robust and not slumpy in the banneton I assumed it would bake the same as a normal loaf and this wasn't the case. I baked it side by side with a regular sourdough and that was a mistake - my habit is to turn the loaves when I remove the steam trays after 20 minutes and this bread was still very wet and loose and should not have been turned, and this turn seemed to knock it into a strange and wonky shape. Perhaps I should also have given a few small scores rather than the single 'ear' type score as well to contain some slumping. It did get an extra 15 minutes in the oven with the door cracked open afterwards, but certainly this bread should have been baked more carefully, as one does with a wet slumpy dough, and requires at least a full hour of low and slow baking with foil tenting.


This bread was super delicious. As the main ingredients were generously used, with ample hummus and miso, the flavours really came through and shone. It made for a lovely savoury breakfast bread, and since we had a friend visiting who was appreciative, it was cut a little too early, and a little too hot. And was superb with melting butter on it. And, finally, gone within an hour.

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JonJ

Sourlotti by Abby has a great way for making an 'oat porridge' bread that has worked out well for me before. I think it might be the amount of butter in the soaker preparation that makes it work so much better for me? In any case, for this loaf I decided to eschew the butter and replace it with coconut oil which has been working very nicely for me as a substitute for butter in other recipes too like hamburger rolls.

Danni3ll3 made a bread with sprouted quinoa which was on my mind lately, and while I was prepping this bread I decided to use the white quinoa that I'd started soaking the night before for sprouting in this bread as well, even though it was intended originally for something else. The quinoa seeds didn't get much of an opportunity to sprout, and the stiff quinoa paste that I made out of them seemed flavourless, with only the merest sweet taste. This is what the quinoa paste looked like (basically soaked white quinoa seeds that had been moistened as if to sprout them, but only for 16 hours, and then ground in the food processor. Quite a stiff consistency. I added it together with the levain to the mix with the autolysed dough:




It was a bit bold to use that in this bread, in addition to the oat and flax soaker for which quite a lot is added - about 200g of that soaker was added by lamination to each loaf! But, miraculously it seemed to work out and the dough managed to hold all the extras in it.


Its hard to judge the hydration with these things - nominally a 93% hydration but a lot of that water is locked into the oats/flax in the soaker. And these loaves needed a long bake - 60 mins in total, because of the oat soaker. I squashed the one loaf a little trying to turn it 20 minutes in (when removing the steam trays). It was still very wet, even at that time and shouldn't have been touched.


The bread was nice to eat, and I did find myself choosing it over some of my other frozen loaves for quite a few days after. I would say though that it was fairly mild to the taste - the quinoa and oats didn't bring in as much flavour when compared to a bread like the 5 grain levain which I was mentally comparing it to. I do like the quinoa paste though and will probably try it again - it seemed to bake up nicely, and maybe next time I won't be so impatient and even give the quinoa a chance to sprout.

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JonJ

Derek and Gavin have been baking very interesting breads with (sweet) lupin flour lately. The promise and attraction of these breads is, to put it in Derek's words, "..taste delicious not too overpowering very light in mouth and stomach afterwards..." and "completely devoured in no time!".

So, it was with these thoughts in mind that I made the impulse purchase of a bag of pigeon pea flour and found myself making a sourdough bread with it when I got home from the shops. The bag itself recommended using the flour for baking biscuits and crepes or pancakes. And I found a paper that said that "the bread from 10% pigeon pea flour blend with 2–3% vital gluten and 0.5% SSL had high loaf volume and loaf quality" so went for approximately that amount in the final dough:

pea flour formula

 

When mixing the dough there was a clear pea (vegetable) smell to the dough. Dough was a nice pale yellow colour, which carried through to an attractive golden appearance in both the crust and crumb of the final loaves. When the bread was first cut, I noticed only the very smallest amount some of that 'off' pea smell taste (far less than when working the dough), but that taste note was lost the next day when the sourdough flavour of the bread developed. The starter used was about 2-3 hours past peak (and it did have a small refresher feed, but nevertheless, the sourdough tang was present in the taste).

I'm not completely convinced that pea flour brought all that much to these breads other than the lovely yellow colour, and possibly an improved protein composition. Nevertheless, I've got plans to use it again, perhaps at 5% in a loaf together with semolina to bring out a strong yellow colour.

  • Method:

        1 h 15m autolyse

        Added levain using the dough hook for 1 minutes only (load shedding kicked in and had to stop there).  Completed this with 50 slap and folds

        30 minutes later added salt and bassinage of 52g of water that had been held back

        15 minutes later an additional 10 slap and folds to bring the dough together after the bassinage

        At 2 hours after adding levain, gave it a coil fold

        At 3 hours after adding levain pre-shaped into rounds

        20 minutes later final shape

        30 minutes later into fridge

        (next day, 9.5 hours later) remove from fridge while oven heats (for 45 minutes)

        Into freezer for 15 minutes

        Bake on baking steel together - 220°C for 20 minutes with steam, then 23 minutes without steam at 200°C.
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JonJ

Psyllium husk is usually used in gluten-free or keto style breads where the gel that it forms can act as a binder and helps the loaf to retain its structure without slumping.

For a long time now, I've tried using psyllium husk together with my lower protein flours (around 11.5%) to see if I could make a better bread with these weaker flours and the results have been usually somewhat unclear.

So this post is my attempt to describe in one place some things that I've learnt, both good and bad, about the use of psyllium husk in baking in a non-gluten-free context.

The thing is, you don't need to add psyllium to a wheat bread. The benefit really is that it is a simple way that allows you to dramatically increase the hydration without risk of the dough slumping or baking a flat loaf. The dough becomes super easy to handle, the flow/rheology changes, and the dough holds shape. The crumb retains more moisture to it as well.

What are psyllium wheat breads like, is there an improvement? Initially I was adding around 2g of psyllium husk per approximately 500g of flour, and for these breads the results were unclear. The dough became much easier to handle, but beyond that it was difficult to pinpoint exactly if this was beneficial to the final bread.

Lately I've been reading gluten free recipes that use about ten times as much, around 20g of psyllium. And so I moved up to 20g of psyllium, and whilst it made a beautiful wheat bread with 20g of psyllium, with a beautiful shape, in some ways the crumb looked a lot like those pictures you see of gluten free breads, a little too homogeneous, somewhat unnatural, and not at all like what you expect:

The unnatural looking crumb is visible in the photo above; it must be said though the texture of the bread was quite lovely, soft to the touch and without any noticeable taste change. The shape was good, almost as if the bread was formed in a mould. For this bread the psyllium gel was added at the same time as the levain to the autolysed dough using the dough hook, and the hydration was 87%.

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In another, later experiment I reduced the amount of psyllium down to 6g, and wanted to compare adding a psyllium gel versus adding water by bassinage.

The loaf on the left used bassinage to increase the hydration to 75%;  the loaf on the right used Psyllium gel as the way of increasing hydration to 83% (the initial dough had a hydration of 70%, and was divided in half).



Note the Psyllium loaf had 'snail trails' on the surface, or deposits left on the surface from the gel. It also spread at the score rather than lifting the crust to make an ear, and had a softer crust and moister crumb, although the bassinage loaf had a nicer chew. Besides that they were fairly similar breads. The effort to add the psyllium gel addition by hand is a lot easier than bassinage is.

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Finally, psyllium has its uses to help with recovery from an over hydrated dough - I had issues with my scale and inadvertently mixed up a dough at a hydration of about 86% which was way too high for the flour used. To recover, I added 5g of psyllium husk into the dough, which stabilized it enough to continue to shaping and it kept its shape without slumping when it came out of the banneton. There were lumps from the psyllium, so the dough was not smooth when worked by hand, but this did not seem to carry through after baking.

Once again there is no ear, and there is an unusual upright shape and way in which the loaf opens up. Interestingly, for this bread, the crumb was noticeably moister even one or two days after baking and quite nice to eat.

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JonJ

Roosterkoek (or roosterbrood) are a traditional bread or bread rolls cooked over the braai (BBQ). The name is Afrikaans for rooster ("grilled")  plus either koek ("cake") or brood ("bread"). They are usually eaten piping hot together with the meat.

Many of the recipes are fairly similar and usually include sugar and oil in the dough. Where I differ a little is I like to give mine a little bit of shaping and bake them as pull apart rolls. Also, I'm not a great fan of them if they're cooked directly over the coals, which is the traditional way.

My method is to mix all the ingredients except the oil, with a Danish dough whisk, usually I mix the yeast, water, and sugar together and then add the flour and sugar to that. Then olive oil is kneaded into the dough after about 20 minutes. About 40 minutes after the initial mix the dough is weighed and divided into 9 balls that are shaped into rolls and placed on the dutch oven lid. About 1h15m - 1h30m after the initial mix they have normally puffed up enough to be baked. I like to bake 20 minutes on the cast iron base in the Weber with coals to the side and parchment underneath. Might turn it every 5 minutes so that it bakes evenly.


The lovely thing about them is that not only are they enjoyable to eat, they're also super convenient. If you forget to buy rolls. Or have run out of potatoes, they'll still be there for you.

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JonJ

Last week Natalya Syanova of Natasha's Baking posted a short video of a babka with a cream cheese filling that I just had to make. The filling she used was made with cream cheese, an egg yolk,  sugar and vanilla, so you can imagine the resulting flavour, and she also use a brioche base for it to ensure a super soft and pillowy texture.

Instead of using her brioche recipe though, I used a Tangzhong one from Bread by Elise.

The resulting bread is delicious and so soft, although my guilt-o-meter is off the charts when I think of the cholesterol in it.

The crumb is super soft and shreddable with small pieces of cream cheese fat embedded in it and only the very thinnest layer of filling visible in the final bread. I might be inclined to use a more conventional babka dough if I was to repeat as the brioche dough kind of collapsed a little under its own weight while cooling.

And next time I'll chill the cream cheese filling so that it doesn't ooze out during the roll up step of the babka shaping!


 
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JonJ

Benny's 100% wholewheat Hokkaido recipe is the recipe that just keeps on giving, and I keep on seeing miraculous loaves coming from the oven even as the recipe is tweaked and stretched which really surprises someone like me who is used to the experience of failed experiments when things are pushed too far.

One thing about this recipe that you need to be warned about is to not try and bake it late at night because the smell of the loaves as they are baking is so intense that if you're like me you'll want to then stay awake for long enough to let it cool enough to try a slice.

Previously I'd made a dairy free version of the recipe but wanted to stretch it further to see if I could make it without eggs while still making a nice bread. Also, the previous bread used a 'plant butter' that was really just a margarine with good marketing and I wanted to try something better.

In this bread, 14g ground linseeds plus an additional 42g of almond milk were used to replace the 56g of egg that was originally in the recipe. And, this time around I had quite a nice 'vegan butter' which was much less like a factory margarine (see pic, the ingredients were listed as olive oil, coconut oil, soy milk, apple cider vinegar, salt and lecithin).

But the most special ingredient was this bag of Manitoba wholemeal flour that was milled in Israel and baked in South Africa:


A truly international bread.

The one downside to leaving out eggs is that I couldn't get the topping to stick properly. I tried painting the top with melted vegan butter and then sticking the seeds on, which sort of worked, but eggs or something like whey would have given much better stickiness.

I'm not a vegan myself, so tried out slices with the vegan spread and with butter. I must tell you, you can't really beat butter can you, but at least I had something to offer my vegan friend!

The bread itself turned out lovely. I certainly preferred it flavour and texture wise to my previous dairy-free one, but I'm not sure if this was because the vegan butter I used was superior to marge. To be fair, I've only ever made these wholewheat Hokkaido breads with a certain local type of flour, so a large part of what makes this one special is the flour used which seemed to also be finely milled never mind the high protein and great flavour, and I need to try make a bread with this flour that includes all of the dairy and eggs while I still have some left!

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JonJ

Maurizio Leo has quite a nice "Stout country recipe" on his web site, although he has promised an improved version for some years (as he did note that the bread could be better with more beer in the recipe).

I've tried making a few beer breads, with say an IPA or a weiss, did make one too with a local stout but I've always found that beer brings a tightness to the crumb and the flavour has been underwhelming although the stout one wasn't too bad. There was a standing joke with a friend that you'd have to prise my Guiness from my dead hands before I used it in a bread, and yet - here I am, still breathing, writing about using Guiness in a bread.

For these breads I used an entire large (440ml) can of Guiness, and since the can included the famous widget, perhaps the extra froth from nitrogen made a difference, or who knows fermentation is just better with nitrogen. The formula listed is based on using more beer, just as Maurizio suggested, and it worked out nicely.


The boule got 40 more minutes final proof at room temp (stopped the bâtard earlier because the banneton was already at the top, not the best reason for stopping earlier I guess).

These are larger than my normal loaves since it had - 1kg flour plus 250g levain for the two loaves. And baked the bâtard a little darker than I would have liked (was engrossed in a work meeting at the time).

Method wise it was a bit of a mixture of methods. I stuck to the quantities from The Perfect Loaf, more or less, with adjustments for the extra beer of the full can. However, the method used was a little different, mostly because the recipes from The Perfect Loaf have a LOT of stretch and folds, and I usually don't manage them all, but did manage 5 here over the first 3 hours. Also, it had an all in one initial mix with both the starter and salt being added up front. Both loaves were pre-shaped. The bâtard only had linseeds for the topping, but for the boule I was more generous with linseeds, sun flower seeds and black sesame.


Overall these were lovelier breads than I expected. The flavours were lovely, the loaves were larger than my usual and a pleasure to eat.

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