The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Kernza Flour Levain baguettes

alfanso's picture
alfanso

Kernza Flour Levain baguettes

Felila posted a link to an article in the Washington Post newspaper on baking with a newly developed flour, Kernza.  During the summer I visited with a friend in Vermont who was gifted a small bag of Kernza flour, apparently promotional as the one pound bag has no markings on it other than the Land Institute logo and "Kernza Perennial Grain Flour".  Not even the weight of the contents.  And handed it over to me.  The bag was placed on the back burner, but Felila's posting had me commit to baking with it.

 Kernza is a very low gluten flour, and so requires a high protein flour to keep the final product from likely pancaking out.  I still had some King Arthur Bread Flour at 12.7% protein.  Enough to make the two levains and the first dough.  After that I relied on Gold Medal Bread Flour at a slightly lower protein, 12% for the final dough mix of the second bake.

I used the published formula, mostly, and it is a very wet 80.5% overall hydration dough.  The dough was quite "flabby", slack and unruly during the French Folds and subsequent Letter Folds due to it's hydration, and was initially sticky, the way rye flour can be, I wasn’t so pleased at handling it.  But over the course of a few hours it more or less settled down before being placed in retard for the night.  A morning divide and shape proved to be modestly less challenging, and I was pretty unsure as to how it would eventually bake up.  It turns out fine, but the flaccid nature of this dough, at least for hand mixing and then baguette shaping, is not all that pleasurable.

So I did it again today, the next day.  But this time I dropped the hydration down to 75%, which still made for a wet dough, but much more manageable.  And again, had a fine bake.

Changes I made to the published formula were to bump the pre fermented flour to 20%, and then to mostly ignore the author's steps, following my own compass instead.

Apparently the grain is quite expensive, and it tasted like nothing more than a similar profile Whole Wheat bread, maybe a tad sweeter.  So for right now I’d classify this as a boutique type of grain.  Whether it gains traction and becomes more accessible and affordable, we shall see.

The formula normalized for 1000g of flour

Both doughs were scaled out at 1200g.  All things being equal, I  don't see much difference in the final product, but I'd stay with the lower hydration version for ease of manipulation.

These are from the first, 80.5% hydration bake

And from the 75% hydration bake

Comments

Benito's picture
Benito

I see your trademarked photographic angle shots showing the beautiful ears and grigne of both bakes.  The crumb is lovely, so open and a beautiful colour as well.  I’m sure I won’t be seeing this flour any time soon in Toronto, but interesting that new grains are being developed.  Being a low protein, gluten potential poor flour, it may have better uses than bread but we’ll see if it ever becomes popular.  

Gorgeous bake Alan.  Happy New Year

Benny

alfanso's picture
alfanso

I've commented on TFL a number of times - and gosh I'm about to do it again in the next sentence here too -->.  My favorite bake to post is when I find a formula that intrigues me enough to give it a run, and can't find anywhere having been posted as baguettes before.  If one searches for Kernza images, it is fairly hard to even find a photo of the grain as bread among hundreds of photos displayed.

I've now had the luxury/good fortune to have baked with both Kernza and Tritordeum, the former from our Vermont friend and the latter initially through a TFL posting by Abel Sierra, which led me seek it out and to actually ring the doorbell at the grain's headquarters in Barcelona.  Both are environmentally friendly drought tolerant grains.  

Tritordeum is still not FDA approved for sale in the USA yet, as far as I know, only available in certain countries in Europe so far.  A hybrid cross between durum and barley.  For my pantry I'd rather have a bucket of that around to bake with, and indeed still have some Tritordeum flour left over from my spiriting kilos of it back with me from Spain.

I didn't have such high hopes on the initial bake due to the difficulty of wrangling the dough, with no North Star other than the article (and its 16 step process!) to guide me.

Thanks and see ya soon - as long as they allow you Canucks back across our borders!
Alan 

Benito's picture
Benito

We are still hopeful that we can travel this winter, I'm hoping that omicron with peak soon and then start to fall.  One can only hope.

Benny

trailrunner's picture
trailrunner

My three bags arrived yesterday. I am so glad to read your approach. Beautiful breads !! I am going to cook some as a grain and serve with vegs and sauce. I’m going to also try it in breads as flour and I’m going to pretreat some and flake it to use as porridge. Will post the outcomes. Thank you for posting. c

alfanso's picture
alfanso

Since it was a small and free bag that was given to me, I never looked up the cost of the flour, but am led to believe that it is quite costly.  OTOH, we home bakers realize, with few exceptions when some of the crew spends many hundreds on baking pans and pots, etc., that we are are fortunate to have not only a tasty, but fairly inexpensive hobby as well.  I suppose that making balls of string or collecting dust bunnies come in at a lower price, but they just aren't as table friendly.  

So I suppose that splurging on flour here and there is well within the tolerance.  Ace TFL baguette baker kendalm, who hasn't posted much recently,  may have put the wheels in motion by buying more costly flour with his joy of purchasing flour from a French Mill and importing it to the West Coast, soon duplicated by you (I think), danayo and mtloaf, and I'd guess a few other TFL souls with "purchasing power".

I first tried my hand baking at home a decade before TFL's existence, a somewhat failed experiment which I soon gave up.  At that time a friend told me something that has always stuck with me "Think about Alan, with your hands you create the most basic food to place on someone's dinner table".

Good luck with the grain, and keep in mind that while I reported it to be sticky dough (at that very high hydration), that was at only 25% of the total flour.

thanks, Alan 

trailrunner's picture
trailrunner

https://perennial-pantry.com/blogs/community-recipes/tagged/bread

There are lots of community bakes and they have photos with them all. They have a recipe development person so it is ongoing and they ask that folks please post. Your pics would certainly be most welcome as well as your process. I can hardly wait to try some. My YW is bubbling !!  c

alfanso's picture
alfanso

I did a search on the Google Machine for "kernza" and reported back on the scant few photos with bread among hundreds of other not bread photos.

rgreenberg2000's picture
rgreenberg2000

As usual, your experience with shaping baguettes shows in these, Alan, and sounds like you needed a lot of that experience working with this grain and formula!

In addition to your insight with regard to how Kernza behaved in a dough, what are your thoughts on what it brings to the party in terms of flavor?

Rich

alfanso's picture
alfanso

like a Dutch Oven from a banneton, there is a lot less to be concerned with re: shaping.  Once these were on a well-floured couche, channelled tightly together, they completely behaved, particularly the 75% version.  The 80% was not so compliant when being rolled out, and between the pre-shape and final shape, in 20 minutes' time, they had already gone into their relaxed state and were losing their shape.

Best I can tell, the taste is similar to a whole wheat flavor with perhaps a touch of sweet to the flavor profile. Other than as a curiosity, unless the grain becomes more accessible through distribution channels and the cost comes down, as mentioned I don't think it will become more than a "boutique" type of product.  Kernza has been around for barely more than a decade - I'd guess mostly in experimental mode.  Tritordeum, for comparison, was developed in Spain more than 40 years ago and is still attempting to forge its way into new markets and across national borders.

thanks, Alan 

rgreenberg2000's picture
rgreenberg2000

Appreciate the additional info re: handling, etc! :)

Sounds like there's not much on the flavor side that would balance out the current cost of obtaining this grain.  Guess I'll stick with the usual suspects....I'd like to play around with some other grains this year  - spelt, khorasan, einkorn, etc.  I think I'll pass on the Kernza for now! :)

Thanks, Alan!

R

idaveindy's picture
idaveindy

(This is meant as a compliment to you, Alan. And not as any put down on Kernza.)

Alan, you could make a dough of 25% sawdust, and turn it into beautiful baguettes!

alfanso's picture
alfanso

I'm all over it, just ordered a bag.  Have to add a little VWG to amp it up!  Will post back!

idaveindy's picture
idaveindy

Talk about boutique pricing! 

JonJ's picture
JonJ

That's for the terroir, for the how you say extra special aromatisant of the smoke.

MTloaf's picture
MTloaf

It is a title that is rightfully yours. I do like to sample different flours and grains and we are all fortunate to have so many choices out there. The bounty of the world is at our fingertips. I used the last of the French T65 with Evian water and salt from a far away sea. Unfortunately they were diminished by the crappy oven that came with our new home that we have just settled into. Flour seems to be the cheapest part of a baking obsession. Maybe someday (when shipping becomes too expensive) they will develop this wheat into something that could be harvested with a riding lawnmower.

Nice to see your baggies on the the page again.

Don

alfanso's picture
alfanso

will be named Perennial Baguettes, already cleared that one with the city registry's Dep't of Goofy Names.  Unlikely, as at age 71 I'll not choose to be participating in diaper games.  However, I am warming up to the title of Lord and Lady Perennial Baguettes.  So I've now registered our Coat of Arms with the city.

As with you, I haven't posted all that much recently as I generally bake the same things, so what's the point?  But here and there something piques my interest.  To be specific, this is a case of "here", not "there".  I was given the bag of flour by friends with the express idea that I'd bake with it, although the time frame to comply was foggy.  That was back in July, so I've misbehaved for months before making good on the handoff. 

thanks, Alan.  Your posts are missed, although your humor, subordinate to mine in most every way, is not 🤓. 

idaveindy's picture
idaveindy

From Tony Randall's Wiki page:

At the age of 75, he married 25-year-old Heather Harlan, an intern at one of his theatrical programs, on November 17, 1995. [...] The couple had two children—Julia, born on April 11, 1997, and Jefferson, born on June 15, 1998—and remained married until Randall's death in May 2004.

alfanso's picture
alfanso

"". I would change that to "testicley, it's possible", but this is family website, so I won't.  We already had our one child, whose avatar I maintain here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEP1acj29-Y

britt's picture
britt

Hi Alfanso - your baguettes are gorgeous! What are you baking on - at first I thought it was a baking steel but it almost looks like granite? I'm new here and not seen that before. 

alfanso's picture
alfanso

There's a growing handful of really good baguette bakers on TFL.  If that is a thing to interest you, we had, what Dan the founder of them calls, a Community Bake on baguettes in Summer 2020.  It is extraordinarily lengthy, far and away the longest of the ~15 CBs so far.

Back to the baking deck.  Yes it is a piece of scrap granite.  I went to a countertop fabricator with the dimensions to allow for ~1 inch on all sides for ventilation and heat dispersal.  It was a steal at $20US.  A piece of stone like that is valuable because once heated up it will maintain a consistent temperature through all of the oven's cycling and door openings.  There are a few threads on TFL about the virtues of baking steels, some claiming that one must exercise care as the steel may easily scorch the bottom of the bread before the rest of it has baked thoroughly through.

Likely have seen this before, but generally TFL is composed of a lot of quite friendly and helpful folks, with almost no flame throwing.  An international site, although the majority of participants are from the USA, it seems to be acknowledged as the "best" site for home "artisan" bread bakers.  Note that there are equally fine sites for pizza and cakes, pies and the like.  Sometimes they leak over to here, but mostly this is the place for home bread bakers.  It is not unusual to have a few professionals amongst us or checking in on us here and there.

Good luck baking and feel are to ask away, reply with your own knowledge and/or post your own wares.

Alan

britt's picture
britt

I very much look forward to working my way towards the Community Bake on baguettes! I am currently working my way through Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast / The Elements of Pizza and the Bread Baker's Apprentice.

I have a baking steel but it is extremely heavy to get in and out of the oven and yes it does have a tendency to scorch. Someday I hope to set up a second used, older oven and keep the heavy steel in place. Now I'm dreaming of a second used oven set up with the granite - or you have me thinking maybe soap stone. I will search around on the site for additional information. 

I'm going to work my way through the lessons on the site and then the handbook. Once I have done that I'll "introduce" myself! :-) But when I noticed your baking set up I couldn't resist asking you about it. And the $20 price tag sounds great compared to what I paid for the baking steel or a Le Creuset. 

I was raised on home made bread and thought I knew how to bake bread until I moved to Florida. There is something about the tap water and humidity that was causing all of my bread to have the texture and consistency of old bagels. I stopped baking entirely and then one day tried Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread recipe and was amazed! I've spent the last three years playing around with high hydration doughs and I am ready to get serious.

I'm very excited to have found this forum and really impressed by everything I have seen and read so far. I appreciate your response and welcome. Looking forward to learning a lot from all of you.

- Britt

Benito's picture
Benito

Do you really need to move the baking steel?  I levain mine in the oven and it doesn’t get in the way.  I occasionally have to move it to another rack depending on what I am baking or roasting.  To shield the baking steel I place mine on the roasting rack the oven came with and I stuff the roasting rack with crumpled aluminum. I discovered this arrangement during the baguette CB and found that it works well to greatly lessen scorching of the bottom crust on baguettes and any bread really from the steel.

The top right is my setup for baguette baking while the top left is for hearth loaves.

britt's picture
britt

I love your set up but my situation might be a bit different. My steel looks different than yours - I purchased an original baking steel that weighs THIRTY TWO POUNDS! Yours very well weigh as much as mine does but I have fractured my finger tips moving it around. Is your steel resting inside of something? 

OK - I just figured out what you are doing and that is pretty brilliant. The bottom photo shows what your steel is resting on. Does your oven heat from the bottom with a coil or is it different than mine? We are renting and I have a horrible oven which I pride myself in my ability to bake and roast with the good awful thing. :-)

The other valuable thing you have shown me is that I can steam from the top - I presume that's what you are doing with the cast iron skillet? I had always thought that I needed to steam from the bottom which means that I loose space at the bottom of my oven using the bottom rack to steam. That then puts me in a position where I have to put the steel on the second rack and frequently have to have move it out of the oven if I am roasting something large. 

Your set up very well may work almost permanently for me except that my "wonderful" oven does not have an oven cleaning cycle and so occasionally I would still have to move the steel out. 

Have you had any issues with glass or ceramic cookware cracking if you place it on the steel to cook dinner? 

Benito's picture
Benito

Yes glad the photos help.  Yes that is a cast iron skillet on the top rack.  I prefer to steam from above but because my oven isn't that large I have to resort to steaming from above and beside for taller hearth loaves.  So keep your steel and don't move it from the lowest rack which should give you space to roast or bake large things.

I seldom place ceramic or glass in the oven, but when I have, including my glass pie dish to bake a pie, I do place it directly on the steel.  In fact that is a great way of ensuring a crisp bottom crust in a fruit pie.  Never had the glass break or shatter.

Benny

britt's picture
britt

Was it by happy coincidence that your broiling rack fits your steel? Or did you buy the steel to fit what you have? It appears to fit perfectly and now you have helper handles to move your steel around. Pretty brilliant!

Benito's picture
Benito

It was a coincidence that the broiling rack fit under my baking steel.  It was not purchased for baking bread, it was to help the bottom crust of pies brown.  It was only during the baguette Community Bake when I found that the bottoms were burning that I was helped in discovering this fix for the burning!  Yes it does make it easier to move if and when I want to.

alfanso's picture
alfanso

I just sent you a DM.  Some newer users can neither send nor receive them until they request the access to do so from our site host Floyd, who regularly monitors the activity on his baby - TFL.

britt's picture
britt

Now I understand how recipes were being sent behind the scenes in posts I have read! Thank you!