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ITJB Vienna Bread - 3rd Time Not the Charm

Profile picture for user OldWoodenSpoon

I baked this recipe for the third time tonight, and I am still scratching my head.   For this iteration I made the following adjustments:

1)  Reduced the malt to 10 grams, based on Eric Hanner's parallel bake comments and results here.
2)  Reduced my mixing time to 10 minutes to reduce the level of dough development.
3)  Added a wire rack to the middle of my oven to avoid baking directly on my quarry tiles.

ITJB Vienna Bread

When I saw the strong proofing OWS was getting from his attempts at baking the Vienna Bread from Inside the Jewish Bakery.  I baked this as a tester a long time ago but this is the now released version so I thought I’d give it a whirl. It's a fast rising enriched dough that just takes a few hours to complete.

Crust help

Toast

I desperately need help with crust. what I want is a paper thin, shatteringly crisp crust. but all I can achieve is moderately crisp but thick, hard, turtle shell crust. I have tried everything imagineable. dutch oven, cloche, steaming, misting absolutely everything I can think of.  KA AP, Gold Medal AP, bread flour ..got desperate and  yesterday I even used 1/2 C rice flour .. got the shattering part, but under it was 1/4 inch of turtle shell. (great rise and crumb) Fortunately my sandwich loaves are most always good. specially James Beard's sour cream bread.

Caramelized Onion, Rice and Sage Bread (a variation of Mr. Reinhart's Wild Rice and Onion Bread)

Hello,

Mr. Reinhart’s Wild Rice and Onion Bread is back on the front page; the picture and the recipe tempted me to try making some :^)

Not having any wild rice, black-and-mahogany short grain rice (a blend) was substituted, and a mixture of caramelized sweet onion, leek and shallot used in place of raw/dried onion.
In place of all bread flour, I used 1/3 each bread, 75% Red Fife, and 100% whole-wheat (locally-grown) flour.