Breakfast loaf and pastries

Jan Hedh, the Swedish bread, pastry and chocolate master, has recently put out his second bread book; the new one is titled "Bröd & kaffebröd" ("Bread and pastries"). I've just picked it up, and baked the first loaf from that book this weekend. It's an inspiring book, written in a style similar to his first bread book, but this one's filled with even more gorgeous photos. Hedh is passionate about bread, and provides detailed recipes for several European style hearth loaves and for breakfast pastries (mostly croissant, Danish and sweet dough oriented stuff).

I decided to try his "country bread from Bayern" first, mostly because of the lovely photo of it in his book :) Hedh doesn't provide any bakers %, so I used a spreadsheet to get the figures. I decided to adjust the recipe a bit (it looked awfully dry, and slightly heavy on caraway seeds), so I ended up with something like: 50% whole spelt flour, 20% whole rye, 30% AP flour. The original hydration was at approx. 62%, so I increased that to 70%. It could've been even higher, I think. I used approx. 1% caraway seeds, and put the whole rye flour in a rye sourdough. I baked it this morning together with some croissants and other pastries shaped from the croissant dough:

I think the loaf turned out alright - it rose nicely in the oven, and smelled deliciously of caraway and earthy wheat/spelt. The flavour is similar to that of a mostly whole-wheat bread, but the rye and caraway makes it a bit more exciting. Filling and delicious with hard cheese!

The mandatory crumbshot (I know people get upset if there's no shot of the crumb, so here you go!) reveals a pretty dense crumb, so next time I'll increase the hydration further and perhaps see what a poolish+rye sourdough can do to loosen it up a bit.