Five-Grain Bread

The five grains in this bread come from high-gluten and whole-wheat flour, rye flour, cornmeal, rolled oats, and flax seeds. Since it can be argued that flax seeds aren't really a grain, the name may not be totally accurate. Nonetheless, this is still a terrific bread. It has a lovely, complex flavor without being too heavy. The crust, in particular, has a nice toasted nutty flavor.

For these loaves, Hammelman suggest either a two-hour bulk fermentation or an overnight retarding. I tried both scheduling my baking so that I could compare these loaves. The loaf on the left (overnight retarding) was started the day before the loaf on the right (two-hour bulk fermentation). Both loaves were baked in a soaked cloche. I preheated the cloche before putting the bread into it, cooking first the overnight retarded loaf and then the two-hour bulk fermentation loaf. Consequently, baking conditions were not identical but were close. (I did not cool and resoak the cloche.) I set the retarded loaf out for an hour or so before baking, but it wasn't up to room temperature.

Differences between loaves were slight. I got slightly more oven spring and a slightly softer crumb with the two-hour fermentation. Overall, there was little difference in the taste of the loaves. I slightly preferred the retarded loaf, but probably wouldn't have been able to distinguish between the two loaves if I hadn't had them side-by-side. Both were excellent and well worth the effort, not that either was difficult to make. This is a keeper.

Baguettes with Poolish and Pâte Fermentée

Yes, I haven't posted in a while. I finished the July breads in the middle of the month so there was a week or so when I didn't have the next set of recipes. Then I was out of town for another week. But mostly I've been baking without writing. So it is time to catch up!

I begin with two new baguettes recipes. These recipes are quite similar, so I cover both in this post. They differing only in the preferment—one using a poolish (a wet preferment with a batter-like consistency) and the other a pâte fermentée (a dryer preferment with the same consistency as the final dough). Both produced a lovely dough and a bread very similar to straight dough
French Bread previously described on this blog. Neither bread has good keeping qualities. They are usable the second day, but that's about the limit. This is about the same or slightly better than the French Bread. (Hint: You can take stale bread, rub it with water, wrap it in foil, and then reheat it in a low oven. This will soften the bread, but you will need to use it quickly.)

Compared to the pâte fermentée, the poolish produced a dough that was slightly more elastic, slightly less extensible, gave a slightly better rise, seemed a bit sweeter and less sour, and had a slightly more open crumb. But I hesitate to mention these differences because all these differences were quite, quite small. Had I not had the breads side-by-side, the differences would not have been noticeable. For a practical considerations, the breads were the same.

The recipe produced a nice, satiny dough that was fun to play with. This inspired me to play around with different shapes. Using ideas from Peter Reinhart's books, Ciril Hitz's videos, and Lionel Vatinet's presentation at the Asheville Artisian Bread Festival, I made baguettes, a couple of baguette variants, an epi, a variation on an epi, and a corrone de bordoulaise. Previously, I'd made baguettes and epis, but little else. All of these variations proved easy and fun, definitely something I'd do again.

French Bread

Flour (100%), water (70%), yeast (1.25%) and salt (1.8%)—this is a pretty basic recipe for a French baguettes. It is a simple straight dough. There are no special techniques—no preferement and no autolyses. The bread is easily made in under one day. This is a type of bread that I've made hundreds of times.

There were no surprises with this bread. The results were excellent. This particular recipe doesn't quite develop the flavor that can be achieved with a preferment. But the bread is considerably less trouble. It won't keep very well, but that's rarely an issue since you're apt to inhale this bread.

This recipe produces a soft, satiny dough that is easy to work with, and easy to adapt. I've use it to make both baguettes and large rolls. The recipe for four baguettes will give 16 hamburger size rolls. These take about 12-15 minutes to cook. Or you can mix and match making some baguettes and some rolls.

I won't pretend that there aren't better recipes for French style bread, but none provide better quality with less work.

70% & 80% Sourdough Ryes With Soakers

In the spirit of full disclosure, rye breads have never been among my favorites. At times I can appreciate a lighter rye bread, particularly rye toast with a good crunchy peanut butter. And rye goes well in some heavier sandwiches, pastrami for example. But, rye is rarely my first choice, and when I do choose rye, it is always a light rye. Moreover, Hamelman's comments leads one to expect a heavy, leaden bread. Breads with a rye content beyond 60 percent, says Hamelman, "should be sliced thinly... sandwiches made with these breads are open face, since a double thickness of these compact and concentrated breads can be a bit too much of a workout for the jaw." (Emphasis added.) These are not encouraging words.

Finding the ingredients for these two breads was also a challenge. The 80% loaf calls for whole-rye flour and high-gluten flour. The 70% loaf calls for medium rye flour and rye chops. Whole-rye flour is fairly easy to come by at most grocery stores, but the other three ingredients are not so easily found. I had already faced the problem of medium rye flour and high-gluten flour from the Light Rye recipe. I order medium rye flour from King Arthur's. Although I gotten high-gluten flour from King Arthur's in the past, I'm now blending my own using King Arthur's bread flour and vital wheat gluten. For rye chops, I went to the Internet and ordered rye berries. I put the rye berries in a food processor to create the chops. On the whole, these were quite hard and this did not work very well. (Perhaps it would have worked better if I'd tried processing them after soaking. Alas, I didn't try this.)

(The baker's percentages were a little puzzling with the recipe with rye chops. Had I been doing the calculation, I'm not sure whether I would have included these as part of the flour or not. Hamelman included them. Conseqently, both recipes had a 78% hydration. An to be sure, the rye chops do soak up quite a bit of water. Still, if I were to eliminate the rye chops from the recipe, they don't add much and are a pain to find and work with, I'm not quite sure how I would proceed.)

When preparing the bread, I cut each of the recipes in half. My wife likes rye even less than I so most of the two smaller loaves would be discarded. Unfortunately, when cut in half, I didn't have quite enough dough for my mixer and needed to do the final mix by hand. Both recipes produced a wet dough without much gluten development.

The 80% loaf called for an oblong, free from loaf while the 70% loaf called for a pullman pan. Since I was only making half the recipe, I didn't have enough dough to fill my pullman pan. Consequently, I cooked both loaves together, one in each end of the pullman pan using the temperatures and times for the 70% loaf. (Times and temperatuers for the two loaves were pretty much the same anyway.) For the final fermentation, I separated the two loaves in the pan with a piece of cardboard covered in plastic wrap which I removed before baking. This approach worked nicely giving me two small, nearly identical loaves.

The two loaves are shown above with the 70% loaf on the left. At least initially, the 80% loaf had the stronger rye taste, but the 70% loaf had a very strong rye finish. Perhaps this is a consequence of the rye chops which need to be chewed before their flavor is released. The chops also gave the 70% loaf a chewier texture. Both loaves had an unpleasantly hard crust and a dense crumb. Overall, the loaves were more alike than different.

The bottom line is that I can't say I was particularly enthusiastic about either of these two breads. Thus far, before posting any results, I have tried each recipe at least twice, trying at least once to follow the recipe very closely. This time I've only made each recipe once, and am not include to go back and try either recipe again, particularly since there are another 15 rye recipes in the book.

Bialys

I'm a big fan of bialys so I was particularly interested to try Hamelman's recipe. I first encountered bialys over a decade ago in Baking with Julia which includes a recipe from Lauren Groveman. More recently, I've pretty much stuck to the recipe in Rose Levy Beranbaum Bread Bible athough I have tried a few other recipes including the recipe in Mimi Sheraton's unreadable The Bialy Eaters.

Excluding toppings, Hamelman takes an approach that pretty much matches everyone else. With exception of the malt he adds to bagels, Hamelman pretty much uses the same dough for bialys. (And malt is sometimes added to bialys.) In particular, both recipes call for 58% hydration. By comparison, Ciril Hitz treats bialys as a bagel variation (with 59.4% hydration) in Baking Artisan Breads. By contrast, Beranbaum has two different recipes with 68.6% hydration for bialys and 63.8% for bagels. Reinhart hasn't published a bialy recipe, but he uses 57.1% hydration for the bagels in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. The Child/Groveman recipe isn't specific enough to calculate hydration. But it does differ from the other recipes in that it incorporates onions directly into the dough as well as in the topping.

Although I didn't test the side-by-side, as far as the bread goes, the recipes all produce very similar products. Most bialys are flatter than those I made using Hamelman's recipe, but that didn't seem to affect the taste. Without a side-by-side comparison, I wouldn't recommend one recipe over another.

The big difference between Hamelman recipe and most other recipes is the treatment of the onions for the topping. Hamelman grinds raw onions, mixes them with bread crumbs, and then lets them rest in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. Since this is the same approach that Mimi Sheraton recommends in The Bialy Eaters, I'm guessing that this is an authentic approach. But when I made bialys this way, I found the results were awful. I ended up cutting the part with the onions off, discarding it, and just eating the rest. An Hamelman's variation with the addition of chopped garlic wasn't any better.

Every other recipe that I've seen calls for sauteing the onions first, something I've always done and highly recommend. I particularly like red onions sauteed in peanut oil. The addition of poppy seeds and sesame seeds is another plus.

All-in-all, I'll probably stick to Beranbaum because it's what I'm comfortable with, but I'd be happy with any of these recipes. However, for me, cooking the onions is a must. I don't plan to go back to the onions and breadcrumbs anytime soon.

Beer Bread with Roasted Barley

This is another annoying recipe that requires an ingredient that is hard to locate, a problem that is becoming all to common with this challenge. First high-gluten flour, then high-extraction flour, and now, malted barley. (And one of next month's recipes calls for rye chops!) I really don't mind using unusual ingredients, but at times Hamelman doesn't provide an adequate description of said ingredients, guidance in finding the ingredients, or possible substitutions.

For my first pass through the recipe, I hadn't yet located malted barley so I substituted barley flour while I continued my search. This produce a nice, but unremarkable loaf. An okay loaf, but nothing memorable.

For the malted barley, the idea is to take hulled barley that can still be sprouted, sprout it, toast it briefly in the oven, and then grind it into a fairly fine meal to use in the bread. Eventually, I found barley that was suitable for sprouting although perhaps not completely hulled, and repeated the bread.

For comparison purposes, I actually made four half-loaves. I use the sprouted/toasted/ground barley per the original recipe, I use ground pearl barley, I used barley flour, and, as a lark, diastatic malt powder. These four loaves are shown in the picture. (Different slash patterns are used so I can distinguish the breads after baking.) Otherwise, I stuck pretty much to the recipe. For the record, I used Guinness as the beer.

Overall, all four breads were pleasant and enjoyable but, as before, unremarkable. The differences among the loaves were slight. The beer didn't really seem to add much to the bread. Perhaps, rather than using the watery Guinness, a stronger, more assertive beer would have been a better choice. Of the four loaves, my wife and I both preferred, surprisingly, the bread made with the diastatic malt powder. And we both ranked the sprouted barley last. It certainly wasn't worth the effort of tracking down the barley. We split on the other two loaves.

All-in-all this isn't a loaf that I'm inclined to go back to. On the other hand, I do have a lot of hulled barley, barley flour and the like.

Bagels

I love a good bagel and have been baking them for several years using recipes from Peter Reinhart. So I was very interested to see what twists Hamelman might come up with. Is there something else I could be doing to bake an even better bagel? There are several key differences in the recipes, including the use of a bagel board. It all seemed very interesting.

Using Hamelman's recipe, I've now made bagels three times. The first try, I follow the recipe very closely using King Arthur's high gluten flour. I faked the bagel boards using a fresh cedar plank I had bought for the grill along with a linen dish towel. (The approach worked well except the kitchen smelled of pencil shavings.) The bagels were very nice but a bit gnarly looking. When boiled, they were slow to float and didn't rise or round out very nicely. Flavor, however, was not a problem. They tasted great.

The first batch exhausted my supply of high gluten flour. For the second and third batches, I had to adjust. For the second batch, I created my own high gluten flour by adding vital wheat gluten to bread flour. (See my previous post, Tech. Note: High-gluten Flour & Vital Wheat Gluten, for the detail on using vital wheat gluten.) For my third batch, which I cooked at the same time as the second batch, I used straight bread flour without adding any vital wheat gluten. I wanted to see if it really made a difference. Also, after shaping, I let the later batches sit out on the counter for another 20 to 30 minutes, that is, until that passed Reinhart's bagel floating test, before I put them into the refrigerator overnight. I was hoping the bagels would be a little less gnarly. Finally, I baked these directly on a baking stone rather than bothering with the bagel board, something I found to be a real nuisance.

The picture above shows my later efforts. I didn't taste bagels made with high gluten flour side-by-side with those made with bread flour with added vital wheat gluten, but as memory serves me, I don't think there was much difference. There was, however, a striking difference between those made with just bread flour and those that had the added gluten. It is definitely worth the very minor effort need to add the vital wheat gluten. The bagel without the addition were more bread-like lacking the chewiness I've come to expect of bagels. This was not a problem with the bagels with the added vital wheat gluten. I won't be in any hurry to order more high gluten flour.

Also, waiting until the bagel passed the float test proved to be a good idea. I got fuller looking bagels that quickly floated when boiled. And as to the bagel board, once was enough. Cooking directly on a baking stone worked just fine. Overall, these were fine bagels and not that different from Reinhart's. Still, in the future, I probably go back to Reinhart's recipe, if only because it is what I'm used to.