Bread book: Heritage Rye

matt — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:44:00 +0000

Flour: 3c unbleached white wheat; 2c whole “Red Fife” wheat; 1c dark rye; 0.5c ground rolled oats.
Other: 1 tbsp. or so of honey added to the water-yeast mixture.

This was the first batch of dough this year, although technically I started it last year (and baked up the first loaf as part of our new year’s eve refreshments). Red Fife is a heritage wheat, the first cultivar to be widely planted in Ontario; I picked up a batch of it at the local bulk food store, along with a number of other random flours.

I had trouble with the first loaf, due to timing. My usual method is to mix the ingredients into dough, let it rise for a few hours, and then refrigerate — overnight at least — before actually baking with it. This time I was operating under time constraints — the bread bowl had held the last of my Beer Cheese dough (about which more another time) until quite soon before, and it I wanted a loaf for the party there was going to be no chance to chill the dough. The major upshot is that the dough was very sticky, and hence I dumped a whole lot of extra flour on top in order to extricate my hands. This gave the loaf a powdered look that quite quite pleasant. The crumb was moderately dark (though not the darkest I’ve baked) and pleasant enough to the taste; not much in the way of strong flavours.

I’ve currently got the last batch baked up as rolls or buns; I did this because the second-last batch barely rose at all. This is probably because I was a very neglectful baker who laid out the loaf and then let it sit for multiple hours before remembering to bake it, thus allowing the dough to expand outwards slowly rather than upwards quickly.

Notes for next time: the flour on top worked really well. Maybe try seeding the loaf somehow: sesame on top, maybe. This might work well as a nut bread. I think I also want to try this with a lighter rye flour.

General notes on bread recipes

matt — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:43:00 +0000

One of my current interests/hobbies is baking my own bread: maybe because it’s totally badass, maybe because the workings of yeast seem like tasty little miracles. (My interest in homebrewing, which I haven’t explored yet but hope to once I’m back in my own kitchen, is perhaps founded on similar principles.) At the moment most of my technique is taken from the excellent Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which is full of kneadless bread recipes where you make a single large batch of dough that you stick in your refrigerator, to be portioned out and baked over the next week or two as desired. Most of my experimentations at this point have involved varying the types and proportions of grains in the recipes; most of the basic recipes use 6.5 cups of flour (which yields four loaves of bread), so it’s a matter of what kinds of flour (or other sources of starch) I’m using for that. The other basic ingredients are water, salt, and yeast; anything in addition to those will be listed in my notes.

Also, if you’re doing home baking then I must recommend the use of pizza stones or stoneware baking sheets. I’ve found that metal baking sheets give a crustier bottom to the bread, which isn’t always desirable and often results in uneven baking. Also, and probably related, I’ve had a lot more trouble with bread sticking to metal sheets than stone.

Out of my hat » Baking bread

Bread book: Heritage Rye

General notes on bread recipes