Bread Baking

Epicurean Exploits - Food and Recipes
1

One symptom for me of getting into making neapolitan pizza dough has been developing an interest in baking other kinds of bread, and a belief that it was possible to do so well. I’ve learned so much in the last 6 months from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Whole Grain Breads and feel like I’ve made a lot of progress. I started out with ciabatta, a rustic dough very similar to pizza dough, and I got some successful loaves after only a few attempts. What I really want to make, though, is the kind of dense, whole grain breads that really aren’t available at US bakeries, but that are de rigour at German bakeries and are an essential part of daily life there.

So I thought I would start a thread to share my trials, tribulations, and photos, with the hopes of flushing out other bread bakers and getting a conversation going about what you all are doing and how it’s working out. Plus, it’s fun to take pictures and share them.

Here’s my first offering, a Transitional Rye Seigle Hearth bread with anise seeds. For anyone not familiar with Reinhart’s vocabulary, “transitional” means that there’s some amount of white bread flour included in the recipe. “Seigle” means there’s greater than 50% rye flour content. “Hearth” means it was baked on a stone with a steam pan. This loaf began with a rye soaker (rye flour, water, salt), and a sourdough starter built from a whole wheat starter and elaborated with bread flour. I ran out of rye flour, so there’s about 1/2 cup of wheat flour in the recipe as well. I’d guess that the whole thing came out to about 55% rye. Here’s a shot of the batard after proofing and scoring, right before it went in the oven.

And here it is after baking. The baked loaf was about 13.5" long. I love the way the gluten strands are visible in the scored section, which the second image shows nicely.

And finally, here’s a shot of the crumb.

The crumb was dense without being heavy and the crust had a firm chew to it. The flavor really developed over a couple of days, with both the rye and anise flavors becoming more intense. On the first day, it made a great tomato sandwich, with mayo and sliced vidalia onion. Later in the week, it made an exceptional piece of toast with butter and sourwood honey. It was ever so slightly undersalted though. I have to play with my salt additions since I use a sea salt that’s fairly large-grained and somewhat moist as well.

Tonight I’m starting a rye loaf with pumpkin and sunflower seeds. Should be baked by tomorrow midday.

2

Very cool Jaime. I’ll be watching to see how you do. I’ve wanted to get into the bread baking scene, just can’t find the time. But I’m interested in how you do. Post pics and tips please.

3

Here’s an update on today’s project. The recipe loosely follows Reinhart’s Transitional German Style Many Seed Bread I started a soaker and starter last night. The soaker was 75% rye flour and 25% whole wheat (the inverse of Reinhart’s proportions), 2 oz. flax seeds, salt and water. Since I wanted more rye flour than the recipe called for and adjusted accordingly, I needed the acidity of a sourdough starter to control the rye enzymes instead of the commercial yeast biga called for. So I made starter with a WW mother and bread flour (25% and 75% by weight, respectively). It was a cool day in Chicago yesterday and last night, with inside temp holding at about 69F. My starter didn’t double like it should have, even though I left it at room temp overnight. I don’t have pH strips, so I haven’t checked the acidity, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be OK.

Mixed the pre-doughs this morning. Here are the components before mixing. That’s honey, yeast, and salt in the mixing bowl with the pre-dough pieces (the dark one is the soaker, the light one the starter). Below are the seeds: toasted sunflower and pumpkinseeds, and untoasted sesame seeds. To the bottom left is 2oz of additional wheat flour. The second image is the dough mixed and set out for the first rise.

A side note: as I mentioned above, it’s pretty cool outside today. A sunny, brisk morning, feeling very much like fall is upon us (hooray!). I’ve got about a pint left of sourwood honey from western NC, where I spent a lot of time in my teens. After I put the it into the dough, I licked the remainder off my measuring spoon and the combination of the sourwood flavor and the weather was like an instant transportation back to cool late summer mornings in the NC mountains, smelling the scents of the forests as the dew evaporates off the trees, and chewing sourwood leaves picked on a morning hike. I miss it there on mornings like this.

4

And here it is.
From the left:
-proofed, scored, and ready to bake
-the whole loaf finished
-detail of the crust

As you can see, I decided to coat it in sunflower seeds, which makes for a pretty attractive loaf. It baked for about 35 minutes at 375, reaching an internal temp of 199F. The final loaf is 11.5" long and weighed 2.5 lbs. So it’s quite a dense bread, as the shot of the crumb below shows.

I just tried a slice of it, and I love it. The crumb is soft, dense and moist, while the crust has a great crunch to it. The toasted seeds really give it a satisfying nutty taste and the “finish” is really lengthy, the flavors remaining on the palate for a while. It doesn’t have a particularly rye taste to it, nor is it sourdoughy at all. Since it’s the more well-done portion, the crust brings a sort of savory earthiness to complementing the softness of the flavors inside. Delightful, a big success I think. I look forward to following its development over the next couple of days.

5

looks tasty. I’ll take two please!

6

A quick update on the development of this bread since yesterday: it’s half gone! Also, the crumb has become a little more sour tasting and the flavors of the different seeds are more distinct. Lovely. Next time I make this one I might use all WW flour for the starter to see about getting a denser crumb and a richer flavor. Maybe also substitute molasses for the honey.

7

I liked the story (and your efforts to improve) but I think what I appreciated the most were the pics - some very nice ones!

8

It’s been a while since I updated, due to having other stuff to take care of besides playing on the internet. I did in fact make another version of the many seed bread above. This time I used an all rye soaker and 75% WW, 25% bread flour starter. I also substituted molasses for the honey. The dough was way denser than before and I don’t think it was wet enough. It rose some, but probably not enough. Plus the surfaced cracked when I shaped the batard. The baking also took nearly an hour at 375F to reach an internal temp of 195F. This was way too long. The crust was really thick and didn’t soften much after cooling, leaving a very hard loaf that was super dense, a pain to cut, and somewhat of a challenge to eat. The flavor was pretty good, but you really had to work to chew it. It was definitely better as toast. No pictures this time, sorry to say.

I think I got a little overconfident in my experimentation on this loaf. And I should have added more liquid to the dough to compensate for the more absorptive flours. Oh well. Live and learn.

My baking stone also broke during some pizza making, which put me out of commission for a while. That and I’m moving to Germany for the next 5 months, so I’ve been packing things away and don’t know how much baking I’ll be able to do there. Hopefully at least some. Maybe this will have to become a purchased bread thread for a little while.

9

There seems to be some interest in bread baking spreading today, so I thought I might try to revive this thread and see if I can get an ongoing discussion started.

Here are some pictures from a recent first time experiment that I thought was pretty successful: bagels.

I used Peter Reinhart’s recipe from Bread Baker’s Apprentice, except I substituted honey for the non-diastic malt powder. The technique is basically this:

-Make a sponge (more or less a poolish) with bread flour, water and a touch of yeast, at about 100% hydration.
-Add flour, salt, honey, a bit more yeast and mix to 57% hydration.
-Knead ~10 minutes until smooth, slightly stiff, and not tacky at all.
-Divide into even chunks, shape into rolls, rest 20 minutes, shape into bagels (which I did by punching a hole in the middle of a roll with my finger and stretching the dough out into a ring. It’s amazingly elastic at such low hydration), rest 20 minutes.
-Perform a “float test”, where you drop raw bagel dough into a bowl of water. If it floats within 10 seconds, it’s ready.
-Cover and refrigerate overnight.
-Boil in water with baking soda, I did 90 seconds per side.

Here are the boiling bagels.

Immediately after boiling, I placed them on a parchment lined pan and sprinkled a mixture of poppy seeds, sesame seeds, and sea salt on them.

They then baked at 450F for 5 minutes, turned around and baked another 5 minutes. Here’s the result.

And here’s a shot of the crumb.

Cooled for 15 minutes and they were very soft on the inside, despite the crust having a great chew. After a day out, they had firmed up quite a bit and were great toasted the next day. It really was much easier than I thought it would be, although I might try boiling them longer and going for even lower hydration next time to see if they might be firmer right off the bat.

10

For a firmer bagel, try high-gluten flour rather than bread flour.
You might also want to try boiling less. Izzy Cohen is adamant about no more than 20 seconds total. I go 30 seconds because I live at high-altitude with a lower boiling point. Regardless, the longer you boil, the thicker the skin, which to me is not desirable.

11

Hmm, I quite like the thicker crust, but I’ll certainly be playing around with the recipe. I’ve also found that high gluten flour is not readily available, also high-extraction. I’d like to experiment with both.

12

Would adding vital wheat gluten fix that Jamie?

13

It might. I’ve never used vital wheat gluten before, so I don’t really know if it can be added to flour with the effect of essentially increasing the gluten content.

14

From pizzamaking.com glossary:

Vital wheat gluten has a typical gluten content of about 45% and a protein content of about 75%. Its recommended use is at the rate of 1 to 2 teaspoons for each cup of flour or 2–3% by weight of flour. Each 1% addition of vital wheat gluten increases the protein content of the flour to which it is added by 0.6%.

15

Another bread trial, this one adapted from several recipes for Vollkornbrot, which is typically a very dense, very moist, 100% rye loaf with tons of seeds and wheat berries. My version included:

14 oz. of rye sourdough starter at 80% hydration
16 oz. of rye soaker at 100% hydration
These were prepared two days and a day before baking, respectively.

I mixed them for the final dough and added:
2 1/4 tsp instant yeast
2 1/2 tsp sea salt
2 Tbsp molasses
1/4 c toasted sunflower seeds
1 oz. bread flour
1 oz. whole wheat flour

The molasses had made the dough very wet and sticky, so moist that it wasn’t even cohesive, looking more of a quick bread batter, so I had to add the extra flour (I had run out of rye flour at this point). This brought the hydration of the final dough to about 80%, and it was still fairly sticky during kneading, but manageable. I gave it a first rise of about 30 minutes. Here is the interior of the dough just before shaping:

I was excited about the aeration I got and had pretty high hopes for the loaf. Shaped it and put it in a bread pan, oiled and dusted with rye flour. Then I let it rise for another hour, during which it expanded and formed a dome above the top of the pan. Then into the oven, heated to 500F, steamed it and immediately turned the temp down to 375F. Baked for 30 minutes, turned around, then another 20 min., removed from pan and placed it directly on a baking sheet and baked 5 minutes on each of the long sides. Internal temperature was 205F after this.

Here’s the finished loaf.

and here’s the crumb.

Now, if you’ve ever had proper Vollkornbrot before, you know that this is not nearly seedy enough. The real thing looks more like just enough flour was used to hold the berries together. What I got, though, was mostly an (almost) all rye, dense sandwhich bread. For a loaf like this one, I would hope for a little more airiness. My experience with the starter is that the wild yeast does not really have enough power to leaven very much at 80% hydration. It is simply too firm. But at higher hydrations (90% and higher, I would guess; I keep my rye mother at 133% and it behaves like I want) the yeast will puff the dough up and create a light, spongy texture. I think that might give me the texture I want, but the dough will be a mess to work with. Next time I’ll try to use maybe 75-80% rye starter at high hydration in my final dough and let it raise the loaf itself before baking. We’ll see what happens.

I also think this will help me with the flavor profile I’m looking for, which is much more sour than this bread ended up being. It’s tasty, sure, but I want a real tang.

Anybody out there with rye bread experience (Bill?) who cares to share a tip or two?

16

Ah ha. Very useful. Thanks.

17

You’re welcome. Bear in mind that protein content is not the only factor the affects the taste and texture of a bread.