Roasted Garlic Levain: Mellow Bakers (January)

I finally got around to making the Roasted Garlic Levain from Hamelman's book Bread, this week.  The recipe, which is on page 183 of the book, was on the January list of Mellow Bakers breads to make.  I'd gotten a bit distracted and was having so much fun making cookies from KAF's website and spice bars from The Modern Baker, that time got away from me, and I forgot to get back to bread making.  I was planning some baked mostaccioli for dinner on Wednesday, and I thought this would be the perfect meal to serve the Roasted Garlic Levain with.

First off, I prepared my stiff levain the night before baking, by combining bread flour, water, and ~ 2T of stiff sourdough culture.  My sourdough culture was at 100% hydration, which I thought was correct for a stiff culture, but last night as I was flipping thru the back of Hamelman's book, I discovered that a stiff levain is 60% hydration.  Oops, I guess 100 % was close enough, though.  I will file that in my memory banks for next time.  Stiff = ~60% hydration.

I let my stiff levain build ripen on the counter for 12 hours, while roasting my garlic cloves near the end of that time.  I wanted by garlic cloves to cool off a bit, before mixing up the final dough.   I peeled off the top layer of papery skin from my 4 extra large cloves, cut off the woody end of each clove, drizzled them with olive oil, then baked in my 325° oven for ~ 20 minutes.  I poked them with a knife and it went right into them, so bingo, they were done!

Here are my culture and garlic all ready to get thrown into the final dough.  I mashed up the garlic really good with a fork before adding it in,

Since everone else had shaped their dough as rolls or loaves so far, I decided I'd shape mine as fougasse, since JH said this bread makes excellent fougasse.  Besides, when I asked hubby whether I should shape it as a boule or as fougasse, as he was heading out the door for work, he confidently responded 'fougasse', so fougasse it became.

I always like trying something different, so when I saw shaping directions for a leaf-shaped fougasse in Baking With Julia, I decided to give that a try.  The Leaf-Shaped Fougasse shaping directions are on page 146 of Baking With Julia, and a picture of it is shown on the inside front cover.  It's a little hard to see in the picture of my finished fougasse, but what was new to me in the shaping of this fougasse were the 3 slanted cuts on either side (edge) of the teardrop shape.  I made these with a razor blade, and only cutting into the dough about half the length of the blade.  

I baked my fougasse for 20 minutes at 450°  At first I thought it was too done when I took it out at 20 minutes, and was kicking myself for not checking on it earlier, but when eating it, it tasted just right to us.

This recipe made quite a large fougasse, which just barely fit onto my stone.  

Oh, we were in heaven as we tore into our chunks of sourdough garlic fougasse.  It tasted kind of like pizza dough and the garlic flavor is subtle in this bread, but you can definitely tell it is there!  I had also sprinkled Italian Seasoning into my dough when I was mixing it up to give it even more flavor.  Also, before I slid the fougasse into the oven, and onto the stone, I brushed the dough w/ EVOO and sprinkled on a bit of kosher salt.

We both love the chewy interior and slightly crunchy exterior of fougasse, so I'm sure this garlic bread will be on the menu again in our house.  This one's a keeper!

Sourdough Seed Bread: Mellow Bakers (December)

As the Mellow Bakers group winds down with its final few breads left in Jeffrey Hamelman's book Bread, I'm trying to sneak in a couple on my 'must make soon' list.  The Sourdough Seed Bread was one that the group did back in December, but that's when we were moving, so I wasn't able to get it done then.

Hubby and I love seeds in our bread, so this one was right up our alley.  I have not made nearly enough sourdough  breads yet, so this one was destined to be made.  The bread calls for a liquid levain build (which is just some bread flour, water, and 2 Tbsp of mature sourdough culture) and a soaker.  Both of these were put together the night before and left to rest on the counter.  The soaker was made up of 1.1 oz (31g) of flaxseeds and ~ 3 oz of water.  I read a comment posted on The Fresh Loaf yesterday that said if you google it,  you will find that soaking flaxseeds in water makes the seeds more readily digestible and I guess helps release some of the good stuff in the flax for our bodies to use.  I had previously thought our bodies only received the benefits of flax in baked goods if it was ground first.  I learned something new!

The final dough for this bread includes two other seeds, sunflower and sesame, both of which are lightly toasted first .  Here are my seeds ready to go, the flax seeds having gotten kind of gooey after sitting in the water overnight.

 The liquid levain, which I mixed up the night before, was to sit at room temp. for 12 to 16 hours.  I mixed up my final dough after 13 hours.  My levain smelled pretty tangy, tasted good and it had lots of little bubbles on the surface so I figured it was ready to go.  I tried to get a good picture of the gluten that had developed in my liquid levain,

but my picture was not nearly as good as the one Joanna took of her levain for this post (second picture from the top).  Her levain was a stiff one, but I think it's a pretty cool shot of the gluten that can develop in a sourdough levain build overnight.

The recipe for this bread was really quite simple.  The final dough only involved combining 12oz (348g) bread flour, a bit of whole rye flour, the two bowls of toasted seeds, water, salt, the soaker, and all but 2Tbsp (returned to the fridge) of the liquid levain build.

The bread, since its a sourdough, and didn't include any commercial yeast in the dough, involved ~ 4 1/2 hours of fermentation time.  I could have retarded the loaf in the fridge overnight, but I hate doing that, because it takes up so much room in my already too crowded fridge.  The first stage of fermentation took 2 1/2 hours and involved folding the dough once.  After this, into the pan it went, since I wanted a sandwich loaf.

The above photo is just before the loaf went into the oven.  For the final 2 hours of fermentation I kept the loaf pan in the oven w/ the light on.  It was quite happy in there I think.  I baked the loaf @ 360° for ~ 36 minutes taking it out when the temperature reached ~197°.

The loaf was beautiful, at least from this side:)  The other side burst open a bit.  Note to self is already in the book  This loaf needs scored.  Even if its baked in a loaf pan, I believe it needs scored since the loaf will split, burst open, if you don't.  When the crust starts to form and when the pressure builds inside the baking loaf, it will seek to release this pressure by opening at the weakest point in the loaf.  I should've gone w/ my gut feeling that told me before I slid this into the oven, that it needed scored!

Over at The Fresh Loaf site, the consensus was that this was not a good sandwich bread, which dampened my spirits a bit as my 'intended for sandwiches' loaf baked away in the kitchen.  Hubby and I think, though,  that this will make wonderful sandwich bread.  He took his usual turkey/cheese sandwich to work for lunch today, so when he gets home we'll see how he liked it.  For myself, my lunch sandwich is usually peanut butter and jelly, but today I just warmed a slice and slathered on the fresh ground peanut butter.  Yum!!!

Whole-Wheat Multigrain (Mellow Bakers: March)

Determined to strengthen and give Lucky (my sourdough culture) more practice, I wanted to try one more of the mellow bakers March breads before March ended.  The very next recipe in Hamelman's Bread, on page 169, is the recipe for Whole-Wheat Multigrain.  One of my husband's favorite breads is Peter Reinhart's, Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire from Bread Baker's Apprentice, so this Hamelman recipe looked promising.

I cut the recipe in half this time and the night before the bake, I prepared my liquid levain build with 1 1/2 Tbsp of culture, 1.9 oz of bread flour and 2.4 oz of water.  At the same time I also made the soaker.  Hamleman doesn't tell exactly what grains to use, but gives the weight as 2.9 oz or 82 g for half the recipe.  I chose to use 20 g of cracked wheat, 42 g of rolled oats, and 20 g of coarse cornmeal (Bob's Red Mill Corn Grits).  I like to use the coarse cornmeal in breads because of the teeny golden nuggets deposited throughout the crumb, and the subtle sweetness it lends to the bread.  Since I used the cracked wheat (a harder grain), I used boiling water to cover the grains as opposed to room temp water.

After ~ 14 1/2 hours my liquid levain appeared to be ready.  Definitely showed more signs of activity than the levain from last week.  These looked like the tiny soap bubbles, described by Hamelman, that should cover most of the surface:

and my soaker was ready to go

I added all of the ingredients to my mixing bowl, remembering to put 1 1/2 Tbps of the levain back into my original sourdough culture, and mixed on first speed for 3 minutes.  I added at least several more tablespoons of water to the dough as it seemed dry and the dough kept soaking it up.  I finally stopped though, and called it good.  I mixed the dough on second speed maybe 4 minutes.  I had to keep stopping the mixer to push the dough down off the hook, so it's kind of hard to keep track of the actual mixing time when doing that. 

As usual my sous chef, Tucker, was plopped on the rug right behind me in case he was needed for tasting or to catch some stray bit of ingredient that happened to fall his way.

I put my dough into a lightly greased bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and off to the store I went in search of a sharp tomato knife or a straight razor blade.  I was back in an hour to fold the dough.  I figured since the house was cool (outside temps back into the mid 40's) another hour of fermentation would be beneficial.

I shaped the dough into a batard, thinking I might use this bread for sandwiches and here it is ready to go into the oven:













Once again, I wasn't happy with how the scoring went.  I imagine this is an area that baker's struggle with all the time, trying to get this right.  I was only able to find an inexpensive tomato knife at the store, and as I didn't think it was very sharp, its going to be returned.  I wish I could find just a plain old-fashioned straight razor blade, but henceforth my search hasn't turned one up.

I had no gaping holes open up from the bottom of the loaf and my interior crumb structure didn't look too bad this time.  There's an occasional "bite" from a bit of cracked wheat in the bread, you can see golden cornmeal flecks in the slices and it tastes smooth and tangy.

Overall I was very pleased with my second attempt at sourdough bread.  Hopefully warmer weather will be back soon and April will bring lots more bread!!!

Thank you for visiting my blog this time 'round and stop by Mellow Bakers to see what others have made!

Whole-Wheat Levain (Mellow Bakers: March)

Monday was a beautiful spring day here, a perfect day for baking bread.  It was in the mid-70's, the birds were chirping and all kinds of blooms were bursting forth.  I gathered a couple pictures:

The Whole-Wheat Levain that was on the schedule for mellow bakers for March looked to be a very simple bread.  No cheese, no raisins, no nuts, nothing.  This looked like a good bread though, to try out lucky with.  The recipe for whole-wheat levain, found on page 168 of Hamelman's Bread, was for 2 large loaves, and I only wanted to make one, so I cut the recipe in half.

To start this bread, I weighed out 1 oz of lucky on Sunday evening, and mixed him with 2.4 oz of water, and 2.4 oz of whole-wheat flour.  This is called the levain build and is the process of building the culture necessary for the production of this particular bread.  Jeffrey said to start this process 12-14 hours before mixing the final dough, but also that ripeness is indicated by a mildly acidic aroma and a subtle sweetness, as well as by numerous small bubbles, kinda like soap bubbles, that partially cover the surface.  My levain culture did not smell nearly as acidic/sweet as during the day Sunday after I gave lucky a Sunday AM feeding.  Also, there weren't very many small bubbles on the surface of my levain after 14 hours, so I waited another hour and just decided to go ahead.  I was worried it would be bad to wait past a certain point.

I put 4.8 oz of liquid levain build (2 T went back into my original sourdough seed culture) + 5.6 oz of whole-wheat flour, 8 oz of bread flour, ~ 8 oz of water, and 1 1/2 tsp of salt into the bowl of my stand mixer.  I mixed on first speed ~ 3 minutes and then on second speed for ~ 3 to 3 1/2 minutes.  This dough seemed very heavy to me and didn't seem to have much extensibility (not sure if that's the right word).  I tranferred the dough to a bowl, covered, and let it ferment for 2 1/2 hours, folding twice, at 50-minute intervals.  I decided to shape mine into a boule, and then I let it ferment for another 2 1/2 hours at 76 degrees. 

After baking for 36 minutes at ~ 450 here's my boule:

I used what I'm calling a "sand-dollar" scoring pattern for this boule.  I was reading some articles regarding scoring and how it affects the baking of the loaf, at The Fresh Loaf, when I saw an example of this scoring pattern.  It immediately reminded me of sand dollars and so I went and grabbed one of my sand dollars off of my dresser and sure enough it was the same pattern.  When I was a teenager I used to love to dive down to the sandy bottom of the ocean along the Florida coast and search in the sand for these critters.  They are tricky to catch.

One problem I had with my boule was that it was not level/flat at all on the bottom because the bottom kind of split open :(  Has anyone else had this happen or anyone know what caused this?  Was it something I did wrong?

My husband is the slicer of bread in our house, because being an engineer and all, he's very precise and articulate and cuts very even slices:

I was disappointed at how the interior of the loaf looked, but at least my first sourdough loaf didn't burn and it tasted pretty good (although it did come very close to sliding off the back of my stone when I slid the parchment and boule into the oven). 

My husband said he could taste the tanginess from the sourdough element, but I'm not sure I could, but then my taste buds weren't working perfectly due to my cold. 

I think this first test of lucky wasn't too bad and I'm looking forward to learning more about sourdough and hopefully my culture will develop a more distinct taste and get a little more active as the weather warms up.

Thank you for visiting my blog this time around for mellow bakers!

Introducing -- Lucky

I know that no one else is as excited about this as I am, but I decided to post this anyway.  It is day 4 in the life of my new seed culture, from which I'm going to begin my sourdough starter.  I was thrilled when I went to retrieve Lucky this morning and this is what he looked like at 9am:

So if you've been hesitant to try this process, you needn't be.  I'm still quite inexperienced at this bread baking thing and I was able to do this in the middle of March.  I thought that I would have difficulties, being that it's still rather chilly outside and in.  I'm following the guidelines in Peter Reinhart's "Whole Grain Breads" book in case anyone is interested.  Also, you can go to the Yumarama bread blog  for a very interesting step by step, sourdough starter comparison intro.

Stay tuned for more sourdough adventure.

Thank you for visiting my blog!!