Ilya Flyamer's blog

This year with CLAS! Will bring the treats to work tomorrow.

Here is the dough formula: https://fgbc.dk/2blk

For the filling I found milled and steamed poppy seeds here - Dampfmohn (pricey, but saves a trip to Germany to buy ready made filling, or saves lots of hard manual work with a pestle and mortar). So just boiled those with milk, honey, lemon zest and raisins the day before.

I used quite hot milk/sugar/salt/oil mixture when making the dough, so it was super warm from the beginning and in an hour it was more than doubled. I punched it down and gave about another 25 min before making the hamantaschen.

Then I had a work thing, so punched down the remaining dough and put on the balcony to slow it down, and then after about 2.5 hrs rolled out and made cinnamon buns.

Made another bread with all ruchmehl - a Swiss "semi whole" wheat flour. Used some quite old unfed rye starter from the fridge (maybe around 25 g?), 450 g ruchmehl, 330 g warm water, 11 g salt. Mixed with a hand mixer and spiral attachments until moderate gluten development. Did three folds about 30 min apart, then left at around 28ºC for a few hours, until nicely grown and airy. Preshaped, and then shaped into a batard, left to final proof overnight on the balcony. Baked in the morning on steel 230ºC around 15 min with steam, then 210ºC without steam until good colour.

Again the ruchmehl gave a rather open crumb! It has 14% protein, higher than any flour easily available here. It makes a very nice strong dough. I can see why the Swiss bakers like baking with it.

This time the flavour is clearly a little more tangy (I guess due to low inoculation with unrefreshed starter and long bulk), but still delicious, and the texture is great. Very pleased with this bread, and I think I might just keep using this flour for everyday sourdough bread. Flavourful and so easy to use. I might compare to some German Type 1050 at some point, should be the most similar flour available afaik.

We bought some cheese on a market across the border in France on the weekend. So my girlfriend requested some baguettes to go with them, since all my equipment including the baking steel finally arrived from Edinburgh. I wanted to try Benny's Yorkville baguette formula (sans any seeds this time), but I needed a slightly different schedule than in Benny's recipe, so I prepared the levain overnight and increased the % PFF, and shortened the bulk fermentation time. I didn't do a very long cold ferment, but after I observed some growth in the dough I kept it on the balcony outside for a few hours (around 12 degrees C), hoping shorter cool fermentation would still allow some more flavour development.

Here is the formula: https://fgbc.dk/290t

And here are the pics:

Very nice oven spring and beautiful look (although just a little wonky shape (but I haven't baked baguettes in a very long time!). I think this is the best crumb structure I have got with baguettes (open and fluffy), although I have a feeling a slightly wetter dough, while more challenging to work with, could improve the texture even further. The crust is nice and crispy. The taste is nice and mild, perhaps a longer cold ferment would improve it further though.

Having source some very coarse rye schrot, I wanted to bake the Frisian Rye bread by hanseata (http://hanseata.blogspot.com/2016/06/friesisches-schwarzbrot-hearty-rye-from.html) that was highly recommended here by someone a few months ago. I still don't have my bread pans, so bought a cheap cake pan. I was aiming for half of the recipe since I just had one pan. I didn't invest the time to measure its volume, and it turned out to be bigger than I expected, so when I tried to fill it with half-sized dough mixture it was way too little. I should have used the whole recipe for just one pan! Still, I just mixed in 50 g whole rye flour, some more seeds, and water to adjust the consistency (and an additional pinch of salt). It was still quite low in the pan, but at least didn't look ridiculous anymore. It came out quite flat because of this. I also forgot to sprinkle sunflower seeds on top :(

Let it rest for more than a day before tasting it just now. Really delicious, very nutty flavour and nicely caramelized crust. Pleasant crumb texture too, well aerated despite the low profile. Really worth repeating in full scale!

Happy New Year everyone. I'm back in Switzerland after holidays and baked my first bread with the local Ruchmehl flour - a Swiss version of high extraction flour. I followed a very simple recipe from https://www.homebaking.at/ruchbrot/

It includes a white flour levain build over a few hours and then exclusively Ruchmehl in the main dough, with high hydration (80%). The main flour is autolysed for 3 hours before mixing in the salt and levain as well. After just a little hand kneading using just firm folding and Rubaud-style the dough was well developed, and a couple more stretch and folds later made a strong, although stretchy dough. After bulk the dough was preshaped and then final shaped. I proofed in a floured towel in a tray placed on the balcony overnight, with night temperature going down to 4°C - just like in the fridge.

Baked with steam on a tray at 230°C. I discovered the oven here has a special mode for "humid baking" - it doesn't let out steam this way (audibly noticeable that the fan doesn't come on, unlike the regular baking mode even without convection), and it's the recommended setting for baking bread. So I used that, and seemed to work. While the shaping wasn't very tight and in proofing the bread spread out quite a bit lengthwise, oven spring was really good, however the slash didn't open very nicely. Maybe I didn't have to score it at all? Interesting.

The crumb is amazingly open, custardy, soft and a little moist - just like in the pictures on the recipe page! It's very tasty, without very strong wheaty/grassy notes like in whole grain bread, but very flavourful.

Overall, very happy with this bake, and pleasantly surprised with the flour!

And just now after baking noticed that there is an English version of the recipe available, and I didn't have to resort to Google translate :)

I finally got close to where I want to be with ciabattas!

I was going to a friend's flat for an Italian dinner yesterday, so decided to bring a ciabatta, although previously I only had partial success with this style of bread. However Rus Brot has a video recipe for ciabatta, and so far each and every recipe of his have been a great success, so I decided to risk it. The video is unfortunately only in Russian: https://youtu.be/beEhMiwIaHw

Here is the formula, except I increased the amount of CLAS to 5% by flour weight, since my bread flour is a little higher ash, probably: https://fgbc.dk/1so4

In addition, I replaced 20% of the flour with semola rimacinata, since I need to use it up soon, and seemed like a fitting bread to add it to.

The process is very simple. The dough is mixed using cold CLAS and cold water (I used, like him, a hand-held mixer with spiral attachments), and oil and some water are withheld. Then after partial development oil is incorporated, and then the remaining water, until very soft consistency - around 80% hydration in my case, all the while developing the gluten. DDT of about 25°C. Then the dough is transferred into a rectangular contained. Folded after 1 hr, and then it goes into the fridge for ~24 hrs. About half-way through cold bulk it's folded again. Before baking it's warmed up at RT for 1.5 hrs. Then in the recipe he does a few folds before dividing the dough and coaxing it into rectangle. I decided to skip the folds at this stage as I felt they would impede open crumb formation, and simply divided the dough in half. It's then proofed at RT for 20-30 min, and baked. I proofed on a couche, and flipped upside down when transferring onto a peel - like you'd do with baguettes. The very tip of one of them got a little stuck on the peel unfortunately, and I think it deflated that half of the bread a little. So I brought the other one to the dinner party. Baked for about 15 min with steam on steel, and then until I liked the colour without steam.

They looked stunning, even is I say so myself, with the beautiful pattern of flour on the crust. Crust was super hard and crispy out of the oven, and stayed so for a little while, but it's always lost here with the humidity we are having. I think addition of a little durum also helped with that.

My friend took a couple of pictures of the food, which included the sliced ciabatta. Shows quite clearly that in some spots it had huge bubbles under the crust, despite being flipped before loading into the oven. Perhaps they could benefit from some light docking, but they were already huge and would barely fit on my steel, if they ended up being any longer it would be a problem.

Here is the crumb of the one I kept at home. It's a bit different in different parts of the bread, some parts more open than others. But I'm not complaining.

And it's delicious! It's awesome how easy it is to bake with just yeast for leavening, and CLAS provides such pleasant flavour. No overt acidity, but a nice lingering pleasant aftertaste, a bit similar flavour to when I tried making ciabatta with a SD biga back during the CB. Nicely caramelized crust. Light and fluffy crumb. I'm very pleased with this.

Tried to make a French-style rye bread following this recipe from Stanley Ginsberg: http://theryebaker.com/sourdough-tourte-de-seigle/ The recipe is very simple, but also very different from what I am used to (i.e. very short fermentation times, very high hydration for hearth bread, basically no shaping).

I halved the amount to make just one bread. Due to that on top of using warm water to mix the different stages, I also kept the dough in a warm place at about 28°C - I thought a smaller mass would lose the heat faster, and the fermentation times were scary short. The first stage more than doubled overnight (not tripled though, like said in the recipe, but I've never had my rye do that). I gave full 2 hours for the second stage, despite warm temperature, since I didn't observe any clear cracks or broken bubbles at 1.5 hrs. The dough however looked ready at 1.5 hrs with some broken bubbles on the surface.

The final proof is ridiculously short. Checking out the original video Stanley Ginsberg used as a basis for his recipe, the dough is not shaped at all, just scooped into generously floured bannetons and left for 15 min. I lined the banneton using my linen couche and generously dusted it with rice flour, and dusted the surface of the dough in the bowl with white rye flour. Since I just had dough for one bread, I simply inverted the bowl over the banneton and made the dough fall down, and scooped what stuck tot he bowl on top, and gently smoothed the surface. Left for 15 min again at 28°C.

Baked on a preheated steel without steam, generally following the instructions. But figuring out when to stop baking was tricky, and I might have stopped too soon: with the bread covered in flour, it's hard to see the colour of the crust. I tapped the bottom of the loaf and thought I heard good hollow sound, although time-wise it was quite a bit sooner than in the recipe. I gave it extra 5 min just in case, and pulled out.

Left to cool and only cut this morning for breakfast, it was baked around 1pm yesterday.

As you might be able to see above, the center is just a little gummy and a touch sticky. It's not terrible and still completely edible, but could be better. So I wonder if it's a little underbaked, or there is an issue with fermentation. I found it difficult to judge the fermentation here, since the times are so short, and in particular the final proof. But still I'd guess it's slight underbaking, since I baked for a significantly shorter time than in the recipe: only about 40 min vs at least an hour.

The flavour is very good anyway, very clear rye taste and a nice aroma! I might repeat it at some point and bake more thoroughly to evaluate it more fairly. The recipe is incredibly simple and very quick on the baking day (as I said, starting the second stage in the morning, the bread was baked at around 1 pm!).

As I planned and discussed with Paul last week, finally made Riga rye bread (aka Rizhsky bread). It's a famous Russian bread (I guess historically based on Latvian recipes). It's a white rye bread with 10% wheat flour.

I followed the advice of Rus Bread to adjust the process to using CLAS. First a portion of flour is scalded with diastatic malt (I used barley malt instead of traditional white rye malt, due to availability), which produces a very sweet liquid, which is then fermented for a long time with a small amount of yeast and CLAS. Then final dough is made by adding most of the flour, salt, malt extract and more yeast for a quick rise. Here is the formula, with time and temperature: https://fgbc.dk/1qeb (note that barley malt is stronger than rye malt so scald was very liquidy, and I omitted a little water that would be added to pre-dough otherwise).

Two small defects in the final bread. Liquid dough applied before bake was probably a little too liquid, and I got small bubbles on the surface after the bake. Rus Brot confirmed that with white rye the ratio of dough to water should be 30:21 g instead of 30:25 g due to lower water binding capacity of white flour, and this is probably the reason. Lesson learned. Also one of the two breads "exploded" a little (crust got torn) on one of the sides, and that I am not sure why.

I particularly like the flavour and aroma of the crust here, very full and nice. Very caramelized, as you can see, yet very soft (at least in part from the corn starch glaze I applied after the bake).

The crumb is amazingly soft for rye bread, feels almost like wheat bread! And kind of open even. The flavour of the crumb is very subtle and delicate, except when you get a caraway seed, which explodes with aroma. I expected something stronger from the crumb itself to be honest, but perhaps it is as it should be? I've only had commercial Riga rye in Moscow, and didn't like it that much due to a rather dry mouthfeel it gave (which is not at all the case here), but I thought it did have stronger flavour. It's been many years since I've had it though.

Followed this Rus Brot recipe for Palyanitsa, a traditional Ukrainian white bread, with CLAS: https://youtu.be/tpNqhC5s_Ck

Scaled it down a little to 500 g bread flour, otherwise followed quite faithfully. Here is my formula: https://fgbc.dk/1pfj (I also didn't record it there, but I took 3g IDY instead of 3.5 g, and extended bulk by 10 min). Incredibly soft crumb, yet nicely chewy. It was still just a little warm in the center, so couldn't even cut it cleanly how soft it was. And it's so-so tasty, despite being simply white flour with nothing fancy at all. Very easy recipe with outstanding results.

Edit: nicer crumb shot

Thinking why there is so much flavour, I'm thinking it has a lot of lactic taste, while I don't detect any sharp acidity. I guess very warm fermentation (30°C in bulk, and above that in final proof) must really shift the balance to lactic acid over acetic acid!

Followed a very similar procedure to the recent seeded whole spelt bread I posted, again following Rus Brot's process: I took his recipe for whole wheat bread and added seeds. The dough was super slack after the final mix, so I added a little extra flour, but still it was weaker than I would have liked. But baking in a pan solves this sort of issues! Here is the formula: https://fgbc.dk/1p57

I used 1:2 ratio of linseeds and sunflower seeds. Again, I think the mucous produced by soaking linseeds caused overhydration a little, and made the dough more slack... I should have learned my lesson from the previous bake with spelt. I also sprinkled pumpkin seeds on the bottom on the pans before adding the dough, and sesame seeds on top of the dough. Made for a very tasty bread full of nutty seeds.