pmccool's blog

About a month ago, I reviewed Daniel Leader's Living Bread.  In passing, I mentioned that I had baked one bread from the book and would post about it separately.  Well, finally, here is the promised post.

Michigan's deer season opens this coming Sunday, November 15.  My brother-in-law and some of his cousins will set up camp on Friday and Saturday, continuing a tradition begun by my late father-in-law.  Accommodations are rather Spartan, in the form of a converted school bus.  I've volunteered to bring bread as my contribution to the groceries for our stay. 

We knew that 2020 would be a momentous year, long before we ever heard of COVID-19.  We had no idea just how much the virus would affect our plans. 

Fortunately for us, we have not had to endure any illness.  Nor have we lost any family members or friends to the disease.  We recognize that as a true blessing and are grateful.

While I have Ken Forkish's Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, I don’t often bake from it. I'll admit to being put off by some of his notions but that doesn’t mean I should deprive myself of good bread.  So, I decided to have another look when I needed to bake a couple of weekends ago. 

Some things are worth repeating.  Horst Bandel's Black Pumpernickel from Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread is solidly in that camp. 

We had arranged dinner with friends who will move away soon. During that conversation, I offered to make a bread for them as a going away gift.  Since they enjoy dark, hearty breads, I knew a rye bread was in order.  It took a while to peruse various recipes in several books but Bandel's pumpernickel kept drawing me back.  

The lead photo is Auvergne Dark Rye from Leader's Local Breads.  While I won’t know until tomorrow how it looks inside, I really like the way the crust turned out.  I expect it will be worlds better than my disastrous first attempt with this bread a few years ago.  

Mr. Forkish designed this formula as a hybrid, using a levain and baker's yeast for leavening.  I elected to use only the levain because it was one of two things that I wanted to test with this bake. 

Some context is probably in order. 

A whole wheat four strand braided Challah from today's class.  The flour is a 50/50 mix of white whole wheat and AP.

Paul 

One of my Christmas gifts this year was several pounds of barley and of oats to feed my home milling habit.  After noodling around here on TFL and the web, I cobbled together a formula to use some barley flour.  

Ingredients 

400g whole wheat flour, freshly milled

400g whole barley flour, freshly milled

400g all purpose flour 

5g malted grain (I used malted barley)

900g water

60g honey

24g salt

10g active dry yeast

Process

Our oven has been rather busy lately, especially with the Christmas cookies that my wife likes to make at this time of year.  In spite of all of that going on, I still managed to work in three different breads yesterday.  

First up was the Tyrolean Christmas Zelten from The Rye Baker: