There are various breads in ‘Bread’ made with raisins. This one is in the levain or sourdough section. This tasty and ‘good for you’ number is created with a liquid levain starter, some water-soaked oats, a little wholemeal flour and some good raisins.
While baking my way through this book I have had time to think about the order of mixing ingredients, especially when there is a substantial sourdough component. Often this is made with one flour and then you add other flours into the final dough. It is very easy to end up with patchy looking bread, not a real problem from an eating point of view, but aesthetically it is not that wonderful, so what I do is mix all the flours for the final dough together very carefully so that they are as evenly mixed as possible.
When putting the dough together I add the water to the levain first and make sure it is well mixed and loose, and not with big lumps in it. If using a soaker, like seeds that have been in water, or old bread, or, as in this case, oats, I add that next and again mix it well to distribute the new material in the liquid part. I then add the flour to the liquid if I am mixing the dough in the Kenwood. It doesn’t work if the flour goes in first very well. On the other hand if I am mixing by hand then I add the liquid to the flour. The point of this bit of discussion? Don’t be afraid to adapt your mixing methods to suit yourself! I recommend adding any fats in once the rest of the ingredients have been mixed and the flour has hydrated.
Suas recommends holding back part of the water from any recipe and adding it once you have mixed the dough. It cannot be stressed too highly that flour has very variable absorption powers and reading other people’s posts makes me aware that we have very different experiences with the wetness of the dough we end up with.
This one was not perfect, but only because I overproved it – it ended up waiting in a queue for the oven as we were making supper at the time. The oven needs cleaning again, don’t tell me!
It makes lovely breakfast toast with melted butter. I don’t know what else to do with it though. Any suggestions?
To see the other versions of this bread please visit my fellow Mellow Bakers who can be found with links to their blogs on the Mellow Bakers forum.
If you want the formula for any of these breads there is usually someone somewhere on the internet who has written them out, easy enough to find by Googling. For example here is the recipe for this one. You could always buy the book though, authors need us to buy their books, it’s how they make a living!
This bread turned out to be a sweet white sandwich bread, loaded with sugar and dried milk powder, called Pain de Mie or Pullman bread by Jeffrey Hamelman- one of the Mellow Bakers 
1250 grams of this yeasted dough made a perfect rectangular loaf in my huge French 
Melba toast was created for Dame Nellie Melba, an Australian opera singer, by one of her fans, the chef Auguste Escoffier. The dessert, Peach Melba, was created by him for her at the Savoy in London. What passion!
I had two goes this month at making the brioche. I got in a complete muddle about the yeast and the columns, not helped by the fact that there is an error in one of the columns, which I knew about, but then managed to forget by the time I came back to make the brioche the second time.
The first time I made the Hamelman brioche, I made a very small quantity, I used the Metric column and divided by 10%. The first lot I made took forever to rise, I got into a muddle about the yeast quantities and I think I used too little. I used the instant yeast, chilled everything, mixed the dough, put it in the fridge overnight and then made little balls and put them in tall muffin cases, originally used for mini panetonnes last year. The finished balls were light and airy, but didn’t fill the cases and though delicious looked a bit like muffins.
The pay off: the aroma of brioche baking on a chilly weekend morning has got to be one of the best things ever! Warm brioche, soft apricot jam, a little sunshine – Zeb agreed, reminding me of his French origins. We loved this bread; its butter content means that it can’t be an everyday bread, but for holidays or special days or treats, it’s worth doing, life as a home baker wouldn’t be complete without a brioche once in a while.
Zeb Bakes 