Sergey 4-5 day clas
I have about finished the 4 days of Sergey's clas (recipe at foodgeek; 4-5 day process; see also his Live Journal article.).
The pH readings below are from the last 30 hrs.
The left one is near end of Day 3. The one on farmost right is at end of Day4. Not much change. The top of the mixture (end of Day 4) is bubbly, no mold growth, but no plum fragrance yet. With 6hr more-pH got to around 3.7.
The discards are manageable. I may be violating a rule of discards but I did use some excess at end of Day 2 for pita. I had good results. Day 3 requires 3:1 of new rye to old rye and Day 4 requires 9:1 of new rye to old rye flour. So just before starting Day 4 there was a lot to discard (clas at end of Day 3). I froze 2 - 100 gram batches for possible future use (resume the 4 day process at Day 4). Then I baked bread (100% freshly milled wheat lean loaf) with some end of Day 3 discard (only 75g clas for nearly 500gr fr milled ww). Surprise loaf!!
The crumb is even better than some of my previous loaves on 24 hr clas. :)
Below: Bread on discards from end of Day 3-ending dough temp 207F; no collapse at top of loaf, good bubbles at bottom of loaf and throughout. Baked in Zojirushi BM.
Conclusion: I have a LOT of 4 Day clas now and will freeze it in 3-150 gr batches (enough for a loaf of bread and 15 pita) and 4-110 gr tubs. If they perform as well (after freezing) as the Day 3 discards did in the above loaf, then I will use this clas to quickly get new batches in 24 hr as before.
Here they are:
None of the clas has off putting smells! :)
Curious that no plum-cherry aroma has emerged. Are these whole wheat or rye? Fresh-milled, I assume. Are you using 150 or 190% hydration?
My WW CLAS was made with flour I milled, and the aroma was there on Gen2. The rye CLAS was made using organic whole rye flour from the local coop. No plum-cherry until Gen4.
That seems to be a consistent characteristic of CLAS. A very uniform crumb throughout. I am not a fan of cavernous bubbles in my bread, so this is very welcome! It's a great dough conditioner. Even the discards.
Hi,
Isn't clas fun?!
I used freshly milled rye throughout the 4.25 days. Maybe I don't know what the plum fragrance is supposed to be, but I have harvested plum from my yard for 20 years and made tons of jam but the smell here didn't register.
I was careful to be at 150% hydr. I will have to keep the 2 hydr of 150% and 190% straight since I have 2 clas types now.
I am going to see how this clas works with a Chinese sourdough recipe that was recently posted.
What are you baking this week? Any new machines?
Now that I'm learning more and better ways to use it, it defiinitely is!
Well these fragrance associations are highly individual... we all have a different set of experiences we reference them to. So it may not be "plum-cherry" to you, but I'd say for sure it has unmistakeable pleasant fruity overtones.
Nice. You're definitely a more adventurous baker than I... I'm still getting the basics down :)
No bake plans at the moment. I already baked a few days ahead, because I'm doing plumbing repairs for a couple days starting tomorrow. Next bake will probably be applying the CLAS-with-preferment to my "Max Bran" loaf which I make every week. No new bread machines, I'm happy with the stable I have. No one of them is best at everything :)
I think it is unlikely that we'll see any *great* new breadmakers, in the USA, anyway. Some companies (like Panasonic) don't even sell their better models here! The golden era of breadmachine design was in the late-1990's to late-2000's...
Hi,
I would love to see how you make the MaxBran Bread!!
because last week I already started writing it up. And in the process, I diiscovered that, in the very beginning back in May, I made a huge mistake converting a weight-based ingredients list that I based it on. That's probably why it has taken several months to get it working! So I have some work to do before it's ready to share. But will do.
Jo_en, good afternoon!
Thank you for journaling your progress and for the pictures of your wonderful breads. They sre so good!
You seem to be growing the 24 hrs CLAS over and over. The reason for that is that you applied the method designed for a spontaneously fermented CLAS to a CLAS that was acidified in its first step, acidified with vinegar, sourdough, baker's yeast, yogurt, etc. You mixed rye flour and water and added a portion of yeastless sourdough starter to it. It's called acidification of the first step. The schedules for those two are different. That is why your starter's pH is stuck at the level of RusBrot's pH = 3.8 - 4.2 which is typical of his mildly acidic, not so concentrated 24hr CLAS.
Acidified CLAS in step one is supposed to be held for 48 hours at 40C undisturbed and then it is ready, has a typical deep red hue to it and spicy plum aroma. Refresh it once and you are good to go.
If you didn't get the sour plum or honey plum fragrance by the 48hrs mark, you can either continue to hold it at 38-42C unrefreshed, until that aroma shows up, which in my case took full 63 hours to appear, or refresh it and keep going according to the 6days CLAS schedule. Sooner or later it will appear and the starter's pH will be satisfyingly low.
The starter is ready and stable when after feeding it 1:9 at 40C the plum aroma and the shift in color from raw rye's grayish-greenish to deeply reddish shows up 2 hours after feeding it. You will still hold it for 12 hrs to mature and for its pH drop, but the important part is that fragrance of plum and spices (cloves, dogwood) and reddishnes appearing soon after feeding it.
Hi Mariana,
Yes you are right! I "cheated" by calling my rusbrot clas the Day 1 product and jumped into Day2. Thank you for explaining the pH being "stuck".
However, referring to the 4 day clas instruction at LJ, Day 1 reads:
Step 1 (24 hours at 39-42°C).
100 rye flour, c/w;
150 warm water (45°C).
I can't see how it is different from rusbrot except that this hydration is 150%. I did not have any added diy, vinegar, etc.
=====
This week's new start:
"Acidified CLAS in step one is supposed to be held for 48 hours at 40C undisturbed and then it is ready, has a typical deep red hue to it and spicy plum aroma. Refresh it once and you are good to go."
Step 1: Use only rye flour and water(150%) and hold it for 48 hr at 39-42C.
"If you didn't get the sour plum or honey plum fragrance by the 48hrs mark, you can either continue to hold it at 38-42C unrefreshed, until that aroma shows up...or refresh it and keep going according to the 6days CLAS schedule."
The second option above then is to refresh 1:1, 1:2, 1:9 until it turns to red hue.
(I think I will hold it unrefreshed until the red hue and aroma show up.)
Step 2:
"Refresh it once and you are good to go."
So this means the 1:9 refresh? Here I am to look for the deep red color within 2 hrs, then hold it for 12hrs to mature and pH should drop (below 3.5).
Ok, will do.
Thank you again!!!
Good evening Jo_en,
The difference is rye malt vs unmalted grain. Not only malted rye is 15-25% sugar by weight (NA rye has 0% sugar) and contains a lot of predigested proteins, it already contains lactic bacteria in detectable amounts (which unmalted rye does not) because malted rye grain stays wet for days while it sprouts, so its microflora proliferates and is richer than that of unmalted rye milled onto rye flour.
I wrote the comment above to thank you for your experiment and to tell you that what you have now sitting at 40C, please keep it for 48hrs or longer and sniff it from time to time and test its pH if you wish.
No need to start one from scratch, at least not now. Complete that acidified CLAS project first.
Once its trademark plum (or honey plum or plum butter) and spices aroma emerges, whether it is before 48hrs mark or after (in my case it took 63hrs at 38-42C!) measure its pH and refresh it a couple of times in a row and see if it is stable, that each refreshment gives off that aroma and that it reaches a truly low pH on your test paper strip.
Hi Mariana,
Does the clas from LJ use rye malt? If yes, then that was my mistake. I thought it read regular rye flour. In rusbrot, I never use rye malt only 100% reg rye.
I put everything away in the freezer except for a small 4+ Day sample of 75gr(30 gr rye flour and 45 gr water) -- It is in the refrig. I could refresh it 1:1 or 1:2?
I would be so excited to smell fruity aromas!!
Refresh is always 1:9 for 24 hours. Rusbrot's method, which I abandoned, is 12 hours.
In my experience, the most important factor seems to be temperature, then time. The other numbers are not hyper-critical. It will still work fine if it's 1:8 or 1:10. And a few % either way of hydration level seems to not make a difference, though I tend to err on the wet side due to our dry climate. I also put a layer of cling film on the yogurt maker's stainless steel container to minimize water loss around the lid. Quite a bit of water collects on it, which gets scraped back into the mix when its done.
Example: Yesterday I did a refresh of my WW CLAS. A 278-gram refresh calls for 28g CLAS, 150g warm water, and 100g WW flour. I used 32g of 3-week-old CLAS and it worked just fine. When I checked it about 3-4 hours in, it had the "deep plum" aroma.
Technically it will be done an hour from now, but it smells fine and I could no doubt stop it now with no ill effects. (I don't get visuals, the yogurt maker's lid is opaque...)
So assuming your ingredients are correct, I would scrutinize the temp control arrangement. That's the biggy.
Hi Jo_en,
The CLAS from Sergey Kirillov's LJ (and from his Youtube classes on fast methods for developing starters) is not one but several different ones, differing in composition and methods of developing a CLAS from scratch.
And no, none of them lists rye malt(s) in the list of ingredients. Al least not openly, because by default whole rye flours with less than 7-10% sugar content on their nutritional label should be malted, i.e. supplemented with diastatic rye malt at 2-5% level. That would bring "regular" rye flour to the standard level of quality needed for bread baking.
In North American baking tradition, only wheat flours are regularly malted by millers, they add diastatic malt or amylolytic enzymes to flours after milling them. In European baking, none of the flours are malted by millers, it is always done by bakers, so bakers naturally know this and do not even mention diastiatic malt it in their recipes.
RusBrot's CLAS from Andrey, the owner of RusBrot Youtube channel and BrotGOST blog, is again not a single starter, but a group of 8 recipes for a fast preparation of CLAS from scratch.
Pure unmalted rye flour method is #5 out of 8 on his list, it is not the speediest one (requires 24-48hrs or longer, It took over 60 hours in my tests of this method) and definitely one of the least effective ones. One out of three attempts to make a CLAS using that regular rye flour formula and method fail to produce a CLAS in 24-36 hours. In my tests, the very first one failed.
RusBrot explains that whole rye German flours with 0.5-1% sugar in them are the reason why this method fails so often, they need supplementation with up to 5% diastatic malt for baking and at least 25% diastatic rye malt for developing a fail-proof CLAS . NorthAmerican rye flours have zero sugars in them. They always have to be malted by bakers before using them in starters or rye bread, adding 2-5 % diastatic malt to them depending on the rye flour quality and its uses.
You obviously could, you could do anything, there is no bread police or starter police around watching us ; ) But should you?
If you want a "real" CLAS (pH=3.6, TTA=18-22°Н, bright plum aroma, reddish color), then
- take that 75g sample out of the fridge,
- add a teaspoon of sugar/honey/malt syrup, or diastatic malt, or both to it, and
- keep it at 40-44C for 24-48 hours or until a clear and strong aroma of plum, plum butter, or sour plums with spices shows up, and your pH test strips clearly show pH=3.5 color.
Then refresh it 1:9 with a malted rye (5% diastatic malt) and keep it for 24 hours at 38-42C.
Then use it or refrigerate it, or dry a sample of it, etc. We discussed all methods of preservation of starters before.
CLAS could be refrigerated for up to 1 week as is without any quality loss. Your do not have to refresh it before use. Longer periods of refrigeration (2-3 weeks) killed my CLASes. They could not be restored at all, they were simply dead. It is easier to make them from scratch in 18 hours using RusBrot's #1 method.
So, to summarize, there are three groups of CLAS recipes
1) a classic 5+ days method for spontaneous fermentation of plain whole grain flour with clean water.
It should be started with some whole grain flour, rye or wheat, or at least medium rye flour, and after 4 days could be fed any flour, white rye flour, white bread flour, etc .if you regularly bake with those white flours and need a white CLAS.
2) fast one to two days methods of making a CLAS from scratch with acidification in the first step with plain rye flour or cracked rye and diastatic rye malt. Those fast methods can be one step or two-step methods.
RusBrot tends to use vinegar or fermented rye malt as acidifiers, but he also has a 2 day recipe for CLAS without acidification in the first step, 100% diastatic rye malt and water method. He tested soured grape mash, pasteurized sour whey, and vodka as acidifiers or suppressors of rot in the first step as well.
3) long 3-6 days methods with acidification in the first step which result in a brighter, more aromatic CLAS.
Good luck with your CLAS, Jo_en!
NorthAmerican rye flours have zero sugars in them. They always have to be malted by bakers before using them in starters or rye bread, adding 2-5 % diastatic malt to them depending on the rye flour quality and its uses.
Mariana, would malted barley flour be an alternative to diastatic rye malt? I can get the barley from a local water mill, but the diastatic rye is harder to come by.
TomP
Tom, for flour conditioning, any diastatic malt would work - malted wheat, malted rye, malted barley, malted brown rice, malted spelt, etc. Milled, cracked or whole.
I do not know which kind of barley your local water mill sells. Can you tell me more about it?
I get my diastatic malt powder from Hoosier Hill Farm in Indiana, it has malted barley flour in it and a guaranteed 7% sugar content.
You can even sprout some grain at home (steep it for 18 hrs, then drain and sprout for two days) and dry it at room temperature, to have your own reserve of diastatic grain which you can mill later in a blender or a coffee grinder.
The only "problem" with that method is that you will never know just how diastatic is your homemade sprouted grain and how sweet, whereas the commercial diastatic malt has a standard level of diastaticity (diastatic power) and sugar content, more or less, so that brewmasters and bakers can count on it.
With alpha amylaze enzyme, it is easier, it begins to be synthesized de novo in the first 12-18 hrs of steeping whole grains in water at room temperature, and reaches its peak on the second to fifth day of sprouting, but sugars take 3-7 days to reach their peak levels in spouting grain.
For rye malt-based CLAS and FLAS recipes where malted grain is the major player or the only grain base, it should be cracked or milled diastatic malt. It has a substantial amount of sourdough LAB on its surface, not just enzymes and 15-25%sugars under the surface, because it steeps and then sits moistened for a while as it sprouts, so lactic acid bacteria begin to grow.
I do not know which kind of barley your local water mill sells. Can you tell me more about it?
[I seem to have lost what I wrote]
I only know that the label says "Malted Barley Flour". I suppose it might not actually be diastatic, if you get right down to it.
Tom, if you could sample it before you buy, just by taste you will know.
Non-diastatic is used as a flavoring agent, it has a distinctive flavor and gives 'malty' taste and aroma to breads known as malt breads.
Diastatic malted barley flour is taste neutral. It tastes just like plain white bread flour. Like nothing. And of course it would hydrolyze a Tbsp of bread flour mixed with water and a pinch of barley malt flour into zero starch flour under 2 hours at 60C. A drop of iodine test will show you that.
Compare your tested product color to a pure sugar solution with a drop of iodine color and you will know. If it's brown, no iodine color change, then your malt flour is diastatic, all flour starches were converted to sugars. If it's purple, then starches stayed intact, their barley malt flour is non-diastatic.
I just tasted a pinch of the malt barley flour. It's not neutral. The flavor is a bit like a cereal and a little bitter, I would say. Sounds like I better order one of the diastatic malt products you've mentioned.
Hi Mariana,
I'm once again in the midst of studying malt and alpha amylaze enzyme in bread baking. The biggest struggle has determining the diastatic power of any of these products. Red Star specifies their product at 60 degree Linton but most suppliers have no such data to offer. In many cases I assume that they are repackaging red star diastatic malt powder but not certain. I looked into malted grain from the home brew store and had to go to their supplier specifications to get the diastatic power data, and it was all very high, which explains to me why malted grain is diluted with sugar/flour in these commercial products
So when recipes state 2% diastatic malt (or whatever) I always ask... diastatic malt with what diastatic power?
Any insights on this thought to share?
Hi Brian,
Good question! I understand you! I was also puzzled by that question when I started baking at home.
The problem is that as home bakers we do not know 2 variables
1) how diastatic is our diastatic malt
2) how much, if any, malt our specific flour needs. How diastatic is our flour?
Our goal is to find a perfect match of our diastatic malt to our flour that we are currently baking with. Or to avoid using malted grain altogether, if all we need is fermentable sugars in our flour for good bread, if we do not want to weaken its proteins by proteases found in malted grains.
Not only diastatic malt powder has amylolytic enzymes, it also has proteolytic enzymes which our flour might or might not need.
So, there are two solutions
1) Test bakes
First, take a look at the nutritional label of your flour(s). If they have zero sugars listed and are unmalted, they need sugars added or malt or liquid amylolytic enzymes added to them. If they have 2-3% sugar, then our white bread flours are OK unmalted, such flours clearly have their own enzymes.
You just follow the guidelines of 0.5-2% diastatic malt powder for wheat flours and 2-5% (on average 3.5%) for rye flours. Test bake the lower end and the higher end of those ranges, see which satisfies you more both during fermentation and proofing and in bread quality, both in freshly baked and in a one day old bread, if you can wait that long! :))) Somehow those values will match your flour to your diastatic malt that you happen to have in your bakery/kitchen.
That is what big industrial bakeries and bread factories do with each new batch of flour, they send samples to their labs for testing and test baking.
Even if they use pure amylases, bacterial, fungal, plant amylases, or others, they need to determine what this batch of flour that they received needs. And that cannot be calculated, it must be discovered by testing flour and test baking within recommended ranges of use by the manufacturers of those enzymes.
Test bakes with plain unmalted flour are good for both wheat and rye flours, because they sometimes have low falling numbers and sometimes high falling numbers, i.e. high or low diastatic power, and give either gummy crumb (weak proteins) or rubbery quickly staling crumb (excessively strong proteins) which are great in warm, straight out of the oven breads but as the bread cools it becomes so rubbery and hard within an hour or two, it feels like chewing a piece of plastic bag.
So those wheat and rye flours that give rubbery or quickly staling crumb in bread need to be supplemented with diastatic malt powder because it contains proteolytic enzymes, so that our bread's crumb is pleasantly soft when freshly baked and stays soft for days and weeks in storage, never becoming like cellophane as we bite it.
2) Colorless and flavorless malt syrups that do not alter the look or taste of breads
If our flour proteins are OK, it is neither too strong nor too weak a flour, then the goal of adding diastatic malt could shift to the goal of supplementing flour with enough fermentable sugars without altering its taste. We want a baguette to be a baguette, not a piece of sweetish brioche bun which we prefer with our hot dogs and hamburgers.
So, we can simply add colorless or lightly colored malt syrups/liquid malt extracts to our dough, 5-10% flour weight depending on the length of fermentation and flour extraction.
I use liquid rice malt extract (sold as rice syrup by Lundberg Farm or found in Korean grocery stores, many brands available), liquid sorghum malt extract, and liquid wheat malt extract. I add 5% to wheat dough and 10% to rye dough. I also use dark liquid rye malt extract when I bake 100% whole rye breads, although colorless types will work as well. If it's a white 100% rye bread, then only colorless types of malt syrups will be appropriate to keep its crumb snow white. I never use barley malt syrup sold in health food stores. It alters bread color and aroma too much.
Well, I mostly ask ... just how bad is their flour that it needs 2% (presumably very diastatic) malt written into formula? How much sugar it naturally has and how strong it is compared to my current flour, whether I must use my diastatic malt with my flour at that level or can simply substitute malt syrup instead.
I was very puzzled when I read about tiny amounts of 'malt' in Professor Calvel's recipes in his Taste of Bread book and in his videos I saw that he was holding a tiny bottle of liquid (not syrup) which he would measure, drop by drop, into the mixer's bowl as he was kneading his baguette dough. Just what was that liquid, what kind of liquid malt?
English edition of his book lists 0%, 0.2%, 0.3%, 0.4% , 0.5%, 0.6% malt extract in his French bread formulae (0.5% in pan de mie, milk rolls, and brioche dough) all the way up to 1-1.5% and even 7% malt extract! Or, in other recipes, he writes "0.5-1.5% malt", "4% non-diastatic malt". What is that? Are they even the same malts/extract(s)? How to substitute? Do we need that or that much with our malted NA flours?
There was no such diastatic malt extracts in our stores and no answers and I did not know how to translate that into our baking reality here in North America with our flours and malts being all over the place, all of them different from European market products. So I know what you mean, Brian. Been there as well.
A lot of food for thought. Experimentation in the planning phase!
Shops selling supplies for home brewing of beer is a great source of malted grains, malt syrup and dried malt. The non-diastatic malt probably is Dried Malt Extract (DME) used for home brewing beer. I have used that quite a bit to add a bit of sugar, color, and flavor. Munton's brand is what I use and verified with them that in the drying process the heat is high enough that all diastatic power is completely kaput. I'm not sure, though, if the malt syrup sold has any remaining diastatic power or not. Some of that malt syrup for home beer berrewing also has hops already in it so not very good for most bread.
Brian, Perhapsthese guidelines from University of British Columbia, Canada, will be useful to us all. They say that
Thanks, Mariana. Until we learn differently I'm going to assume the range for WW bread is 10 times too high (probably a brain blip on someone's part). That would give a range of 0.5 - 0.9.
Tom, you might be right. Or may be those are numbers for malt with medium diastatic activity that they advocate for.
I wish they indicated diastatic power of "malt" in their table (and flour's falling number as well), otherwise it's meaningless. And specified what they mean by "medium diastatic activity", in numbers.
10% non-diastatic malt is wonderful in plain whole wheat bread (w/o sugars, fat, or dairy added), it gives it unforgettable apple flavor as it ferments and bakes, like Calvados, but I cannot use my brand of diastatic malt in such high amounts with wheat or with rye. 2% max for wheat and 5% max for rye flour.
I wish I knew my diastatic malt's diastatic power, but my flour's falling number is either 160-220 sec if I use European wheat and rye flours, and 350-450 sec if I bake with Canadian wheat and rye flours. Rye is especially bad, reaches 600 sec says the miller whose flour I buy. With wheat, I only met a bad bag of unmalted and unbleached APF once. Its falling number was way above 500 sec.
Tom, you might be right. Or may be those are numbers for malt with medium diastatic activity that they advocate for.
I'm going by consistency with the other numbers in the table. Whatever the malt activity, I'm assuming (or maybe hoping is the better word) that it's the same for all entries. But really, who knows?
I believe LMEs are all non-diastatic. The brewers wort has been heated to stop enzymatic activity and then concentrated to give a syrup.
FYI, Briess LMEs contain no hops.
@mariana
Sometimes I really do worry about you Mariana! Always with that dogmatic language too!
I've seen you say this thing about zero sugar before including about about NA wheat flour.
Reality / fact check time!
FDA regs are tricky. It states that if the products contains less than 0.5g of sugars per serving then total sugar can be listed as 0g in all cases. You get so carried away and don't seem to think about what you're saying.
Rye is typically richer in fermentable sugars and has a lower falling number than wheat flour.
This thread has gone so awry with inaccurate information it warrants deletion!
Thank you for your feedback mwilson!
Reality check is here United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural research service, tests their grain and flours and their grain is so sound, i.e. no sprouting in the field at all, that it contains zero maltose sugars.
The tests that I linked shows that on average NA whole rye kernels contain 0.98% sugar of which 0% is maltose sugar. These are tests of NA medium rye flour, 1.1% sugars, of which 0.02% is maltose (ranges between 0% and 0.16% in different samples). North American light rye flour. 0.93% sugars, 0.13% maltose (in different samples it ranges between 0% and 0.31%). This shows that those flours do not have active amylolitic enzymes and our rye breads and rye starters are different from European ones.
Now let's take a look at European rye flours, for example, German rye bread flours. 6.7g of sugars in 100g of flour. We cannot just go ahead and use European recipes with without malting our North American rye first, or adding malt extract to match 7-10% sugar in rye flour. There is little to no sugar in them. So, your statement that
probably comes from your experience of baking with European ryes and wheats, not North American ones. British wheat flours that I bought in London had 2-3% sugar in them, way more than our North American rye flours ever.
European ryes are indeed rich in sugars (7% sugar in the whole rye flour sample that I show below), and often have a lower falling number or at least a wider range of falling numbers than European wheat flours.
0% Sugar is one thing, and 0% Maltose is another. Indeed 0% maltose could indicate sound grain but it in no way can tell you anything about its amylase activity and therefore its falling number.
Regardless of where it is grown Rye will always be more fermentable than Wheat.
From Pyler: Baking Science and Technology.
“Rye flour, in general, contains somewhat higher contents of soluble sugars and dextrins than does wheat flour. Also, the sugar -yielding substances appear to be more susceptible to enzymatic hydrolysis so that rye flours as a rule possess considerable fermentation capacity. Rye flour contains several times the amount of a nonreducing trisaccharide sugar, trifructosan, as does wheat flour. Schulerud has determined the trifructosan content of rye flour toaverage 2 percent, and that of wheat flour 0.4 - 0.5 percent.”
Vermont grown Rye Falling numbers: - [Falling numbers below 300 indicate high amylase activity.]
Variety
Harvest Date
Falling Number
Danko
1
250
Danko
2
294
Danko
3
236
Danko
4
214
Hazlet
1
250
Hazlet
2
270
Hazlet
3
153
Hazlet
4
112
ExcerptNGGANewsletterSpring2020.pdf (sare.org)
Data speaks for itself!
As it happens, I have un-malted Central Milling High Mountain Flour sitting in my Kitchen. Certificate of Analysis says it falling number is over 400 which is on high side. I have made bread (sourdough) with it just fine, with no addition of amylase or sugar.
Humble Regards,
Michael
For that matter,
From Procedures for Breadmaking Quality Assessment of Rye Wholemeal Flour
https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/8/8/331
This article was written by Polish authors, so I suppose they studied European ryes.
there is one thing I can't reconcile regarding the rye flours. In one post you said:
"In European baking, none of the flours are malted by millers"
and right below:
"RusBrot explains that whole rye German flours with 0.5-1% sugar in them are the reason why this method fails so often"; so that tracks;
but in this post you show rye flour with 7% sugar:
"European ryes are indeed rich in sugars (7% sugar in the whole rye flour sample that I show below).
I'm puzzled by the discrepancy. Why the wildly different numbers? Are the German rye flours just so inconsistent?
Personally, I have only seen 3-7% sugars in European Ryes (imported whole grain rye flour or rye kernells). For example, I bake now with 3% sugar Serbian whole rye flour and 6.7% sugar Polish rye grain bought here in Toronto, Canada in ethnic grocery stores and bakeries, they import them and they fly off the shelves, because their customers cannot reproduce their country's breads by baking with Canadian rye flours..
However, this does not mean that there are no German rye flours with little sugar and definitely no alpha amylase in them. Here's one example: German cracked rye, as wholegrain as it gets, 0.3% sugar (Zucker) and elevated protein (Eiweiß) content (i.e. this rye grain never germinated in the field or in storage and its protein is too high and sugars are too low). It needs to be malted and "softened".
NährwerttabelleAccording to Austrian bakers who attempted to bake with our NA rye flours and gave up and Modernist Bread team of bakers and researchers, who had to import Austrian rye flours for the section on rye breads in their book, the main difference between NA and European rye flours is not sugars, i.e. not the grain itself, but how it is milled. European rye flours are finely milled whereas NA rye flours are either more coarsely milled or very coarsely milled, thus is the difference in volume and softness of rye breads.
Same recipe, differently milled rye flour. Left - finely milled Austrian rye. Center and right - US rye flours. Right- coarsely milled (pumpernickel rye flour).
Explanation is given here, beginning at 33:50 min:
Driven by nostalgia, for I ate European whole rye sourdough bread every single day with every meal for 18years as a child and teenager, I now manage to bake good European ryes with NA rye flours, no matter how they are milled, they are excellent, but I have to malt them, or else breads will not have their "European" look, aroma, and taste..
Here is an article that has a detailed discussion of German and North American ryes and how they affect baking bread. It may be behind a firewall, but if you can turn off javascript in your browser you should be able to read it.
https://artofeating.com/real-rye-bread/
Here are a few excerpts:
and (about NA rye flour)
and
Your notation is not entirely correct. From left to right you have Austrian type 960, American medium rye, and American coarse rye, different from pumpernickel rye. So it's not just differently milled and different particle size, it's also completely different extraction rates.
Thank you very much for this clarification! I had no idea. I thought the difference in crumb color was due to different rye bran colors. Sometimes even wholegrain rye breads look very differently, some have pale gray crumb, while others have it chocolate brown or even tar black.
To this day I do not know what American coarse rye and pumpernickel flour are. Do you bake with them? Where do you purchase them? I only purchase American medium rye flour from Baker's Authority. It's an excellent flour, so fragrant, always freshly milled. Never disappoints.
So, the authors of Modernist Bread misinformed us :( Unless they had no idea that different extactions are supposed to bake into different breads. They ended up with a suggestion of improving rye flour by adding dry wheat gluten to it, to make rye breads taller and fluffier and raw rye dough easier to handle.
Although Francisco Migoya did mention in his presentation just where in the United States home bakers could purchase light rye flour, similar to the Austrian one in their picture and finely milled. He did not mention ethnic grocery stores, though, they sell all kinds of good rye flour and cheaper than our local Ontario rye.
I don't think the authors themselves are entirely on top of things - they don't seem to understand that the Austrian flour is not a whole rye at all, and their classification of rye flours is kind of a mess. They do mention light rye as an alternative to typ 960 but I am not sure they understand how similar in grade they are. They also show some of their test bakes meant to showcase the pitiful state of the American rye, but they are clearly of the "blame the baker" kind. I'll add a picture later and you'll see what I mean. I think what happened is they never had much exposure to rye baking and instead of invting an expert they decided to go it alone.
No one knows what a pumpernickel flour is. It's what the miller wants it be. In the book they imply that it is a coarse grind of whole rye, but then they show two drastically different breads for coarse rye and pumpernickel. To be honest I don't know what the situation with the rye flour in the US is right now. I am about done with leftovers of frozen whole rye, then it will be medium and light. By the time I am through with them it could be summer again.
To this day I do not know what American coarse rye and pumpernickel flour are.
That's probably because there *is* no standard. It's up to each mill or supplier. I would guess that Baker's Authority's "pumpernickel" is closer to a German pumpernickel than almost anything else in the US, but probably not really that close.
Unfortunately for me the closest Russian or Polish "delis" are an hour and a half drive one way, and I don't even know if they carry any rye flours. We do have a German deli/restaurant in town here - run by Germain immigrants who are experienced in running a restaurant in the US - but their breads I've tried seem like pale imitations of their originals. They are probably afraid of turning off their US customers. Or maybe they just can't find a bakery who can make them the "right" way.
TomP
Here is the full panel of their test bakes. I was wrong - they do know that 960 is light rye.
Their definitions of rye grades. Note that put medium closer to light than to whole rye, although they actually don't have whole rye, and have two different definitions for coarse whole rye.
I would have some kind and encouraging words for a person posting a first rye looking like that in a FB group. For the authors of a $500+ set I don't.
To me this is 1970 understanding of rye bread. At least there is no celery.
Thank you!
Why are they soaking OIL to make American Russian rye?!!! This is so funny. But may be there is a reason? What purpose does it serve? I understand that they were testing published bread recipes, not their own. I simply wonder why oil is in the soak not in bread dough where it usually goes.
And ground coffee... How are
Russiankids supposed to eat that caffeinated bread?I also do not get it why their pictures of light rye breads are so dark. I bake with both light rye and white rye flours 100% rye breads and they are as white as white sandwich bread made with bread flour. Somewhat creamy but not brown for sure. According to USDA database, Austrian R960 flour (8.6% protein, 7.6% fiber) is pretty much an equivalent of American light rye flour (9-11% protein range, 7.1- 9.4% fiber range). However, MiniOven says it's medium rye flour.
It seems that their breads were either baked in different pans, or there is an issue with the scale of each photograph which makes it difficult to compare their volumes/slice areas and heights.
P.S. I got their Modernist Pizza set of books today for $22. It was on 50% off sale to begin with but Amazon made a mistake when shipping it and the Customer Service gave me a 90% additional discount on that! Basically for the price of one pizza in a restaurant. Crazy chap but I am grateful.
This coffee in "Russian black bread" thing is ubiquitous online, I've seen it in multiple recipes. I think it must be a way to replace solod - coffee would add to both the colour and make the aroma richer... I guess.
How do you like this one? https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/russian-black-bread-recipe
74% bread flour (rest medium rye), cocoa and espresso powder for the colour I assume. Vinegar and no SD? WTF?!
I've actually made the KAB Russian Black Bread a few times and it is pretty decent. I have experimented and increased the rye and replaced some of the bread flour with whole wheat. My next experiments would be to used SD, chocolate rye malt or solod instead of cocoa, and mostly rye. It still wouldn't be a Russian rye bread, though.
But it reminds me of one the old Saturday Night Live "Coffee Talk" sketches. The host of Coffee Talk would propose a topic for discussion for the guests and in one particular sketch it was ""The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Discuss." I would say this bread is neither Russian nor a rye bread.
BTW, don't look at KAB's Riga Rye recipe!
Ilya, Russians do have 15% rye and 30% sourdough rye bread (both with medium rye flour in their formula), the rest is bread flour, 2% fancy grade molasses, 0.5% compressed yeast and 2% salt. It is called Slavic sourdough (Slavyansky khlieb). It is distinctly rye in flavor similar to modern Jewish rye in New York sans caraway or fennel seeds.
I always felt that vinegar in bread was detrimental to the quality of bread while lactic acid beneficial, so I would still eat it if baked by someone else, but replace vinegar with a bit of sourdough starter/sd hooch which I always have in my fridge if I baked it myself. There are people who do not care about creating even the simplest of all starters, so vinegar+yeast is their practical quick fix solution.
KAF black bread is not about what Russians eat in Russia, it's an American Black Rye bread and I am sure it's a delicious bread. In Canada, we do not have anything like that, we have Russian, Ukranian, Polish, German, Serbian bakeries with all kinds of rye breads.
Here, in Toronto, we had a Jewish bakery called Open Window, I sold their Russian bread in a Portugese (!) deli store for a while and it was the first bread to fly off the bread shelves as soon as it was delivered, there was never enough! Their Russian (Rye) bread was a phenomenally fragrant and soft Slavic rye sourdough bread with raisins in it baked as massive very long and very wide logs, sold by weight (vesovoy khlieb). I have never seen any other bread in Canada so big and sold by weight! That was a 1900-1930s Russian rye, a delicacy to serve with tea.
I think those American authors wanted black bread, literally black color, because 100% whole rye bread in Russia in old days, even half a century ago, was in some places literally black as tar and somewhat sticky due to a large % of germinated rye in it. Immigrants (or their guests) wanted to imitate that look and sweet'n'sour acidity somehow, just like today many home bakers try to imitate fermented rye malt/solod by using darkly roasted barley malt.
Deviating from Rye for a moment, I once made a "near-sourdough" (wheat) bread using 1/4 tsp instant dry yeast and 1 tbsp liquid drained from live-culture yogurt. Of course, the small amount of yeast required a long bulk ferment, which was my goal. The bread had a smooth mellow flavor, closer to a naturally-fermented bread than the same amount of yeast alone (without the yogurt liquid) produced.
TomP
I would not be so sure, I tried American pumpernickel from a bakery in Brooklyn and it was cotton balls.
I don't know where the idea comes from, but I think it might be a later creation, maybe from some memoir sort of cookbook. Here's a recipe originally published in the 30-ies, and while there's an argument to be made that it looks more German than Russian there absolutely nothing wrong with it, good clean procedure and honest ingredients throughout. Also, dark breads were always made out of necessity, the moment the people could switch to white bread, the majority did.
It's a conflation of two very distinct styles though. Dark, or "black" bread has to be predominantly whole grain (rye). Bread with 15-30% rye, even whole grain, would never be that dark or "black". Of course mixed bread with a small % of rye is nothing unusual. But the fact that it's made so black is very weird, no? And I don't see how coffee and cocoa flavours are in any way appropriate in "Russian" bread... Perhaps as you say in the past "black" bread was as dark as their pictures, but that's another weird thing for me. I haven't see any bread that was THAT black. Some dense wholegrain rye breads are very dark, but no completely black...
Anyway, to each their own. It might indeed be actually tasty, just a strange name IMO.
It's an unwinnable battle. An atrocity of this sort was posted here a few weeks ago and the original recipe came from a Ukrainian forum.
Re: color. I think that 960 flour is fairly dark. The internets show it as having ash in the range of .88-1.12%, nowhere near the 1.4-1.5% of the AMerican medium rye, but also a far cry from white ryes that you see in 600-700 range. Why the American looks similar? Who knows what they used and what ash it is?
Is this the Serbian rye flour you use?
I also purchased this from a Serbian grocer; it has 3.5% sugar. My experience is that this flour is coarser than the stone ground whole rye I purchased from Breadtopia. It has bits of larger bran particles that were not present in the Breadtopia flour. I also find it to be thirstier than that flour was, most notable when I refresh my rye sour culture.
Alcophile, you too! You also found Serbian rye! 😊
Mine is different, though. I do not have a package now to show you a picture. I usually freeze mine at -20C as soon as I bring it home to kill the eggs or flour insects that may be present, then sift it and keep it in a rye flour bin.
Large bran particles might be present even in stone ground flour, especially if it is a dark rye flour, let alone roller milled, which look like so under microscope
Colour enhanced scanning electron microscope of stone milled dark rye flour (Secale cereale). Large round discs are starch granules, and the minute globules are protein bodies, which may leave imprints in the form of dimples in the starch granules. Large bran particles are visible in this area as thin sheets since the microscope was taken at a relatively high magnification (72x). Source.
The Serbian flour I have does not need a microscope to see the bran particles. It's a stone-ground flour more like pumpernickel:
It looks like superfine rye schrot to me, alcophile, not flour i.e. not Roggenvollkornmehl, but Extra Fein Schrot. This is so exciting!
What hydration is your starter? If it is liquid, or at least a soft batter (a.k.a. 100% hydration) then it probably won't matter that much. Once soaked, just give it a few seconds in a blender or food processor or homogenize it with an immersion blender, and it will become silky smooth, fully accessible to sourdough microflora for digestion.
Mine is finely ground whole grain rye flour.
I've been maintaining at 100% (although I may reduce that to 80–90% on your recommendation) but the consistency is hardly a soft batter. It is a fairly stiff dough that would not lend it to blending with a blender. I try to mix it as much as possible when refreshing. Plus, I only keep ≈80 g in storage.
Are you recommending the blending when suspending it for a pre-ferment for a rye SD? For those, I try to whisk it as much as possible to disperse.
Thanks!
Alcophile, good morning!
100% hydration means 100% hydration of 14-15% moisture flours which artisan bakeries and big bread factories receive from mills. Millers make sure that their flour has exactly 14.5% moisture content.
Depending on our indoor air humidity, our flour may end up having more or less moisture in it. Some areas of the US are so humid (like San-Francisco or Seattle, Oregon's coastal areas), that at home flour can reach 16-17% moisture content. Others are so dry, like Las Vegas area, that San-Francisco formulas with their hydration % simply won't work. Not enough water.
There are tables for flour or grain moisture content vs air humidity at certain temperature. I saw one such table on a British miller's website, now I do not remember which one, and that basically transformed my baking and my understanding of flours. Later I found tables for 0 deg C flour storage (a.k.a refrigerated flours), 25C and 26C (room temperature in our home) and 30C which is more like storing flour and grain at home in Israel or Indonesia.
According to USDA database, on average, at home or in their lab, flours and grains have about 10% moisture content. Per each 1% of flour moisture below 14%, we add 2% (I am rounding up 1.8% here) to our hydration% to obtain the same dough consistency as in the recipe from, let's say, Jeffrey Hamelman's book.
So, for an average home baker 100% hydration actually means somerhing like 110g of water per 100g of flour. In San-Francisco it will be less than 100g water per 100g flour!
My own flour is closer to 5% moisture, I track indoor air humidity carefully, so I know how dry my flours are. So for my flours 100% hydration translates into 120g of water per each 100g of flour. That is why I mentioned an immersion blender. It won't work in a 100% hydration wheat starter or preferment due to gluten forming, but it would in a rye preferment.
I did not mean to blend it to disperse or to knead, I meant it to "mill" those softened large particles that are not flour but closer to grits in size. They will not "dissolve" no matter how long we knead them or ferment them. So you will end up with something like cracked wheat bread with chewy bits dispersed in its otherwise soft crumb.
In a blender or a food processor their size will be brought down to the size of flour particles. That is how I deal with flours that are way too coarsely milled to my taste. I mix those flours and water (and yeast or starter) in a blender or food processor and after one hour, once they are hydrated, knead them in that high speed blender or food processor to obtain smooth texture. This is an equivalent of thrice millled rye flour.
As Suave showed in the pictures from Modernist Bread in his comments above, thrice milled rye flours (middle row) will positively impact rye bread crumb vs coarsely milled flour in bread. There won't be as many canals, cavities and large pores in the resulting bread crumb, it will become more elastic and less crumbly, etc.
Thank you Mariana,
You give such a wealth of information!!
I will get to it.