50% Vollkorn Roggen Sauerteig mit gerösteten Walnüssen

In my last post I talked about Garth Hudson, and his amazingness, so take a look at this video! The second example makes me want to move to Arkansas, and give Levon a hug!

Now, this is a bread worth speaking loquaciously about. There are so many delightful aspects to this bread. A high quanitity of toasted nuts, all of its rye coming from whole rye flour, a nice ratio of rye flour to bread flour (1:1), a long full bake, a tender crumb, crisp crust and on top of all that, it's kosher and pareve. The one bad thing is that once you smear it with goat cheese, its no longer pareve! I had the treat of spending shabbat dinner with Rabbi Aaron and his lovely family in Margate, NJ. I am doing my best to get out into the community and take part in local activities. The Rabbi and his wife were gracious enough to invite me into their home, that I am very grateful. And the food was great! 

I grew up in a rather intimate Jewish community. Our shabbat dinners were always small or medium sized. In this community, near Atlantic City, they have big shabbat dinners, with the drinking of wine and the offering of h'our d'oerves which is very different for me. It's great to mingle, but let the dinner speak for itself. I am used to a table that is big enough to move my elbows yet small enough to enable a single conversation. I miss that about my Mom and Dad's shabbat table. Plus, it is hard to come too close to my mothers cooking. It is simple, hearty, tasty, healthy and filling! You can say that I came by my gift of food honestly, and I simply love to share the product of my labors. This reminds me of a line from one of the only rappers that I can stand, Common Market. Actually the only time I like to listen to hip hop is when I spit about bread, yal'kno'wut I'm Sayin!!!!

"The schools failed me, than G-d the farm taught me
The value of a calloused hand, how to work and plow this land
How even a modest crop will make your pop the proudest man"

Unlike the cranberry rye that I last posted on, this bread is loaded with nuts, (upwards of 20%) which makes for a very nutty bread that is just screaming for cheese, wilted arugula and cranberries! I toasted these nuts whole, and then chopped them very minimally, just enough to expose the nuts' inner oils to the dough. This light chop allows for the maximum extraction of flavor during the fermentation process. This bread called for a little yeast, and normally I would not have added it. Since I was baking at night and because I had to be at work very early in the morning, I was forced to use some yeast. I used about one third of what was called for in this formula. I also want to note that I had spent a few days re-feeding Liza May. She is re-charged, refueled and unlike me, she is rather happy to be filled with lactic acid. If only my muscles lactic threshold was as high as hers. Just take a look at this dome of plasatic wrap, she is ready to roll!

The mix was delightful and fairly uneventful. What I mean by that, is that nothing went a rye (oh geeze, I just did that, I am actually quite impressed),

The breads were ready to shape after 45 minutes and ready to bake in another hour. I used my brotforms, like a good German baker. This bread bakes at 460 and is then lowered to 440 for the last two thirds of the bake. The purpose of this temperature reduction is to keep the walnuts from burning. Other than that, this bread is simple, and just lovely! I am finding that a 50% whole rye and 50% bread flour blend is perfect for incorporating other ingredients such as nuts, seeds, fruit and even spices. It is great for bringing out the flavors and textures of the other ingredients. I hope to make another spice loaf soon and some authentic German pretzels when Alex comes to visit in  the very near future.

-DW, The Rye King

Vollkornbrot mit 30% Vollkorn Weißen Weizen und Gerösteten Haselnüssen

Are you ready for a mouthful?   "Vollkornbrot mit 30% Vollkorn weißen Weizen und gerösteten Haselnüssen".

Just in case you were wondering what the heck I am talking about, here's the translation:  "wholegrain bread with 30% whole white wheat and roasted hazelnuts".  I actually baked this bread more than a week ago, but I have been very busy working, cooking, eating, living, loving and working out. 

One of the reasons that I did not post on this bread right away is because I am not a great fan of this bread. I have made this bread before, but this time I added some roasted hazelnuts and replaced the whole wheat with white whole wheat. The finished product was considerably drier than what I am accustomed to.  I had a few slices, gave a few slices to my co-workers, and gave the rest to Kelly's mom, Carla, who has plenty of hungry step kids around.

All of the rye flour in this bread is found in the sourdough build and the soaker. The final dough is composed of whole wheat flour and water and salt. The last time that I baked this bread, the dough was much wetter. I think that the hazelnuts dried this dough up quite a bit and greatly impacted the final product. Prior to baking this bread I ate a few of the raw hazelnuts and found them to be very bitter. So I toasted them and thought they were great. I put way too many hazlenuts in this bread. It was much too pronounced a flavor. The next time that I attempt this bread I will stick to 100% rye and skip the nuts.

Since this bread is a vollkornbrot, the mix is a bit tedious and it takes quite a long time. I had to mix it for close to ten minutes. If you use a hook to mix this, remember that the bowl must be scraped down. Keep that in mind when you make breads that are very high in rye flour, particularly whole rye flour. Of all of the vollkornbrots that I have made, this bread is by far, my least favorite. However, remember my motto: "Live and learn and die learning".

I am keeping this blog entry short because I am going to spend much more time on the current rye I am baking. It is a Sourdough Cranberry bread with toasted pecans and hazelnuts. I will be writing about it shortly and I think it will hold much more promise!  

Until then......... Bake On!

-DW

You are Beautiful!

Well, I was just about to watch a video on youtube and this ad video came on, and it struck me as interesting so I did not skip through it! I feel that there is a true problem in our society. We are too hard on ourselves. We become our own worst critics! Especially when it comes to your physical appearance. I strongly suggest you take a look at this video and think about how others see you! Perhaps they see what you cannot!

 

"Love the one you are and Love the one you are with" -The Rye King

Have a beautiful day!

-DW

Vollkornbrot mit 80% Roggen und einem Roggenbrühstück.

Hello everyone, It has been a while, but I am back!

A lot has happened in my life since I last blogged.  Tomorrow I begin my new job in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

It has been a whirlwind 3 weeks. I have moved out of my parents' house. I have a new apartment in Southern New jersey and I have begun to settle in to my new surroundings. Before I talk about bread, I have to give kudos to my parents for all of their help and support. Also a very special Thank You to my Mom who came down and spent close to a week helping me to get settled in.

Now, lets talk bread. I am rather excited to report that Liza May is alive and well and is in the process of adjusting to her new surroundings. For those of you who are new to my blog, Liza May is my sourdough starter and starters will adjust and change and adapt to regional climate and weather changes.  We are both very excited to continue our German Rye Adventure with renewed energy and purpose.

Major oral surgery, the Jewish holiday of Passover, and my relocation got in the way of my bread baking. However, within six days of arriving here in the Atlantic City area, I had a full-flavored rye bread come out of my oven. All in all, my oven handled itself rather well. 

I got the idea for this bread from Jeffrey Hamelman' book Bread! He used a hot rye flour soaker, which gives the crumb of the bread a tender and moist texture as well as almost gelatinizing the inside of the bread. Due to a recent recall of my preferred bread flour, I was forced to use some white whole wheat flour which I normally steer away from. All-in-all it worked very well, turning this bread into a vollkornbrot loaf by replacing the gluten needed from the bread flour while adding a bit of flavor. I was able to accomplish this without adding too much whole wheat flavor.

Now that I have a 5 pound bag of white whole wheat flour, I will be experimenting with it. I am going to be baking a Mehrkorn Vollkornbrot next.  This is a multigrain whole grain bread in which I will try to offset the intensity of this bread by using the white whole wheat flour in place of regular whole wheat flour. I am also excited to report that I have finally found durum wheat flour at the local Indian supermarket, and I will be baking a semolina sourdough bread in the near future. This is a bread that I tried to make two years ago, but because I could not find the right flour to use, I was unhappy with the results.

Hopefully, I will posting about a successful semolina sourdough in the next couple of weeks.

Back to my bread, it is an 80% whole rye and 20 percent whole wheat bread. What sets this bread apart from the other vollkornbrots that I have baked is the boiling water rye flour soaker, which provides a very tender and tight crumb and a full rye flavor. As I mentioned earlier, it has been a crazy time in my life so I honestly do not remember too much about the details of the preparation and baking of this bread. I was in the middle of thousand other things such as preparing for Kelly's arrival, cooking dinner, and setting up my apartment, etc. It is important for me to mention that I am now living in a location that is about 60 degrees every day so that I will be able to start baking my rye breads without the inclusion of yeast. That is very exciting to me. Taking the commercial yeasts out, allows for a much larger fermentation, and thus a more flavorful bread. I also have a very large boiler room/ laundry room which will greatly help the fermentation of my bread during the cooler months.

An important thing to note about this bread is that it does require a long rest after baking to let the crumb fully settle. I gave the bread 24 hours, but more would not be crazy because this bread has many flavors that need to develop. Another thing to note is that the flavor really changed today (3 days after the bake) from what it tasted like yesterday. I can't wait to see what it will taste like this morning.

As always Keep baking, I know that I will.

Enlightenment Grateful Dead Style

1973-11-30

"Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places when you look at it right"

Right you are Mr. Robert Hunter! Right you are! I just stumbled upon this little gem, my actually clicking on the wrong link. This is quite possible the most wonderful little musical blessing I have received in a long time. This is what is called a Matrix recording which means that it is a combination of a audience recording and a soundboard recording. As you might have guessed an audience recording is recorded by someone in the audience while a soundboard recording comes directly from the soundboard. Both audience recordings and soundboard recordings have their advantages and disadvantages. An audience recording has a very 'live' feeling, sine you can hear the clapping of the audience and the screaming, and even sometimes some very interesting chatter among the crowd which makes you feel that you are right there, it also can detract from the quality of the sound of the performance. While a soundboard is typically crisper and cleaner, and sounds more professionally recorded. Soundboards often have a feeling less live. I like both audience recordings and soundboards, generally speaking I listen to more SBD because really amazing audience recordings are hard to come by, but they Do exist! I really love matrix recordings, but to be honest, they can sometimes feel manufactured and almost to clean. I used to listen to records when I was in highschool because I loved the fact that they were recorded years ago, without the benefit of 30 years of sound technology. They held an air of antiquity and authenticity for me. Plus the ritual, taking out the record, taking out the sleeve, taking the record out of the sleeve and placing it on the turntable, gently setting up the needle and turning it on. I love the process!

What I would love for you to pay attention to in this show:

1. The drums sounds great! Very clean, well recorded
2. The jazzy piano
3. There is good bass, and phil playing his A game!
4. Donna is pregnant and out of the picture, due to not being able to travel by plane (thank goodness) 
5. Bob Weir's voice is sounding good and his playing is spectacular as usual
6. A very nice blend of crowd noise and clean soundboard recording
7. Jerry's guitar sounds marvelous 

Truly, it is not every day that you are confronted with 178:39.63 of love! Take it while you can

Bake on
-DW

Relocation of a Baker!

I think it is fitting to mention my latest plans to my readers, particularly with spring coming; change is in the air. Ironically, at this moment, we are in the middle of a snow storm, nothing to crazy, but none the less, it seems that the environment is resisting this change, which I am eagerly awaiting. Passover is coming, and with passover comes the opportunity to prepare for spring. Cleaning is done, the kitchen is turned over, every last crumb of winter is accumulated and it is then burned. I remember this ceremony as a child always thinking wow my religion is weird while simultaneously saying wow my religion is cool. I may not know who the lord eternal is, but I have grown up in an environment which has allowed questions and even promotes the idea of doubt! Doubt itself is a very powerful tool or weapon. It can cause us to question all that we believe in but it can also help us to re-affirm our faith. We all have many doubts, in my life, they range from will I get this job, do I have the clinical skills, the confidence, the gusto, the nerve. But we can also doubt other things, other humans, other creatures (I often doubt a new starter! Will it work? Will it serve me well? Did I feed it enough? Provide enough love, diligence, time?) I love these philosophical monologues! They are fun for me! I have always had an immense love for questioning everything. Sometimes authority, sometime a recipe, growing up in an environment that nourished such doubt has made a impact on my outlook on life in a most positive way. I owe it to my parents for that, any my teachers and mentors along the way, who though had much more expereince and knowledge than I did, though they always heard my ideas, and nurtured them. I am forever grateful their time and support. 

Let us look at the concept of love for a moment. What is it? What does it do to us? Will we always be able to know when love is there? Or is it simply easier to notice when it is not? I find that to be a very interesting point. I myself, get used to having something around, and it is not till that 'thing' is gone that I notice the 'thing' was there in the first place. Love seems to be this abstract concept that can not be defined. It seems almost limitless. I once said, in regards to baking pumpernickel that:

"Remember, it is not the destination, it is the ride. This bread will teach you a lot about fermentation; a little about life; and a whole lot about love!” 

For me, truer words have not been spoken. For me love is defined by what I have come to know empirically. If I am referring to an individual that I have love for, I define that love based on the experiences we have shared, the memories, the lessons we have learned and the mingling of our experiences -your past experiences combined with my past expereince create this moment that we are experiencing together. For me love is built from memories, so each time I expereince a great and hilarious moment with my father, my love for him grows. Every time I hear a Jerry Garcia solo that rocks me, my love for music grows! Every time I give my mom a hug after a hard time we have shared, my love for her grows (as does my love for myself). Ever time my friends say something that takes me a while to understand my love for knowledge grows. I used to fear the word love romantically, but now I understand that love, as an emotion and a feeling is constantly in motion, constantly growing. If you asked me what memories I associate most with love I would have a different answer than I will in two months. That is because it is constantly permutate-ing, building on itself, growing, learning and being! Bread is my bridge of love. It connects the love that is in my heart with my love for others. So next time you eat a piece of bread, which has been in the making for over 48 hours and possibly if it is sourdough, a fragment of it has been in the making for years, even decades. Think of that old baker, waking early, hands in wet dough to the elbows, burns up and down forearms, sweaty brow, floury hair; think of that, a slice of love!

This brief philosophical deluge was actually caused by my up and coming move. I will be relocating for a job with my girlfriend and partner Kelly to Atlantic City New Jersey. But, please have no fear the Rye King will organize his soldiers, and will occupy yet another strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Liza May will in high spirit rise again and together we will continue our Edible Brot Journey through Germany. I hope you will understand that in the coming weeks it is going to be very difficult for me to bake bread, with Passover  around the corner, and the move, but I will do what I can to keep on feeding your head with this thing I call bread! 

Reply from myself:

I am now recalling a wonderful commentary that I found in Mahzor Lev Shalem   (a prayer book for the high holidays) this past Yom Kippur (day of atonement). Lev Shalem is used in hebrew for an action that you do with all your heart. The title of the commentary was 'Doubt'. How fitting? In Judaism, it is said that adding to a situation can simply detract, so I will not give you my thoughts on this passage, but rather, let your heart listen to the words, and give it your own tempo and melody, and may your experiences with doubt and faith provide the harmony. You should know that HaShem is a name for g-d, it literally means 'the name'. 

Doubt

HaShem is the unseen one –no images can capture Hashem. Equally, then, HaShem is the one about whom no descriptive word can truly be uttered –that may be the secret of the Jewish sensibility which makes the name of HaShem unpronounceable.

There are moments –singular or common, depending perhaps on our personality –when we might feel the presence of HaShem, and certainly others when our reality –tragic, joyous, uneventful –is so overwhelmingly with us that even the idea of HaShem seems distant, perhaps ludicrous. And then there are those moments of aloneness when the world seems barren and the idea of HaShem seems distant, even absurd. The person of faith knows that presence and absence are equally true of the experience of HaShem. Sometimes HaShem feels so close that one experiences the presence of an intimate companion, but the obverse is also true. And in those moments of absence, we question whether the experience of presence was only a delusion.

To have faith is equally to know doubt. The person of faith knows that the atheist is not a person who is bull headed, unseeing, but rather someone who has exclusively experienced the absence, which is the lot of even the person of faith. Both faithfulness to HaShem and denial tell of our human reality. When the person of faith is in touch with the depth of his or her spiritual and rational consciousness, one knows that one’s heart contains both truths. What are we to do, then other than to live faithfully, with doubt?

Source: Feld E, Gordon RL, Kelman RS, et al. eds. Mahzor/Machzor Lev Shalem -New Gender Neutral Conservative High Holiday Prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. 1st ed. The Rabbinical Assembly; 2010.

Vollkornfruchtebrot

Oh Boy! Oh Boy! Oh Boy! This is by far the most exciting and interesting Vollkornbrot that I have ever baked, and I have baked quiet a few of them! I got this idea from the Baeko recipe database. As you might expect, I made several changes to the original formula. This bread is loaded with whole grain goodness, a high amount of fermented flour, a high amount of soaked grain and a truckload of dried fruit and toasted nuts and seeds. My approach to this bread was to simply use the fruit and nut soaker idea and throw that into Hamelman's recipe for Vollkornbrot. The result was fantastic. However, first I would like to shed some light on the process and give you an in depth discussion of the taste and texture of this bread.

This bread is made with 100% whole rye, coming in the form of whole rye flour and rye chops. The rye chops are soaked in warm water overnight, but most of the whole rye flour is located in the sourdough build. What I want to spend most of my time talking about is the dried fruit and nut soaker. This soaker was made with 100 grams of dried cranberries, 100 grams of golden raisin, 100 grams of sliced dried apricots, 100 grams of toasted walnuts and sunflower seeds and 100 grams of boiling water. I used boiling water because I knew that the heat in the water would help to extract the natural sugars and flavors found in the dried fruit. It would also help to extract some of the salty-nutty flavor from the seeds and help to spread it throughout the entire dough during the final mix and fermentation/proofing stages of this bread.

There is something about golden raisins that I love. I am not sure what it is, but they are special to me. I do recall spending an afternoon with my good fried Isaac in 2006 eating handful after handful of golden raisins in our room in Jerusalem. I will admit to regretting it later, because that was a lot of fiber, as with anything else, I had to pay the ultimate price. But lets not "go" there. I also remember eating loquats, which are my favorite fruit, in ample quantities. I like them because they are weird and hard to come by as they are grown in the Middle East and in Bermuda. This soaker makes this bread a lot of fun because it fills the crusty bread with a tenderness and a sweetness that exceeds the typical caramelization of a fully baked rye bread. And this one took close to 90 minutes to bake. This is not a bread for the faint of heart and the fruit and nuts do bring a lightness to a bread that is not typically light. All of the ingredients including the rye, seeds, and fruit brings an intense bread to a whole new level of intensity. This bread is so delicious that it scares me!

Love them seeds

Like any other Vollkornbrot this is a very crusty bread. It is also a very dense bread whose character changes as it is allowed to rest. Much like ourselves, it start off as child, and with the passage of time, it becomes an almost wiser version of itself. But, if you let it get too wise, you will find that it will break your jaw. If this bread is kept in a plastic bag in the fridge, it will last for close to three weeks, maybe even longer. I never have a problem with bread going bad, because it is a major staple of my diet. When a bread is as nutritious and as wholesome as this one is, you never have a guilty feeling about going back for another slice. Over the past few days I have eaten this several ways but the two ways that I have enjoyed it most are "naked" and oddly, with cold pepper jack cheese. (For those of you who are new to this blog, the "naked" refers to the bread and not me.) The spiciness of the pepper jack goes wonderfully with the sweetness of the fruit. The next time I bake this bread I am going to withhold the walnuts and simply add some toasted salted sunflower seeds in their place. I would normally leave them out of the soaker, but once again, I love the salty flavor that the seeds can bring to the crumb when they are added to a boiling water soaker.

I now realize that I did not speak much on the production of this bread. I am currently on an Amtrak train on my way to Atlantic City, and do not have access to my notes, so I will only add a few notes from memory to shed light on a little bit of the process. This dough is mixed on first speed only, and for ten minutes. Karen H Kerr, a baker whom I respect greatly, recommends using the paddle attachment. I gave it a whirl, but it did not work so well for me. Perhaps her formula for Vollkornbrot is much different than mine. After about four or five minutes, I put the hook on and I found it to be more effective. I am a traditional in that sense and cleaning thick dough such as this off the paddle was really a pain in the batinsky! But hey, ‘live and learn and die learning’, that is what I always say. After the dough has come together completely, the fruit soaker is added and allowed to mix until combined and spread evenly throughout. My attitude is: "get the fruit in the dough and don't worry". To me, when you have a dough with this much whole rye flour, the full bake is much more important than a perfect mix. This bread dough is really somewhere between a dough and very thick batter! I always start this bread in a hot oven (470 F) then after twenty minutes bring it down to 375 and bake for one more hour. I then remove the bread from the Pullman pan and let it finish directly on the stone for 15 minutes. This helps firm up the sides a bit and ensures the bread is baked fully! It will be dark, even the flour coating on the pan will have adhered to the bread and look very toasted!

Caramelization!

This is a bread for the ages! One that I hope one day I will be remembered for!!

Bake on!

-DW, The Rye King

Paderborner Landbrot

This is a traditional country bread which comes from the Paderborn region which is actually located 127 kilometers south east of Hanover, where Alexander lives. We have both decided that we will pick up a loaf when (not if) I get to Germany. Actually, when I was talking to Alex about this bread, he also mentioned some other wonderful things to visit when I am there, one being the Wattenmeer or Wadden Sea. Alexander explained:

One of the most powerful experiences I had was walking with my mother alongside the beach in the middle of winter. it was below -10°C and low tide. the movement of the tides and the low temperature turned the sea into a crystal wasteland as the iceshelfs where pressed together and piled up a few feet. There was no wind. Complete silence and it felt like the whole world was frozen in time. We were there just as the tides turning point (they take about 6 hours to completely come from flood to tide until it reverses). Then i heard a very low and eery scratching sound I could not locate. It took me a few seconds to realize it was to coming flood. awfully slow the water coming from below the mudflats pressed against the frozen sea and it began to crack. You could feel the slow yet unstoppable power of the water literally lifting kilometers of tightly packed ice shelves micrometer by micrometer. pressing and pushing the ice until it broke, then squeezing countless liters of water through the tiny cracks and creating a the sound of myriads of little rivers flowing over the white wasteland

Since, I know very little about the natural beuties of germany I will stick to what I do know; rye bread. 

This bread is another formula that was given to me by Karin Anderson, who is another Rye bread baker out of Maine. She actually was speaking to several german bakes from Paderborn, who said that this formula was authentic. She mentioned that there is only one bakery in germany that makes this bread authentically. Now, I of course had to make several changes to this formula because it called for medium rye flour. I am a whole rye kind of guy, so I replaced all of the medium rye flour with freshly ground whole rye flour. I would also like to mention that I am now the very proud owner of 50 pound of rye berries. I got them at a great price, $0.75 per pound. What I am most excited about these berries is that I was able to grind them into very fine flour. I first grind my berries at 3mm to achieve rye chops. Then at 2mm to achieve rough meal, and then at the finest setting the achieve rye flour. I was very pleased that my mill was able to process these berries into such a wonderful soft flour, even the bran was milled finely! 

The other change that I made to this bread was to exchange the 1050 wheat flour for bread flour. 1050 German wheat flour is what is called a high extraction flour, meaning, it is a high protein flour with high ash content. I spoke with Jon at King Arthur and he recommended that I try 'first clear' which is a King Arthur Flour, but since I replaced the medium rye with whole rye I felt that using bread flour would be a fine substitution. Granted, I have never had this bread, I was pleased with the results. 

The finished loaf

This bread, similar to my most previous post, in that it has a fair amount of sourdough starer. This time rye starer was used. Interestingly enough this bread does not have a soaker of any kind. But I am making up for that because my next bread will have two soakers! Another interesting note about this bread is that it is baked in a loaf pan, and it is allowed to proof until the dough reaches the height of the pan. Typically rye breads are not allowed to proof for so long because they begin to break down (at a much faster rate than sourdough wheat breads). Like most german sourdough breads, this bread contains a small of amount of yeast. Prior to baking this bread, the dough is docked. which means that holes are placed throughout the dough, this helps to keep the dough from splitting and to release steam. it also gives the finished product a unique appearance.

I was very pleased with the sourness and flavor that this bread has, although I found it to get boring after a while. I typically like to stick with breads that have something different about them: seeds, nuts, dried fruit, spices. I found that this bread lacked some pizaz but I am very glad that I baked it. It was something different, something new but most of all it was something German.

Bake On
-DW 

Bauernbrot

Before I get into this bread I would like to to thank Karin Anderson, a colleague and blogger who has been helping with my brot's over the past few months. I recommend that you take a look at her blog Brot & Bread. She is dedicated to her craft and her love of German bread comes through in her posts. This is the first formula of hers that I have used, and although I have not yet tasted the bread, it is a beauty. Although my friend Alex has been helping me with translating, Karin has the insight of actually being a German baker. Although she never baked bread while she lived in Germany, she certainly is a German who bakes German bread. Karin knows a thing or two about a thing or two (That is at least four things)!

There are several ways that this bread is different than the normal rye breads that I bake. First of all, this bread is made with a whole wheat mother starter. I did not quite have a 100% whole wheat starter, so I fed a stiff levain at 60% hydration and gave it one feeding with whole wheat flour and provided it with a 75% hydration by flour weight. The result was a stiff levain with a good amount of whole wheat flour and a wonderful amount of gluten development. In the future, I will continue to feed this stiff levain with whole wheat flour and it will eventually come very close to becoming 100% whole wheat! Starters that are made with whole grain flours such as whole wheat, whole spelt or whole rye are stronger than their white flour counterparts. Whereas I am a Registered Dietitian, I am all about the "whole-grain" approach to bread baking and all cooking for that matter.

During this post, I will pay particular attention to the attributes in this bread which differentiate it from the typical German breads that I have been baking.

As I mentioned above, this bread is leavened with a whole wheat starter, but the build is actually fed with bread flour. This helps to develop gluten in the build and thus the final dough. Even though this build was only given eleven hours to grow, you will notice excellent growth and an almost smooth finish. Looking at it, you can see the flecks from the whole wheat starter that was used. Another difference with this bread is that it used a large amount of starer. Typically, when I bake sourdough bread, I use between 7-11 grams of sourdough starter (depending on the size of the bread) This recipe called for 114g for two 650 gram loaves. That is a nearly 16 and a half times the amount that I normally use. To give you a better idea of how much starter was used in the build, check out the picture. Karin's methods for building and feeding a sourdough starter are different. By all accounts, it is just a different technique for baking bread, one that I have simply not practiced before. It required me to build my starter up more often. If the loaf tastes as good as it looks, it will be well worth it!

Secondly, this grain soaker contained both whole wheat flour and whole rye flour. Typically, my soakers are made only of rye flour. Other than one of Hamelman's breads, they do not contain rye flour but rather chopped rye or cracked rye. Another change is that all of the rye flour in this bread is contained in the soaker. Karin notes that one can replace the rye flour with spelt flour, but I chose to use the rye. How could I refuse? Another difference was that all of the rye flour was contained in the soaker. The only other bread that I do this for is my 40% rye with caraway or Kummelbrot. I probably do not practice this because the rye breads that I make are typically at least 50% rye by flour weight. To include all of the rye in the soaker would be overkill.

The next major difference was the water. There is no water used in the final dough. All of the water is contained in the soaker and in the sourdough build. My normal practice is to combine the water in the final dough with the sourdough build to help to break up the sourdough so that it is more easily distributed during the mix. This was not possible, so I tore the build into eight or nine pieces so that it would distribute during the mix. During the mix I had to take the dough off of the hook several times. I know that I should be using a paddle, but that is another practice I do not do. (That is mainly because my dough hook is in the attic and it is roughly 35 degrees Fahrenheit up there).

 

 

The fourth big change is that the sourdough build and the soaker are prepared in the morning and the final dough is mixed at night. I always prepare the soaker and build the night before and bake the following morning. The final dough contained all of the soaker and and all of the sourdough build, plus about 90 grams of whole wheat flour, 8-10 grams of honey, a little salt and a pinch of fennel and caraway. This bread is then divided in half and allowed to ferment in the fridge over night. The next morning it is shaped into boules and then proofed in bannetons, or brotforms. The bread is then baked at 475 degrees for 10 minutes and then baked at 425 for an additional ten minutes. The loaves are then rotated 180 degrees and baked for an additional 10-20 minutes. Typically, I do not rotate my breads in the oven, but I am glad that I did for these. This rotation provided a very even color to the finished bread.

All in all, this technique was new to me in several ways, and I am glad that I was able to bake this bread. Using my intuition as a baker, I made sure to guide the process along in each its stages. Although I have not yet tasted this loaf, I am certain that it will get the "hearthbakedtunes seal of approval" and I am anxious to take my first bite! Karin has given me two more formulas to try and I am looking forward to my next brot!

I just tasted this bread and it has a nice spice to it, but I think I would prefer the taste without the fennel and caraway. I think it detracts from the rye and honey in this formula! The crumb is tight, which makes sense, there is quite a bit of whole grain but the crust is simply beautiful but a bit too thick from over baking.

-Bake On

-DW, The Rye King