JonJ's blog

It seems to be a fashion here, but it was my turn to try out Benny's version of Eric's rye.

The taste was very mild, even though I used wholemeal rye flour. I think that perhaps my rye sour wasn't sour enough - started with a very sour 50g of rye starter so thought that 4 hours of 27 deg C would be enough to get a rye sour, it sure smelt sour but obviously needed more time to develop a stronger sour taste.

Texture was lovely, very soft and just like I'd expect for a deli loaf.

Next time I'll try adding Caroline's "trio" of EVOO/buttermilk/honey to it, and will be sure to use the raisin YW too. Might even consider some malt then. I'm not used to instant yeast, forgot to degas the dough prior to shaping!

The separate gluten development process is a winner. Had my doubts at first when the mixer got stuck into it, but old lady Kenwood eventually managed to produce a beautiful supple dough.

Oven spring surprised me! Think I should have scored horizontally across the loaves instead of at an angle.

I'm a beginner when it comes to corn starch glaze. I painted it on 10 minutes before the end of the bake, at least I thought it was 10 minutes before but the bake needed to go longer and so repeated again. It seems Benny paints it on after the loaf comes out the oven though?

I like the winebottle couche idea, even though it is a little dangerous in that there was a bottle or two of unopened wine left out there on the counter just begging to be opened.

-Jon

Just wanted to drop a note about how much I enjoyed both making and eating this bread.

This is a quality recipe. Great posts from David and Hans and lots of techniques and tricks in the comments to their posts meant this was like following a well charted path.

This bread surprised me by it's mildness. Was a pleasure to eat. Even the kids got stuck into it!

Technique wise I was fairly faithful to the recipe although I did not initially have enough rye sour, so did a two step build with the second step fed 1:1:1 and then given a further 3.5 hours. Even after that was still around 30g short of rye sour when compared to the recipe, but all was fine. Used my "desem" starter for this bread rather than my regular starter. A  60:40 blend of rye wholemeal:sifted rye was made in order to make a 'medium' rye flour, next time I might adjust that ratio to 70:30 as there was a little bit of guesswork for the extraction rate of the sifted rye flour.

In some ways this bread was a healing experience for me. In my youth I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with rye, loved it as this was a bread my family loved but also some of that caraway seeded rye was just a little too overwhelming. As I grew older rye became this superb bread to take with on hikes as it lasted so well. And now, as I get more into bread making I want to explore rye further, especially some of the interesting Nordic, Baltic and Russian ryes that seem to be so beloved by the people for whom they're their first bread and are tied to family and homeland.

We all seem to not have enough time in our lives lately. And it is worse when it comes to finding time to fit natural fermentation into our days! One thing I've been loving about the yeast water bakes is how quickly fermentation takes place. A lot of that speed is due to the sheer amount of levain that is added into the final dough with a large part of the flour coming from the preferment.

So, I've also been experimenting lately with high inoculations to see if I can also make sourdough bread in a way that is more convenient for me. I know that there are some bakers (like Peter Reinhart) who have many recipes with a large amount of pre-fermented flour. This bread was made with 48% pre-fermented flour (153% inoculation).

To get this high inoculation I needed a lot of levain. So, I took the approach of emulating what I do with the yeast water - build up the levain in two steps at a hydration of about 63%. When I looked at my starter in the morning it looked like it had gone past its peak, so I added an extra third preferment step at 100% hydration just to commence with a starter at peak. All of this levain building does kind of defeat the purpose of making the bread in a convenient way, but hey this one was another experiment! Preferment #1 had 2 hours in the proofer, then was all used to feed #2 which had 2.5 hours, and the final preferment also had 2.5 hours, so they were all fairly young when they were used. I took care to feed with warmer water - at 36°C (97°F) - and the proofer was set to 27°C (80°F).

The bulk ferment time was a little like the yeast water - 2.5 hours of bulk proofing, followed by 1.5 hours final proof and then immediately baked. The aliquot was at 38% volume increase at the time of shaping and 105% at the end of final proof.

The rustic look was quite lovely (thanks to seam side down in banneton).

This was quite a flavourful bread - the parmesan, olives and especially the origanum (sweet marjoram) bring a lot of flavour, and I might halve the origanum next time. It is also quite difficult to tell if the bread was lacking a sourdough tang because of the strong herb taste.

I'm not completely convinced any more that a 20% innoculation, as is the default in so many recipes, is actually my ideal anymore. Although, my baking notes do testify that high innoculations, like this one, do involve  some work in feeding the preferments.

-Jon

As Dan said, "bad babka" is a misnomer, and I also happen to think a "bad blueberry" bread is a misnomer. But I'm biased in liking fruit in my breads, and this particular combination of fresh blueberries and lemon zest in the bread is lovely.

As usual, this is a yeast water bread, this time made with apple yeast water. And, like last time, I only did a single build of the yeast water 'levain' before including it in the bake as I could tell that the fridge jar of apple yeast water was suitably fizzy and a double build didn't seem to be necessary. To 137g of apple yeast water I added two different kinds of wholemeal flour: 49g of a hard white wheat wholemeal and 50g of atta flour. To this was also added 129g of a strong bread flour, and it was combined with a danish whisk and finished off by hand kneading and then left for about 11.5 hours to overnight in the proofer at 27°C (80°F) before using in the final dough.

Once again the main recipe is the Hamelman recipe from the community bake. Other than using the single build described above the other main deviation was that I didn't use the same inclusions as in the community bake but instead used 80g of fresh unprocessed (but washed) blueberries, as well as the fresh zest of one lemon, about 3 tsp worth.

I got something right this time when preparing the final dough - did a short 20 minute autolyse of the flour and water before adding in the levain build and this made all the difference. It only needed about 3 minutes in the stand mixer before the bowl was clean, although I left it running for a total of 8 minutes before stopping the mixer; the salt was added about half way through by pouring it slowly into the running mixer.

Fermentation times were similar or faster than the fast times I've seen before with yeast water: 1h30 bulk followed by 1h10 final proof, all done in the proofer at 27°C (80°F). The aliquot was estimated at 50% at the time of shaping and reached up to 225% at the end.

Once again seam side DOWN in the banneton. Struggled to add the seed topping to it because of that. But this time around was so much better! It puffed up into a ball in the banneton during the final proofing. Loading it into the dutch oven was difficult. Even the 'heave ho' to lift in the parchment seemed to change the shape it was so jiggly. I was so worried that I'd get another ugly flat bread that 6 minutes into the bake I removed the hot dutch oven, opened it and did a small cross score just to ensure that there was some lift, and yes there was lift! I've actually already made another bread after this one, and for that I was bold enough to not do any 'panic' scoring and that one seemed to have achieved a nice lift so I'm beginning to trust the seam side down method more now.

Blueberry and lemon is amazing, never tried the combination before. Also think I've got a particularly good bag of lemons at the moment as they were also great in the parmesan bread. I should probably have extracted the juice and just used the blueberry skins, there might have been less cavitation. On the other hand the juice brought extra flavour to the loaf.

-Jon

Gosh. Kicking myself that I hadn't tried out parmesan in my breads before. This bread had a great combination of inclusions: 41g of parmesan cheese, grated from a frozen block. Fresh zest of one lemon, about 3 tsp worth. 2 tsp of dried origanum (marjoram). And 45g of Kalamata olives (13 ea). Incredible smell when it was out of the oven. I couldn't wait the two hours for it to cool. Was cutting into it after 40 minutes, sometimes it is the guilty pleasure of hot steamy crusty bread that is the most enjoyable.

This bread is, once again, a raisin water yeast bread, and once again using the Hamelman recipe from the community bake as the base. For this one though I didn't have time to do a double build. So there was only a single build made using 153g active and fizzy raisin yeast water straight from the fridge, with 169g strong bread flour and 57g atta, other than that (and the different inclusions) it was faithful to the community bake recipe.

The build was used 9 hours later in the final dough, which was mixed all-in-one together with the salt. Had more trouble than usual getting the stand mixer to run 'clean' which is my normal guide to good gluten development. Previously, with the same flours I've done an all-in-one mix with this recipe and had good gluten development after about 8 minutes but this bread ended up getting a whopping 27 minutes of mix time (in 10 minute intervals with some rest between) before I was satisfied. Next time I will pay closer attention as to the order of adding items to the mix, and might do an autolyse or delay the addition of the salt (which is a great tool to tighten the gluten if the dough isn't developing satisfactorily). 27 minutes of mix time is not typical for me, but it certainly built a nice enough crumb!

A lamination was done shortly after the mix and all the inclusions were added in then. There was no opportunity for a coil fold, as bulk fermentation was in a proofer set to 27°C (80°F) and fermentation proceeded quickly. The dough was final shaped 2 hours after the initial mix, and then had an additional 1.5 hours of proof time in the proofer followed by 30 minutes in the fridge whilst the oven completed heating. The final volume increase of the aliquot jar was 200% (in other words, the dough was three times the original volume). I've been pushing the volume increase of these yeast water breads to see what I can get away with lately.

I tried out "Danni's banneton method" where the shaped dough is placed into the banneton seam side down. I like how the dough grew in the banneton after the shaping. The reason why I was trying out this technique was that I've been finding it difficult to score the room temperature dough, especially when it is soft and 'jiggly' as this one was. So the attraction for me of the method is that the bread does not need to be scored with the expectation that it should open up at the seams on the top during the bake. The seams didn't really open on this one very much though. The exterior wasn't exactly ugly, but it also wasn't what I would call charming! At least the bread did not flatten out.

The interior of the bread was lovely. Could taste all of the various flavours and the parmesan and lemon flavours dominated. I might use less lemon next time as it was perhaps a little too strong. There was an interesting layering of the crust at the base of the bread and the crust had that enjoyable glassy brittleness. Not sure if that was from the seam side up method or from the long mix time the dough had.

Am still loving the yeast water! This was a repeat of Hamelman's "Swiss Farmhouse" from the community bake - used the same formula but with some minor tweaks. Said tweaks being that I used apple yeast water (fed using Granny Smith apples, originally started as a raisin yeast water); and replaced the raisins and walnuts by cranberries and pecans; the cranberries were soaked in boiled water for 20 minutes and so were slightly more hydrated than the raisins usually are.

The interesting thing about using the apple yeast water this time is that build 1 and build 2 both had some lovely apple odours to them, but as usual with the yeast waters I can't taste it in the final bread.

The bread flour that I used ("Champagne Valley") needed fairly long in the mixer before the mixer ran clean. It ended up needing 20 minutes before I was satisfied, and perhaps next time I use this brand of flour I'll try it with an autolyse beforehand as that felt like a long time. But, the long mix gave a nicely developed gluten, and I've never had the experience of slicing into a bread and thinking the interior looked like the interior of a croissant until this one.

To be fair "work meetings" meant I was distracted, so perhaps I let the fermentation run longer than usual too, but that isn't such a bad thing now, is it? So this bread had 2 hours of bulk fermentation before shaping without any coil folds, followed by 2 hours of final proof before it was baked without a cold retard. The aliquot jar at the time of baking showed a volume increase of about 225%, think this is a first for me without over proofing!

Our recent babka community bake gave me a hankering for what my grandmother would call 'bulkas/boolkes/bulkes' - yeasted cinnamon buns made with milk.

They are simple, soft and buttery, and not too sweet or as complex as babka. Lovely to eat when spread with butter. We also like to have them as the perfect food for breaking the Yom Kippur fast.

Orna Purkin has a great recipe which uses commercial yeast. She has an interesting YouTube channel that has a couple of variations and a clever technique for shaping the buns.

They're easy to make with commercial yeast, but I do like my yeast water lately, which also seems fairly osmotolerant and can handle the sweeter doughs. These were made with apple yeast water (pictured below) and I did a double build before using in the final dough. For the first build 50g of apple yeast water was mixed with 78g of bread flour and left for 8 hours. This was then used in the second build for which an additional 148g of bread flour and 94g of water was added, this was then left in the proofer at 27 deg C for 12 hours and used in the final dough the next morning.

The final dough formula was adjusted to take into account the yeast water levain. All of the second build yeast water levain was used (about 370g). To accomodate this, the amount of milk in the final dough was reduced down to 107g of full cream milk, when compared to Orna's recipe, and the total amount of flour was reduced to 314g. Another adjustment was that I used some cake flour which gives a softer crumb that I tend to prefer, so that 314g of flour was 206g of cake flour and 108g of bread flour. Because I was using the yeast water I didn't deliberately degas the dough prior to shaping, but since shaping involved rolling it flat with a rolling pin some degassing couldn't be avoided!

Fermentation times were 2 hours for the bulk ferment, after which the dough had risen in size by about two-thirds. The bulkas were then shaped (the dough unfortunately cooled a little in my cold kitchen). It then went back into the proofer for about another hour or so to bulk up. Had nice oven spring too.

These are lovely and quick. The crumb below is crying out to be eaten with butter whilst still a little warm!

-Jon

Have been loving the yeast water. 

I've recently made Hamelman's Swiss Farmhouse bread from the community bake. So interesting and it surprised me that my somewhat fizzy water has such great leavening power.

Since there was leftover yeast water from making the CB bread I wondered what a yeast water bread would taste like without the raisins and if it would still have as strong a raisin flavour to it. And I do like what seeds and nuts as inclusions bring to a bread, so made this loaf, replacing the walnut and raisin inclusions with 50g of a seed mix of my own (pumpkin, sunflower, brown and golden linseed, sesame) and another 50g of nuts (almonds, pecans and walnut).

Other than that most of the method followed was as per Hamelman's recipe.  The nuts and seeds were laminated in. This time around the fermentation, although lightning fast compared to sourdough was slower than with the Swiss Farmhouse, possible because of the lack of raisins. Bulk fermentation was 2.5 hours and final proof just shy of 2 hours, with the aliquot showing 120% increase at the end. With the original recipe the aliquot grew even larger - to 167% and perhaps I should have let it raise even higher, but still learning what I can get away with with the yeast water!

I did err on the side of caution and popped the banneton into the freezer while the oven was warming just in case the dough would spread when it came out. I never know how long you can get away with the freezer for, but it seems to be longer than I expected and up to an hour has been fine. For this bread it was around 50 minutes.

Taste was exceptional. The pecans really came through (most of the nuts did, actually). There wasn't a raisin taste either, although there was certainly no sour taste as you'd get with sourdough. It was especially lovely to eat with a nut butter, but we went to town and also tried it with avo, a 'Labneh' cream-cheese and Speculoos spread.

crumb yeasty with avo.jpeg

yeast water jars.jpeg

So I had two different kinds of raisins that I tried. Ended up using the jar on the left which had the larger raisins made from Hanepoort grapes. Raisins are seeded and still have stalks.

The Tartine book has an interesting variation on the semolina bread called "Golden Raisin, Fennel Seed, and Orange Zest." I've got a friend who makes this bread, but substitutes the raisins for cranberries and calls this her "Christmas bread."

I used a 100g bag of cranberries which were presoaked in boiling water (120g after drainage).

Also, I've struggled in the past with semolina 'rinacinata' in bread, so I developed two doughs and laminated them together with the inclusions, this let me develop the gluten in the semolina dough at  lower hydration and get quite a strong dough upfront. In the pic below of the two doughs the semolina dough (70% of the flour) is the bowl on the right and the bowl on the left (30% of the flour) is strong bread flour dough. I used a little bit less water than Chad (used 330g of water in total, whereas the book had 375+25g listed), but followed what the dough felt like it could hold.

The bread had the lovely yellow semolina colour, and was my first successful high semolina bread! Think I have the double dough lamination to thank for that!

Taste wise the fennel seeds do dominate, so it isn't an everyday bread, but the combination with orange zest, coriander and cranberries was quite interesting to try out. Perhaps too, that floral linalool flavour from the toasted coriander seeds is the thing that held the flavour and made this an interesting bread.

In the light by my window it looks a little golden.

This has to be one of the most interesting (to me) breads I've made in the last couple of months. As I was making it I kept on thinking that this was quite mad scientist and couldn't possibly work.

It all started when I read a stray comment from David (headupinclouds) about the "wet sprouted grain path"....which led me to find Wendy's interesting post here from 2018 about Reinhart's Sprouted Pulp Bread.

And from there it was a short hop skip and jump to take those first tentative steps onto the "wet sprouted grain path". At least some of these tenative steps have been self inflicted, it would have certainly been easier to read Peter Reinhart.

At the time I didn't have Reinhart's "Bread Revolution" book, so the formula that I came up with to make my own was based off some assumptions. The first thought was that maybe 150g of wheat berries to 300g of flour would be a good starting point. It was harder to guess how much water to add, so I assumed that roughly 10% of the mass of the wheat berries was water and germinated the wheat in a closed glass jar so that I could have a rough idea of the added hydration. Also, I made the assumptions that 3 days would be about right for germination of the sprouts, although my kitchen is a cold 17 deg C at this time of the year.

And, based on these assumptions, and treating the sprouted wheat as another flour I initially aimed for '70% hydration' overall, figuring that it is better to be underhydrated and have control over the dough and add in water later by bassinage if needed. It turned out to be needed too - 50g of the water listed above in the formula needed to be added in via bassinage. The wheat husk and endosperm are certainly good at doing what they do when it comes to locking in (or out) the moisture.

The food processor with the sharp metal blade was used for pulping the sprouted wheat berries, and since I didn't really want to wash multiple containers I also used it for mixing the dough. I started out with a slurry of levain and the initial amount of water (178g) and into this the sprouted wheat was added for pulping. It was necessary to run the machine for around 3 minutes until the mixture no longer showed large wheat pieces. On top of this the high protein sifted bread flour was poured, with a total mix time thereafter of around 35 (20+15) seconds to make the final dough. There was a rest between the two mixes so that the dough could fermentolyse. When it came out of the food processor the dough had strong gluten and was taut and rubbery, and it was then left in a bowl in the proofing box for about an hour before the salt and additional bassinage water was added by hand. The bassinage the excessive rubbery gluten texture.

If I was to repeat, I think it might be interesting to pulp the wheat berries first to see what the pulp looks like (and to smell it) on its own without the levain slurry, although the method of mixing used clearly turned out to be effective and there was nothing wrong with it.

From Wendy's post the raisins and nuts looked like interesting inclusions, but I didn't want to overdo the inclusions on the first attempt, so there were inclusions, but only a small amount of dry cranberries and walnuts from leftovers in the cupboard. Inclusions were laminated in, thereafter followed by a couple of coil folds about hourly, with shaping at a low volume increase of 20% and the banneton went into the fridge for a retard at a volume increase of approximately 45%. Normally I like to go a little bit bigger than that, but the levain wasn't as active as I'd have liked.

The levain is my new desem culture which I've been playing with storing semi dehydrated in the fridge, and probably it should have had an additional day growing in the warm proofer with one extra levain build step before use. It is weird to think that the desem levain was started from the same bag of wheat kernels that I used for this bread, at least there is some consistency with the yeast and bacteria species found on the seeds and what is being used in the levain culture, although the whole thing felt kind of cannibalistic!

This bread was lovely to eat. I can see why all the bakers who make pulp breads say they will do it again. The taste was more neutral than sweet, but it certainly did not have the sour taste notes that I associate with sourdough and wholewheat. It was a little denser than I like, and I suspect using emmer or kamut are worth exploring as Reinhart suggests, although even using regular wheat result in a "power" bread that is digestible and nutritious.

Today I bought an ebook version of Reinhart's book to finally see the recipe for his "sprouted emmer pulp power bread". Definitely on the path now. And, can see why his bread is less dense - the ratio of kernels to flour in his recipe has more flour, and he even added some VWG which I see could be beneficial. Plus, he also used a lot more of the good stuff, the raisins and nuts! Definitely will try his recipe too, there will certainly be a next time.