Lucy Combines 2 Dark Ways On A Dark Day – Westphalian Pumpernickel

On one of the darkest days in American history; 9/11, Lucy went deep in her bag of tricks to come up with a new very dark bread indeed.  In the past year, her 2 favorite dark breads were the Really Dark Old School Sprouted Pumpernickel – In memory of Barbra, another dark day for Fresh Lofians and Lucy’s Take on Adri’s Westphalian Rye.

She decided to combine parts of these two fine darkies to come up with one she though would be perfect for this dark day.  Lucy loves making the whole rye starter from scratch in the pumpernickel but changed it up to be a rye and wheat one for this one.

This is a very active starter that is built over 3 days with 40 g of whole rye and wheat and 32 g of water each day and throwing away half right before day 3's ffeding.  We took the tossed portion and feed it separately on day 3 and also used this in the mix to up the levain amount since this wasn't going to be a retarded bread adn we wanted more sor rather than less..  We then took the scald and feed that to one half the starter and 12 hours later retarded both  in the fridge for 12 hours.

Wow!  Could only get half the add ins in this picture.

She also likes the baked scald in the Westphalian rye and used that to replace the home made caramel in the Old School Pumpernickel thinking the baked scald made for way more flavor.  For this baked scald she used some sprouted whole wheat and sprouted whole rye with some dehydrated minced onions, molasses, barley malt syrup, red malt and water baking it in the mini over for 3 hours at 150 F with the door ajar so the enzymes wouldn’t be killed off.  When finished,remember to top the water of the scald back up to its original amount before mixing it into half the levain.  Otherwise the dough will be too dry.

Another big change for this bake is that there was no long cold retard of dough.  We mixed it this morning and baked it this afternoon a one day bread if you discount the starter from scratch and the sprouting, dehydrating and milling of the whole wheat and whole rye grains  The starter from scratch was started on Monday for the Friday bake.

For the aromatic seeds we used caraway, anise, coriander and fennel and for the rest of the add ins we used prunes, walnuts and sunflower seeds.   Needless to say, this bead has a lot of things going on with it.  But, it isn’t difficult and actually fun trying to keep everything on schedule so it hits the final mix at the right time, in the right order and just right.

For the dough autolyse, Lucy used Boulder Beer’s fine Chocolate Porter to wet the dough flour for 1 hour in keeping with the dark theme.  We sprinkled pink Himalayan sea salt on top of the autolyse.  Once the two levains hit the mix we did 60 slap and folds to mix everything together and then did 2 mire sets of 30 slap and folds - all on 30 minute intervals.

We then did 3 sets of stretch and folds on 30 minute intervals to get all the add ins mixed and evenly distributed.  Then the dough was bulk fermented on the counter covered in a SS bowl for 1 hour before being shaped shaped into a boule and placed into a barely rice floured basket seam side down for proofing - so we could bake this seam side up without slashing to get those craggy openings Westphalian bread is known for showing off.

It looks different in the sun.

Rather than bake this low and slow like pumpernickel, we decided to bake this on a stone with Mega Steam preheated to 450 F.  This is a big lump of dough so we steamed for 20 minutes before removing the steam and turning the oven down to 415 F - convection this time.  We baed this bread for another 40 minutes before declaring it done with a bottom thump.

The top did crack a bit like we had hoped.  It turned out to be quite a looker anyway. This bread should look torn asunder in a rustic way.  We will have to wait for 24 hours for the moisture to redistribute in order to see how the inside turned out and how it slices.  One thing is for sure, this bread wins hands down The Best Aroma as it Baked Award

Lucy calls this her Westphalian Pumpernickel  The crumb came out soft, moist and open enough for a heavy bread and 4 day old stater.  The crust went soft after being wrapped up overnight and way different than the super hard crust it had coming out of the oven.  If you like rye and pumpernickel you will love this bread.  It is one fine fasting loaf .  

 This bread only needed some toasting and butter for breakfast.  This isn’t the typical Rosh Hashanah bread but I’m guessing it does have some very serious Jewish history and connections in it somewhere. Happy Rosh Hashanah to all. 

 Lucy says to have a salad with that fine AZ sunset.