pmccool's blog

My wife was going through the cabinets last week and hauled out two packets of dried starter.  One was a survivor from our move from South Africa to the US, dating back to October 2011.  So, just a couple of months away from being 14 years old.  Mind you, this has received no special treatment, having been tucked away in one cabinet or another at room temperature.  It has also survived a second move in 2020 when I retired and we moved from Kansas back to Michigan.

When you are fortunate enough to find something like this out in the wild (and they are legally accessible):

you do this:

which can lead to this:

I had been informed that a crusty, French-style bread was required for today's brunch with my cousins.  So, like any good husband possessed of a healthy measure of spousal love and self-preservation,  I set to work.

We returned home a couple of weeks ago from a trip to Myrtle Beach and needed some bread.  After a bit of consideration, I opened The Rye Baker and began thumbing through it.  Several breads looked appealing and I eventually selected the Milk Rye.  It’s one that I haven’t made previously.  The bread is about 60:40 rye:wheat (medium rye flour and bread flour).  My deviations were to substitute whole rye flour that I milled in place of the medium rye flour, 2% milk for the whole milk, and ADY for the IDY.

A Chai Blackberry pie.  A bit rough around the edges but better than I usually do.  Tasting still to come.

For the flatbreads Community Bake, I made Swedish Tunnbrod.  The recipe is from King Arthur's Big Book of Breads, giving me another opportunity to bake something from that book.  

Tunnbrod is fairly straightforward.  This recipe called for AP flour, rye flour (I used whole rye flour), sugar, yeast, salt, ground fennel seeds, milk, and melted butter.  I combined the dry ingredients and then mixed in the wet ingredients by hand.  The resulting dough was kneaded by hand for a few minutes, then allowed to ferment for an hour.

A month ago (Christmas Day, actually), Tony (CalBeachBaker) posted his bake of the Danish rye bread from Stanley Ginsberg’s The Rye Baker.  I commented that it looked like a great choice for a high-rye bake that I was contemplating.  So, I made it this week.

First up, Hamelman's Quarkbrot.  The formula calls for 60% bread flour, 20% medium rye flour, and 20% rye chops.  It also includes quark cheese.  Since the medium rye flour and rye chops and quark cheese are scarce as hen's teeth in my corner of northern Michigan, I was forced to adapt.  My trusty Komo grain mill does just fine at producing whole rye flour and cracked rye, so I used those.  The cracked rye was treated to a hot soak, rather than the cold soak for the rye chops; this per Hamelman's suggestion in a different recipe.  And Hamelman suggests that yog

I'm beginning to wonder whether I bake better when the weather is cool.  This is the second bake in a row to turn out very well.

The bread is based on a rye levain that matures overnight.  It also has a hot soaker that consists of cracked rye, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, oats, and all of the salt for the formula.  For this bake, I subbed bulgur wheat for the cracked rye since I have more on hand than I can easily use up other ways.  The soaker is allowed to rest overnight. 

The formula for this bread is from the second edition of Hamelman's Bread.  It's a 50/50 white/whole wheat bread with a multigrain soaker.  It is leavened with both a sourdough levain and a yeast kicker in the final dough.  The multigrain soaker composition is entirely up to the baker.  In this version, I used flaxseed meal, whole millet, and a blend that includes sunflower seeds and flaked wheat, barley, rye, and oats.