First Rye Levain & More

Since my last post I've been too busy making bread, boiling sap, working, and playing with the kids to actually write about making bread. I've made two successful attempts with my new Rye Levain. The first is the seedy baguette from "Local Breads". Can anyone tell that I just got that book and am working my way through it? It's only my third bread book and I'm very impressed with the attention to detail and testing that must have been done to get the formulas down for home-scale production. I forgot to take any before shots each of the three times I've made this one in the last ten days, but I do have some nice after photos.



Seeing that I've made three batches in ten days, I guess they were pretty popular around the house and at work. It's pretty easy to make if you're not afraid of slack dough. Although, you do need to have a German Rye Levain handy.




Ingredients
German Rye Levain 100g
Rolled Oats 28g
Sunflower Seeds 28g
Pumpkin Seeds 28g
Sesame Seeds 28g
Water (room temp.) 525g
Instant Yeast 5g
High Gluten Flour 500g
Sea Salt 10g

1. Combine Oats and Seeds in a bowl and mix with 175g Water. Allow to sit overnight.
2. The following day, combine soaker with the remaining ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix with dough hook on medium-low (KitchenAid 3) for 8 minutes.
3. Scrape bowl and dough hook down and allow to rest (autolyse) for 10 minutes.
4. Mix again on med.-low for 6 minutes.
5. In an oiled bowl, ferment for 2 to 2.5 hours at room temperature, until dough has doubled. Halfway through this time, pre-heat your oven to 450F and get a steam pan ready.
6. Turn dough gently onto a well-floured surface and form into a rough rectangle. This would be a good time to measure out water or ice for your steam pan. I find that 3/4 cup cold water works fine for me to create a steamy oven for about the first 12-15 minutes of the baking time, which is about all you want.
7. Cut into 3 equal pieces and gently form each into baguettes.
8. Transfer them gently onto a parchment paper covered peel or the back of a baking sheet. I use a baking sheet because they seem to fit better than on my peel. I can do 2 on one sheet and then do the last loaf solo. If you have a bigger peel/baking sheet/baking stone go ahead and do all three at once.
9. Slide them onto them baking stone in your oven, fill the steam pan with your cold water/ice and set a timer for 15 minutes.
10. Rotate 180 degrees at the 15 minute mark and re-set for 15 more minutes.
11. They should be nice and dark golden brown. Leader calls for reddish brown, but what you're looking for is a really deep, dark golden brown verging on "did I wait too long" here and there.
12. Cool for at least an hour if you can withstand the intoxicating nutty aroma that long. After that, go out and buy Leader's "Local Breads" if you don't own it already. You won't regret it.

I also made a 70% Rye German Farmhouse bread using my rye levain, but forgot to take pictures;
...and one of my weekly breads, Norwich Sourdough














Aside from making bread and working, we also tapped two of our five sugar maples ten days ago, and boiled our first 6 gallons of precious sap down to 2.5 pints of pretty nice looking, and tasting, syrup. I plan to figure out a bread to sneak some into and post about that some time soon. Amy has said she plans on blogging about this on her blog, so I'll let her show off the pictures of the professional sugar-shack we visited, our thoroughly unprofessional sugaring operation, and the liquid gold itself. Unfortunately, she's off to Maryland for the funeral of one of her cousins who died completely unexpectedly last week. So you'll just have to wait until Amy is back and in a blogging mood to hear more about it and see the pictures.

Experiments in Rye

It's not enough that I cultivated one wild yeast starter. After reading Daniel Leader's "Local Breads" I decided I'd better cultivate a separate Rye levain too. My first starter, a white wheat levain, was started with a high percentage of Rye since it has a higher ash content(good minerals & other yeast food)and possibly more wild yeast. After getting it started, though, I have fed it with High Gluten organic White Flour. So far, all the breads I have made have been predominantly made from White Flour, either AP or High Gluten. Now I want to try some high percentage Rye breads which seem to need to be leavened by the higher acid Rye levain that I'm building now. I'm on Day 3 of building and so far so good. OK, so I may have cheated and not followed Leader's exact process since I started with a piece of my white starter instead of capturing new yeast only with Rye Flour. But, I figure that pretty soon with the amount of Rye I'm using each day, it will be all Rye. I think by tomorrow it will be built to the point that I can start refreshing it on a daily or weekly basis depending on my baking schedule.

Since I like to be organized and track my progress, I'm keeping an Excel spreadsheet charting the daily progress of my starters. Some day, maybe even later today if I can figure out how to do it, I will put a link to the spreadsheet in here somewhere for anyone interested enough to check it out. For now, though, here's the idea in brief. I am keeping track of such things as the amount of starter:water:flour that I use in each daily refreshing of the starter. By the way, for those who don't know, refreshing is done to feed the yeast and allow it to keep propagating so I'll always have a starter to use when I want to bake bread. I also track the time of day, temperature at feeding time, 12/24 hour volume increase, flavor and aroma at 12 and 24 hours, and make notes about the bread that I bake each time I use the starter. With my wheat based starter I shoot for a 1:3:3 ratio and 100% hydration (equal weights in grams of water and flour). The Rye starter will be stiffer, about 80% hydration. Sorry, this is probably pretty dry reading for anyone who isn't obsessed with bread, but I'm doing this as much to explain it to myself so I can understand it better, as much as for anyone else's benefit. I promise there will be pictures and recipes coming soon, once I dig out the camera and have time to bake again. I guess I'd better get moving if I want to take part in the Bread Baking Day challenge for this month and do a festive bread of some kind.

Oh yeah, one more thing...reading about bread in the several books and blogs that I use, there is only a loose kind of consistency in the use of the words starter, levain, leaven, sourdough etc. I'll try to stick to using either levain or starter, and what I'm talking about is the wild yeast cultures that I've captured, cultivated and now maintain by feeding regularly and then use to raise or leaven my breads instead of commercial yeast. I don't have any problem with using commercial yeast, it's just a cool and fun and addicting little home science experiment to do it with something I've cultivated myself. Thanks to Susan at wildyeastblog for exhorting us to weigh our ingredients instead of measuring by volume! My bread baking efforts have improved radically since I took that advice.

Slack doughs, like Focaccia

Joy made a comment on my last post about having made Focaccia that was too dense & without any nice air bubbles. So here's what I know about actually making Focaccia and how to get it airy & light. Focaccia, and Ciabatta are made from dough that had a lot more water than typical loaf breads. They're about half a step beyond batter and very loose to work with so you have to get used to a different kneading technique for developing gluten...the stretchy stuff that holds the air released by yeast fermentation and water evaporation. The more water you put into a dough, the more potential for a nice airy interior with the big bubbles like you normally find in Focaccia, Ciabatta and other slack doughs. I was thinking about trying to talk about baker's percentages and hydration, but that's pretty boring and I'd end up confusing myself for sure and probably everyone else too. If you're interested in trying this, read all the directions before proceeding. My cooks have royally screwed up recipes by not reading all the way through.

My Focaccia recipe starts with a Poolish. Poolish is a pre-ferment that adds a little tanginess like a sourdough starter, but doesn't take weeks to make like sourdough starter. You can do all this recipe in one day, including the Poolish. Although if you think ahead and let your Poolish do its thing overnight and bake the next day you'll notice a stronger flavor and a better rise.

Poolish

.25 teaspoon instant yeast
2.5 Cups Bread Flour
1.5 Cups Water

1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix until all the flour is incorporated. It should look like really thick pancake batter. Cover and ignore for at least 4 hours until it looks bubbly and foamy. If you thought ahead and are going to bake then next day, put it in the refrigerator. By the way, this is called "retarding" the dough because it almost puts the yeast back to sleep. Just give it an hour at room temp. before proceeding with the recipe so it can wake up again.

Focaccia

1 Recipe Poolish
2.66 Cups Bread Flour
2 teaspoons Salt
1.5 teaspoons Instant Yeast
6 Tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil
.75 Cup Water
.5 Cup Herb oil --Sorry I forgot to tell you to make this earlier. Just take an assortment of your pantry herbs (thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, dehydrated onion, pepper, chile flakes, whatever you like) and warm them up in the oil until it smells nice.

1. Stir together the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. A kitchen-aid makes this a lot easier, but you can do it by hand in a bowl with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon.
2. Add the dry ingredients and mix until everything is combined. If you're using a mixer, put it on medium speed for 7 minutes. If you're doing it by hand, stir it vigorously, reversing direction periodically, for 5 minutes until its smooth and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. I usually end up adding more flour up to about and extra half cup to get the dough to the pulling away from the sides of the bowl stage. It will still stick to the bottom. You will think that its too loose and you'll never be able to work with it. Remember, the higher the percentage of water, the better hole structure you'll get in the finished product.
3. Sprinkle enough flour on your counter to make about an 8 inch square. Scrape the dough out onto this floured area and dust the top, and your hands, with more flour. Let it rest for 5 minutes.
4. Gently pick up each end of the dough and stretch it until its length is doubled and fold it back on itself "letter style" (according to Peter Reinhart, bread god). Spray it with spray oil, dust it and cover it with plastic wrap for 30 minutes. Repeat this stretch and fold technique 3 times, each time resting the dough for 30 minutes.
5. After the third stretch & fold, allow the dough to ferment for 1 hour. By this time, you should see it swelling and some bubbles forming in the dough.
6. Take a 12x17inch baking pan, preferably non-stick and drizzle herb oil all over it liberally.
7. Carefully lift the dough onto the pan and using your fingers to dimple the dough, spread it out gently until it mostly fills the pan. If you want to top it with something that is likely to burn like nuts or peppers or sundried tomatoes this is the time to put those kinds of things on and dimple them into the dough a little. Cover loosely with wrap and let it ferment in the pan for about 2 hours or until it fills the pan. You should definitely see nice big bubbles by now.
8. Heat the oven to 500. Less fragile stuff like some meats, moist cheeses etc can go on now. Drizzle liberally with more herb oil.
9. Put it in the oven and reduce the temp to 450. Bake for 10 minutes. If you want to put on hard cheeses or similar, now is the time. Bake for 5 minutes more. Take a look. It will probably need another few minutes, but don't let it go beyond golden brown to burnt.
10. Take it out & transfer it immediately to a wire rack to cool for at least 20 minutes before eating it. It's still cooking during this time.

This seemed like a lot of directions, but I actually simplified it in comparison to Reinharts recipe. It's a lot easier than it looks if you get everything you need together before you start. It's worked for me every time. You can actually use this recipe for Ciabatta, but that takes a little more effort in forming the final dough and you need a baking stone. If you like making bread, Peter Reinharts books are the best I've found and he's thoroughly researched bread of all kinds. The only problem with his books is that his bake times are off and I think he probably based everything on convection oven times...a luxury I don't have.

Making Focaccia with Claire

Today I made Focaccia with Claire and Nathan. Focaccia is nice because it can all be done in one day without having to ferment dough overnight. They both helped me while I was scaling out and mixing the dough. Didn't get any pictures from that part of the process; floury hands & camera are not such a good combo. While Nathan and Amy went to a movie, Claire held down the fort and supervised while I formed and panned up the dough for baking. I have pictures of Claire in her supervisory/entertainer capacity, the raw dimpled and dressed dough right before it went into the oven, and the finished focaccia. I put Pine Nuts, homemade (in someone else's home) Peperoni, and Mozzarella on it and it came out pretty well. Lots of big bubbles that Amy likes.

And then we ate it. Cooking with the kids is interesting. Nathan likes to help measure, crack eggs, mix and taste. Claire likes to play with the ingredients and spread them around the house. Nathan insisted on tasting the dough straight out of the mixer even though I told him it wouldn't taste as good as the brownie batter and cookie dough that he's used to. I asked him how it was and he said "delicious" so I offered him the bowl to clean out but he wasn't very enthusiastic and lost interest a lot sooner than usual with the brownie batter. We had fun anyway and everybody seemed to like the end product.