Yeast water seed and nut bread
Have been loving the yeast water.
I've recently made Hamelman's Swiss Farmhouse bread from the community bake. So interesting and it surprised me that my somewhat fizzy water has such great leavening power.
Since there was leftover yeast water from making the CB bread I wondered what a yeast water bread would taste like without the raisins and if it would still have as strong a raisin flavour to it. And I do like what seeds and nuts as inclusions bring to a bread, so made this loaf, replacing the walnut and raisin inclusions with 50g of a seed mix of my own (pumpkin, sunflower, brown and golden linseed, sesame) and another 50g of nuts (almonds, pecans and walnut).
Other than that most of the method followed was as per Hamelman's recipe. The nuts and seeds were laminated in. This time around the fermentation, although lightning fast compared to sourdough was slower than with the Swiss Farmhouse, possible because of the lack of raisins. Bulk fermentation was 2.5 hours and final proof just shy of 2 hours, with the aliquot showing 120% increase at the end. With the original recipe the aliquot grew even larger - to 167% and perhaps I should have let it raise even higher, but still learning what I can get away with with the yeast water!
I did err on the side of caution and popped the banneton into the freezer while the oven was warming just in case the dough would spread when it came out. I never know how long you can get away with the freezer for, but it seems to be longer than I expected and up to an hour has been fine. For this bread it was around 50 minutes.
Taste was exceptional. The pecans really came through (most of the nuts did, actually). There wasn't a raisin taste either, although there was certainly no sour taste as you'd get with sourdough. It was especially lovely to eat with a nut butter, but we went to town and also tried it with avo, a 'Labneh' cream-cheese and Speculoos spread.
crumb yeasty with avo.jpeg
So I had two different kinds of raisins that I tried. Ended up using the jar on the left which had the larger raisins made from Hanepoort grapes. Raisins are seeded and still have stalks.