- Happiness is a well risen loaf of bread!
This was meant to be a catch up post from the August breads for Mellow Bakers but is in fact a bread that’s not on the list. Whoops!
Somewhere I have got a little muddled up so I made this bread which is not the straight five grain bread (one of August’s breads) but the five grain bread with paté fermentée on page 129 of Bread – A Bakers Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. Does it matter? All I know is that this was a drop dead gorgeous loaf which made me happy and stayed fresh and moist for three days, we have half of one left and I will definitely make this one again. It’s a keeper. It reminds me of the light rye with its light crumb and full flavoured crust, just enough seedy interest and with the extra boost to the flavour from the old dough. Wonderful stuff!
The grains are exactly as written in the recipe, a mixture of golden linseed, chopped rye, oats, sunflower seeds and wheatflour – a cold soaker, nothing complicated; all mixed into the yeasted dough and then finally the paté fermentée, which is just a fancy way of saying some old dough. At this point I confess freely that I deviated from the recipe and excavated a solo ball of Abby’s pizza dough out of the freezer, defrosted it over night and used that. Old dough is old dough and I figured the hydration would be ok, the pizza dough is about 70% (factor in evaporation, time in freezer – I’m kidding, right?) and the formula calls for a paté fermentée of 65% hydration.
- Hopefully they’ll both fit on here…
It made an easy to handle dough that shaped into neat tight boules which I popped into two bannetons. All was going well, in fact better than well, the oven was on, the peel was dusted, I had found my lame, tipped them out onto the peel, admired the fact that they didn’t collapse, always a good sign, calmly slashed them…
- Slashing with a nice red knife
… I turned to the oven and it was only on 170 ºC. What !!!!! It had been turned on, and the oven’s default temperature is 170ºC and I HAD FORGOTTEN to turn it up. So, in not so quiet desperation, I flipped it up to 250 ºC, cuddled the dough a little, whispered sadly and helplessly ‘Be patient, just wait, just hang on in there, please stay calm, please !!!’
I got a little water and painted it into the slashes to distract them while they waited, and the boules were very good and just sat there and didn’t move for ten minutes while the oven guiltily heated up and then in they went.
I got my reward then, I just sat there in front of the glass door and watched them spring and sighed with happiness. Once they were done I took them outside to meet the pears which we were hastily taking off the tree in anticipation of stormy weather. It’s all go here!
- Bread and Pears
What? You want a crumb shot too? OK.
- Make this bread – it’s delicious!
Zeb Bakes 
These loaves look beautiful, I especially love that they turned out so well despite having to wait for the oven. I do stuff like this all the time. btw am slightly impressed that I’ve managed to post a comment, thanks for your help :)
Fantastic loaf , looks absolutely scrummy. Will try the recipe when I purchase the book.
Love the color on your breads! Very nice.
Nice looking crumb Joanna. I’d like a slice of that one right now. Tell me, how much old dough did you use? Do you notice much of a difference in the taste when you make it. I make a yeasted olive oil bread that has 100gms of ferment- I’m not really sure I can taste much difference. I like to think I can…
I was off the idea of getting proper bannetones, but seeing yours…they look good! Then I could pretend I was a real baker.
Hi Pie! Thanks for popping over here, glad I could help a bit. I’ll be back to read some more on your blog soon :)
‘Morning Fran, it’s well worth trying, I’m having a go at all-levain version this morning…
@ Drfugawe, thanks so much for the compliment, I need to mix the dough better as the crumb colour is a bit uneven I think. Mixing is not my strong point.
Hiay Brydie, Yes, I do find that using old dough makes a difference to the flavour, it’s richer and more savoury. I used about 250 grams of pizza dough and the final dough weighed just over a kilo, which includes 30 per cent soaked seeds and oats. There is a beautiful levain version of this on Bread Cetera here http://www.breadcetera.com/?p=198 which might suit you? I’m making this from the book this morning, minus the yeast…
Thanks for that link, thats a lovely blog. I think the time has come for me to branch out to different levain styles…now thats a bit exciting :-)
Aaah, yes, I can just imagine your angst at finding the oven too cool, because I’ve done exactly the same thing so many times. Or opened it up and found it full of trays. But what well behaved doughs, to stand there patiently and not sink petulantly while waiting for their turn. And is there anything quite like the moment when you sit beside the hot oven and watch the dough spring? :)
I love your baby round bannetons – how cute are they! One of these days I must get some, but for now, I’ll just be content with the cheap little plastic baskets that I can buy locally (Brydie – at Rewards Distributions in Camperdown!).
Hi Celia, that pair are officially 1/2 pound bannetons, sourced from Bakery Bits, but I put 500 grams in of tightly shaped dough and they worked out ok as you can see :) Zen and the Art of Bread Shaping would say whatever works is fine!
I think your bread looks really good, I am hoping to be able to make such good bread in the future! I do make sourdough but I am still at the ‘learning’ stage, I am never convinced it will turn out successfully. I need much more practice. How do you find your peel I see in the pictures? I am tempted to order one as I see it is now on Bakerybits website.
Hello there Jeannette Mara! Thank you for your kind words. The superpeel is pretty good, the one in the picture is a lighter weight version of the original one which I find a bit easier as I have weak wrists and it gets quite heavy – well any peel does – if it is loaded with dough. It’s great for pizza, dust the peel with semolina and the dough slides on and off without sticking at all :) Fortunately the learning stage with sourdough is pretty quick, and the bread gets better as you make more, like most things. Have you visited all the great sourdough forums like the Fresh Loaf and Dan Lepard? Or maybe join the Mellow Bakers forum, that’s a really lovely group of people and new people join in all the time – lots of advice and good fun :)
What a brilliant idea to use the old pizza dough, Joanna!! I love the cute little loaves ~ seeing this post actually inspired me to make two mini loaves with the sourdough rye with walnuts for Mellow Bakers! =)
Your loaves look gorgeous! I really want to get some bannetons. One of these days… I’ve definitely set my oven wrong before; good recovery. =)
Abby – your dough makes perfect old dough as well as great pizza :) It’s funny that picture makes the loaves look like they were really tiny, but they are 500 gram loaves, a pretty regular size in the UK. I usually make either this size or about 800 grams. I am finding it easier to shape small loaves at the moment and they suit our two person household better. I’ve just sliced the levain version, which has a more open but less bouncy crumb than the yeasted one. Interesting to see the differences between the two…
Di – Thank you ! you should put bannetons on your Christmas list :)
Those loaves and pears looked very happy together, but think they might have been missing a round of cheese.
You’re right! The cheese was indoors – a nice piece of Gorwyd Caerphilly from Trethowan’s cheese shop in St Nicholas’ market :)
This picture is from the Trethowans Dairy Shop site, I hope they don’t mind, it’s just one of my favourite cheeses ever, only I never thought to take a picture of it and I wanted to show you…
Beautiful! The loaves are enough to take my breath away- and the crumb shot has me longing for a good slice of bread.
I agree with everyone else- your bannetons make the bread look so professional!
Thank you, you say such nice things! I’ve been using bannetons for a while, ever since the penny dropped about how bakers got those concentric circles on their bread!
I like them because you can drag them round the house looking for the right spot to prove them in, but it’s easy enough to make one out of a bowl if it’s the right sort of shape, lined with a rye flour rubbed linen cloth, or a plastic roll basket, anything really. I like the cane and linen ones because they are traditional and I think they allow the dough to breathe while it proves, but that might be just my imagination…
Hi,
i had to comment cos you’re funny. Glad to see i’m not the only one who whispers to my bread – well, there’s cursing too sometimes!
And that’s a lovely lovely nature morte there with the pears and buns and the greenery at the back. Somehow i imagine the bread (yes, being even more kooky now) to be happy and grinning there in the cool air.
i’m at mellowbakers too (rookiebaker) but havent been baking much of late. You are such a good baker!
Hello rookiebaker! Really pleased you dropped by :) I drag lots of the bread outside to photograph, usually balanced in the raised vegetable bed. I particularly like it when the bread sings and crackles when it has had a really hot bake, something like the way plastic guttering creaks on a hot day as it warms up. Hope to see you again soon, thanks for the lovely comments.
Hi Joanna, those loaves look very good and you’ve got my fingers itching to give them ago …. when time commitments permit. And it just so happens that I’ve got some of Abby’s delicious pizza dough in the freezer too :) You write you defrosted your ball of dough overnight – did you leave them in the fridge compartment to defrost?
Blue, yes I think I left it in the fridge to defrost, that way the yeast hopefully wouldn’t ‘wake up’ till it was wanted. You could use any dough for this purpose, pizza dough was what I had at the time! I made the other version of this in the book, the one with the levain, and for that one he uses a ‘hot soaker’ for the seeds. Strangely that one came out with the seeds less soft in the bread than this one which is made with a cold soaker. You would have thought it would be the other way round, but maybe there was another difference that I didn’t pick up. It can all be a bit mysterious. It’s quite hard to judge the water content for these breads, it depends on how much water the seeds take up and then release again into the dough, so take your time adding the water and weigh things and make notes, so that if it doesn’t go quite right, you can have a stab at figuring out why…
Help Joanna!
I thought I’d try this loaf today and have found the linseeds and the sunflower seeds. However the chopped rye and oats are another matter and I ended up buying a mix of 5 grain – flakes – (rye, wheat, oats, barley and rice). The mix looks similar to porridge oats. I’m looking at them and worrying that they will react very differently to the seeds in the soaker (I’m afraid I’ll end up with a cold, gluey porridge if I’m honest).
I do have a bag of malted barley in the cupboard and I’m wondering if I shouldn’t leave out the flaked grains and replace the malted barley in the cold soaker. Any thoughts?
Mmmm …. just had a look at the malted barley and I see it’s out of the question to use it in its current state (husks on). Needs soaking, sprouting, roasting ……. could be a long wait. :)
Denise, I think you could take a chance with the flakes and sub that for the oats, but just ignore the chopped rye and maybe add a few extra sunflower seeds, if you like them that is. Or to get a bit of rye flavour, if you have an old piece of bread, like a crust of rye or something, or a rye crispbread cracker, say about 50 grams you could soak that and add it in. Curious about the malted barley, didn’t think you could sprout it if it had been processed? But then I’ve never seen malted barley :) The soakers are strange and porridge like, but tasty when the dough finally comes together – let me know how you get on, won’t you? Alternatively, you could post your query on MB I am sure you will get other suggestions there too !
Will do as you suggest and sub the flakes for the oats. I don’t have anything ‘rye’ here at the moment, so I’ll soak the correct recipe portion of sunflower and toast some more (which I’ll not soak) to bring up the seed content to where it should be. Should introduce a nutty flavour. Concerning the barley, perhaps I should have written ‘barley malt’ instead of ‘malted barley’? I managed to find a kilo of ‘whole barley malt’ for beer making (pils) and one day I’ll get round to sprouting and roasting it. It’s wierd about the rye chops and oats though – I can find the strangest things here, but something as simple as chopped rye and whole oats is difficult!
Thanks for your invaluable help – I’ll of course let you know how it turns out.
Denise
Shipton Mill used to do chopped rye but they didn’t have it last time I was there. It’s not an easy item to come by. I reckon if you can get whole rye grain (or berries, as you see them called in some places) you could chop them a little in a coffee grinder. But to be honest, I don’t really notice them in the bread that much, more a backnote to the flavour, the sunflower seeds, on the other hand, always shine through in a bread!