Soft Wholemeal Loaf

I suppose you could say this loaf has been a long time in the making. Not, I hasten to add, because it takes an excessively long time to make (although this is no bad thing with bread) but because it is another step on my bread making journey.

There wasn't really very much bread on the blog prior to the autumn of 2009, and the few bread recipes I did post weren't all that great. These Spelt and Rosemary Rolls looked fine, but my memory of them is that they were rather denser than I wanted, and the crust rather chewy. I didn't make all that much bread. Around that time I think I started to make more successful bread by following Dan Lepard's recipes and reading the comments people were making on his forums. I can't say everything was always delicious or always 100% successful, but the loaves started to be good enough that I didn't really want to buy bread any more. Occasionally I ran out of mine, or spotted something in the shops I fancied, and then I bought it.

My bread making has come a long way since then and I rarely buy bread now - I am lucky enough to have time to make my own. I've picked up all sorts of tips and tricks that allow me to create the bread I want - soft, substantial, white, grainy, sourdough (well, that's very much a work in progress) I can now often (but not always) get the outcome I want. And I often know why something hasn't worked too, or can think how to tweak it. It always seems to me that it takes an age to acquire a skill, and when I look at other people's blogs with their fantastic photography and wonderful loaves I wonder why it seems to take so long for me to improve. I guess partly I'm hampered by lack of practice - I balance the bread I bake with the bread I eat and don't have hoards of people munching through my loaves to afford me more practicing space (I'm sure many of you would be grateful to have your bread last a few days without needing to rebake!).

So anyway, this loaf is a combination of many things, and it didn't turn out perfectly (it was a little soft and didn't rise up as much as I would have liked, more outwards). But when I look back on where I've come from with bread, this is a million miles from how I started.

Wholemeal, Oat and Mixed Flour Loaf

Ingredients

40g rolled oats

200g very strong white flour

150g wholegrain flours (I used about 130g wholemeal spelt, with about 10g wholemeal rye and 10g wholemeal, just because I wanted to use up odds and ends)

1 tsp salt

1 generous tsp fast action yeast

Method

- Pour 300ml boiling water over the porridge oats in a large bowl. Cover with clingfilm and leave to cool until comfortable to the touch.

- Add the flours, salt and yeast and mix to a soft dough.

- Leave for around 10 minutes and then gently and briefly knead the dough.

- You can repeat this kneading if you want, a couple more times at short intervals (10-20 minutes) but I don't think I did this time.

- Leave the dough until it has risen appreciably. Knead briefly and then form into your desired shape. I chose a baton/torpedo type shape.

- Leave to proove again until risen, but not doubled. (I think this is where I went wrong - the oven was occupied and the dough had to be left out too long. I was itching to get it into the oven, but there was a partially baked cake in there. Such is life)

- During this time, preheat the oven (if not already being occupied by a cake) to Gas 7/220C.

- Steam the oven, slash the loaf and bake at 220C for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down to 200C/Gas 6 and bake for a further 30 minutes then turn upside down and bake for 10 minutes more.

- Allow to cool completely on a wire rack before slicing and enjoying.

This is one of the softest wholemeal breads I have made. The oats aren't a noticeable flavour at all (in fact I forgot they were there until I found a little piece of oat husk in my sandwich one day!) but provide moisture to the loaf (and some added fibre). Soft and delicious yet substantial too. Great for lunchtime sandwiches.

A lot still to learn, with baker's yeast and without, but if all my bread along the way can be this tasty I am happy to plod along at my own pace.

Black Bread - Short and Tweet

This week's selection included suggestions for a number of different breads from @EvidenceMatters - you can find the Short and Tweet schedule for April here. You can find out more about the challenge and how to participate here. So this week's selection included Spelt and Ale loaf (I've just finished my spelt flour!), Walnut loaf (out for obvious reasons round this way), Soya and Linseed Loaf (I have recently baked, but not blogged about a soya containing loaf so didn't want to duplicate the bread in my freezer), Multigrain and Honey loaf and Black Bread. Both of these remaining breads included ingredients I'm really not sure that I'm keen on. I don't really do seeds very much and the Black Bread is full of slightly weird and wonderful ingredients.

Having recently aquired some caraway seeds I decided that it would be the Black Bread for me. Helpfully it didn't require the sponge stage that the multigrain and honey loaf needs. Helpful because I am not organised and have only just finished baking this loaf!

The loaf derives the intense black colour from a mixture of rye flour (although you can choose rye, spelt or wholemeal), black treacle, cocoa powder and instant coffee powder, plus there are additional flavours from the seeds - caraway, fennel and cumin are the suggestions so I decided on caraway. There is also an option on the starchy root vegetable too - carrot is suggested and is what I used, but I'm sure that parsnip, swede, turnip or even potato would work equally well. I guess that with all of these variations each loaf of black bread will be fairly unique to the baker making this particular recipe.

I halved the recipe - partly due to storage issues (again) and partly because I'm not sure that I'll like the end result! Having said that, when I halved the ingredients I was mean with the seeds, using just a scant tsp, mean with the coffee, using just over a half a tsp instant espresso powder (I really don't like coffee at all, even as a flavouring in cakes, but having successfully made Dan's Black Pepper Rye Bread that has coffee as the liquid component, I suspect that the coffee will add to the complexity of flavours rather than overwhelm the loaf), and used about 20g butter.

Cooked rye, muscovado sugar and yeast.

Leaving the yeast to sponge briefly with a portion of the rye that is cooked.

The same mixture after being left for almost an hour.

Lots of random ingredients, ready to be heated.

All in, now to mix...

Mixed up dough, rough and ready before kneading.

Just before shaping. I chose a baton shape rather than the specified round.

After prooving.

Dusted and slashed. I didn't coat mine with the specified sesame seeds, because as I mentioned above, I don't really do seeds.

Just out of the oven.

The crumb is so, so soft. I'm really pleased with the way this has turned out - I chose the right time to bake and was rewarded with oven spring and my slash opening out well, and the crumb is moist and even.

I baked for 10 minutes at Gas 7/220C, then 30 minutes at Gas 6/200C, followed by a further 10 minutes at Gas 6/200C upside down to crisp the base of the loaf.

Amazing looking bread - I haven't had any of it yet, but will update with tasting notes as soon as I can.

Edited 02/04 It's a stunning bread to eat - soft and moist but not pappy soft. The flavour is certainly unusual. The combination of rye, coffee, cocoa and treacle all sort of magically meld into one seamless complex whole - of those flavours I could probably have identified treacle as one but the others were mingled. I'm sure this is just how it is meant to be - after all, the coffee in the Black Pepper Rye bread isn't noticeable as coffee either. I'm glad about this as a non-coffee lover. The next thing I say may sound obvious to many of you, but bear with me, because I've only ever used caraway seeds once before in my life! The choice of seeds in the recipe is caraway, fennel or cumin and I chose caraway, simply because I had them available. The caraway flavour is still very prominent after baking. I thought that this may be the case, because it is a strong flavour, but wondered if it would be tempered by all of the other flavours in the loaf - not so much is the answer! This is fine and great if you love caraway, but I'm still not so sure. I guess this means I'm perching on the fence with this loaf. So it's a stunning loaf - visually, texturally and flavourwise, but use seeds that you know you like the flavour of. Next time I'll make it without seeds I think! I had mine with hard cheese, but think it would actually be much better with a cream cheese.

I'm also entering this into Alphabakes, hosted by Caroline at Caroline Makes and the host this month, Ros at The More than Occasional Baker. The Letter this month is B. So I think my Black Bread qualifies there! 

Spelt Ginger Cookies and Rye and Raisin Cookies

This weeks Short and Tweet challenge (#shortandtweet) organised by @EvidenceMatters (blog here) was either Spelt Ginger Cookies (page 245) or Rye and Raisin Cookies (page 247). Or both, if you're greedy and fancy both recipes like me!

I had seen the rye and raisin cookies before, but for some reason they hadn't really appealed to me. However, this time round the recipe looked like just the ticket. I think that the use of an egg white had put me off in the past - I'm not very good at using up the components of eggs separately - I don't go for recipes where they need to be separated (having had a few failures with cakes needing whisked egg whites in the past) and hence have no repertoire of recipes to use up excesses of either yolks or whites. Happily though (and I presume deliberately) the recipes chosen complimented each other perfectly - the spelt ginger cookies requiring the yolk! Very satisfying.

Both of these recipes came together very quickly and easily - I baked them on Sunday morning and was done well before lunch, including the need to bake trays of cookies separately - I think I had about six trays worth of cookies! The spelt ginger ones especially so as they didn't require softened butter or any creaming in the technique. I have to confess that I did actually weigh out the dough into the specified size, so I got almost exactly the number of biscuits given in the recipe. I found that they took seven minutes to bake and achieve the required slightly golden colour.

For the rye and raisin cookies I wanted smaller cookies than specified, I made some with 35g of mixture and some with 25g of mixture, spacing them fairly far apart for the first batch. I didn't have any problems with these running together. I then realised that I had forgotten the bicarbonate of soda specified in the recipe and added it to the remainder of the mixed dough. I don't know whether it was for this reason, or perhaps just that the mixed dough was waiting around for a while, but the next couple of batches seemed to spread quite a bit more - with the result that the second tray had quite a few cookies making friends with each other. I preferred them less spread out, so if this was the effect of adding the bicarb, I'd give it a miss next time - I shall have to peruse other people's blogs to find if their cookies also spread out or not! I also found that inspite of making my rye and raisin cookies smaller than the specified size, they took longer to cook. Hmm, don't know why! I baked mine for about 20 minutes - at the specified 12-15 mins they looked very soft indeed.

I was prepared not to like the rye and raisin cookies. I don't really know why. Perhaps it's the slight nubbliness of the rye flour (which didn't really come through in these cookies), or my sort-of-indifference to raisins in some situations. Dan notes that if you don't have a very sweet tooth you can reduce the sugar slightly. I reduced the quantities of both types of sugar by about 15g and thought the cookies were still lovely and sweet. Well, I was pleasantly surprised because these were delicious. The rye, raisin and chocolate blended really well flavourwise, and the texture of slightly crispy and sugary and then chewy raisin was great.

I hadn't seen the recipe for the spelt ginger cookies before (I don't think it's a recipe from Dan's Guardian column) but a little googling will find it without too much trouble. I have to say that of the two recipes, this is the one that really, really appealed to me. And I wasn't let down. I love ginger flavoured cakes and biscuits and these were really good. I had a couple almost straight out of the oven and they were utterly delicious - slightly crispy edges and a great chewy centre, gently spiced with ginger and lovely little nubbles of stem ginger to add a bit of bite. My only regret was that after only a couple of days they had softened significantly and were just chewy without the delicious contrast of crispness round the edge that I had so enjoyed the first day. I wonder if they could be re-crisped in the oven? It seems a shame because the recipe makes quite a large batch and it would be nice to keep them for a week or so. Aside from this they were superb.

The use of wholemeal flour (rye or spelt) in these biscuits doesn't make them health food by any stretch of the imagination, but the knowledge that you are taking on a little more fibre than might be expected from a sweet treat does no harm, and without being told that these recipes were made with wholemeal flour you certainly wouldn't have guessed. I fear that I am beginning to sound like a scratched record, but both of these recipes were excellent and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them (oh, and recommend buying the book too!).

Thanks to EvidenceMatters for excellent choices for this week, which again, I probably wouldn't have made on my own.

Extra thin rye crispbreads - short and tweet

A rather puritan start to 2012 you may think. This week I have chosen to make Dan Lepard's extra-thin rye crispbreads from Short and Sweet for the Short and Tweet challenge hosted by Evidence Matters (@EvidenceMatters). I made them as a pre dinner nibble for New Year's Eve and when I mentioned to my dining companion, J, that I had made rye crispbreads she seemed rather underwhelmed. "What, like Ryvita?" Well, no, not really like ryvita at all as it happens!

They are made from wholemeal rye flour but with a dab of butter, a little salt and sugar and rolled paper thin with the aid of plenty more flour (I used normal plain white flour to roll with) but they bear no resemblance either in taste or texture to the cardboard known as Ryvita.

I didn't find the dough difficult to work with at all, and made them whilst making the rest of our NYE dinner, not too much brainpower or effort required for a very tasty result. I would recommend being pretty generous with the flour for rolling out though, as otherwise the dough tended to stick. One of my favourite parts of this recipe was the instruction to leave the edges ragged - I'm rubbish at rolling out proper shapes and so this made it so much easier!

All was well though, since after tasting, J described her thoughts on them thusly.... "Well, if Ryvita is like eating cardboard, these are like a very fine writing paper..... though obviously I wouldn't eat writing paper either..." Funny thing is though, I know what she meant. And if you make these I think you'll know too. Irresistably moreish, we had them before dinner with a little unsalted butter (how pretentious does that sound?!) but then for breakfast the next day they were enjoyed smeared with homemade lemon curd. A great start to the new year! Thanks to Evidence Matters for picking these, I would never have tried them otherwise!

Sourdough success - barley and rye bread

Woo-hoo! Sourdough success! Thanks are again due to the amazing Mr Lepard (plus my sourdough starter, more on that later) and his book The Handmade Loaf. Every time I look at this book I find breads that I really, really want to make. There are some breads requiring only commercial yeast (fresh/dried), some requiring only sourdough and a few hybrids too. There are even some that don't need yeast at all, but they ones that always seem to catch my eye are the sourdough breads.

I have to admit that this is only based on Dan's recipe. I don't currently have a rye sourdough on the go and didn't want to convert my white sourdough so I just made a straight substitution of white sourdough for the rye specified in the recipe. I kept everything else the same though and halved the recipe.

My sourdough had spent a while sleeping in the fridge and when I came to wake it up again it seemed rather sluggish. After a couple of refreshes it wasn't quite smelling how I expected and I wondered how I could boost it. A couple of tsp of natural yogurt came to mind - the acidity and the bacteria help balance the culture. I didn't have any yogurt. Well, only rhubarb flavour, I didn't think my yeast would appreciate that. So I had a think about what else was acidic and hit on the idea of adding a little vinegar. No bacteria to help out, but acidity in abundance. I probably only added 1/2tsp or a tiny bit more, but the next day my starter was frothing away, more active than it's ever been! Has anyone else out there ever fed their starter a little vinegar to help the acidity? All knowledge gratefully accepted!

The second prooving step did take quite a long time to get to the puffed up stage you see in the prooving basket below, but I was occupied with other tasks so the wait didn't seem onerous. There was a moment of tension as I upended the banneton and hoped that the loaf wouldn't stick.... some of it was reluctant to leave it's wicker home, but going gently with it and a little coaxing released the loaf intact. I think perhaps I over-proofed it slightly as there wasn't very much oven spring, a little, but not much. The slashes have opened out but the loaf is a slightly slumped shape. I'm not complaining though because the crumb is excellent.

I think next time I'll have the oven as hot as possible to get the oven spring I'm looking for, but then turn it down straightaway, to prevent the loaf becoming overbrowned. This is just the right side of burnt, but only just!

I'm really pleased with the crumb texture - it was even throughout the loaf rather than some of my past efforts that have been full of massive holes in some places yet quite dense in others. This is definitely the best yet but I'm not complacent - this is just the beginning of the sourdough adventure.