Tag Archives: Jeffrey Hamelman

Hamelman’s Roast Hazelnut and Fig Bread

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Jeffrey Hamelman’s book ‘Bread’ is studded with recipes for fruit and nut breads made with different base doughs. This bread was a little late but definitely worth the wait. You can see what the other Mellow Bakers made of this one by clicking here. This month the random bread picker has thrown up a different variation again, a prune and hazelnut levain, which is possibly even more appealing, as I love French prunes.

April’s simple slow rising yeasted dough was stuffed full of roasted hazelnuts, dried figs, and scented with fresh rosemary and sweet cecily from the garden. Sweet cecily has a sweet aniseedy taste and I nibble at the seeds and fronds as I pass it growing in the garden, and occasionally add it to salads, I thought it would make a good substitute for fennel seeds, which didn’t appeal to me last time I put them in a bread.

I decided to use my tiny crop of hazelnuts from the red hazelnut shrub featured in the previous post. As I had no dried figs of my own, I bought some organic Turkish figs which were very juicy. I do have a fig tree, but it is young still and I eat the figs that it manages to produce as they ripen. I can’t imagine having enough to dry for many years.

The dough was very firm and was quite nobbly with the whole nuts and the chunks of figs, so I decided to bake it in a closed pot as I wanted it to have a thin crust. The dough had its final proof inside the pot. I heated the oven up to 250 C, put the pot in cold (lid on) and then after twenty minutes took the pot out, took the lid off to a great whoosh of steam and put it back in the oven at 215 C for another twenty five minutes.

I think the bread could possibly have gone longer in the closed pot as it hadn’t fully risen when I took the lid off. However, it definitely gave the bread the thinner crust I was hoping for and I think the crumb is softer for that intense steaming too.

: Just delicious!

A couple of notes:

My hazelnuts are thinner skinned than the commercial ones, and despite being well toasted in the oven, they didn’t really want to rub off like the regular ones do. It didn’t matter at all.

I wasn’t sure whether to put the figs in whole or not, so I quartered them in the end and this seemed to produce a good sized piece. I was surprised at how good and juicy they remained after being baked, I was expecting them to go mushy or dry – never having put figs in a bread before. I was pleasantly surprised.

I put maybe a quarter of a teaspoon of finely snipped rosemary leaves in, less than called for, and the same of cecily seeds. I didn’t want to be overpowered by the aromatics and for my taste this was fine.

I upped the quantity of both nuts and figs as I am not making this bread commercially (see C’s comment below, it is indeed a lesson learnt from Dan Lepard!) I decided to put more in and the dough easily managed to absorb this as you can see from the pictures.

I made one loaf with the following, needing more water than the original recipe gives as my flours are very thirsty. Possibly I should have upped the water even more, as the nuts and figs absorb moisture from the dough.

250 grams very strong Canadian wholemeal flour (Waitrose brand)
250 gram strong bread flour (Shipton Mill)
370 grams warm water
10 grams seasalt
3/4 teaspoon dried yeast
100 grams of chopped figs
100 grams of toasted whole hazelnuts
a little chopped rosemary and a scattering of sweet cecily seeds

: A firm dough full of goodies and another peek at the washing!

Mix all the ingredients together apart from the nuts and the figs, which you incorporate once the dough is mixed and has come together well. The dough has a long unhurried first prove of two and a half hours in a cool spot and then a second prove of about ninety minutes. Bake technique as above. Very hot to start with and then a cooler temperature for the second part of the bake.

Even though I adored the flavours and mouthfeel of this bread, with its surprising textures and tastes, I don’t know that I would make it that often as I can’t imagine turning it into sandwiches. Sliced fresh and spread with cold butter, it is sweet and rich; a meal in itself. It might work as rolls, but I would want to bake them covered somehow so as to keep the crust thin.

Sourdough Flaxseed Rye Heaven

Flaxseed or linseed sourdough rye bread I made this bread yesterday and realised that I have in fact made it before when I first got my copy of Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman, before I started baking systematically through the book with the Mellow Bakers group. I love this bread and I can’t think why I haven’t made it again till now. So I am really pleased to see it turn up in this month’s breads. That’s the only trouble with wanting to bake everything you read about and only having so much space for carbohydrate consumption.

I love the clean sourdough taste you get with this bread. I love the subtle texture and moistness that the flaxseed (linseed to us English) gives; I love the colour of the crust; I love the fact that the dough is easy to work and shape; I love the way it is easy to slash; and I love eating it. I am an unashamed rye fan, I think rye and sourdough go together beautifully, it is the taste of my childhood, the taste of family lunches and holidays. I am a rye sourdough soul through and through.

So here it is, from the pre-fermented magic of the starter; 20 grams of mature rye sourdough was all it took plus eighteen hours of cool time, to forming a mounded bowl of sourdough preferment, with its little holes peeping through the surface – a spoon cut through reveals the aeration:- Then to the fun of mixing the mucilaginous gooey loveliness of well soaked linseeds. It all looks so unlikely somehow. Thanks to Carl and Choclette for your help with vocabulary and info today. From Choclette’s tweet ‘CT has come to the rescue on this one, the linseed mucilage is a polysaccharide – a mix of different sugars, so definitely carbohydrate’. I know budgies are supposed to sing when you feed them linseed. Don’t worry you can’t hear me tootling away on the internet (yet). Anyway it’s good for you! It works, every time.

There is enough gluten provided by the very strong flour to support the rye component in the dough and I think the linseed juice adds magic glue too! The formula gives you enough dough to make either two big or one big and two little loaves which is what I did here.

I forgot the proving doughs in their banettons on the windowsill and they had an hour longer than they should have done, and were almost fully proved when they went in the oven, though they still had enough spring for the slashes to open up.

Don’t be put off making this bread by what it sounds like, the seeds aren’t crunchy in the bread, nor do they stick in your teeth. If you really don’t like rye, try adapting your regular sourdough formula to include a linseed soaker, or make Dan Lepard’s lovely soya and linseed bread. There’s more than one way to put a loaf together after all and if you get a taste for this sort of bread try this favourite recipe of mine.

For this batch I only had Shipton Mill’s lovely and useful light rye flour left on the shelf and a little french rye so the bread had a very light colour. If you want to see an image of the first time I made this it’s the one in the sidebar. So don’t skip this one whether you are a Mellow Baker or not, give it a go! Ulrike has made it here with darker flour as written and has the details on how she made it for anyone who doesn’t have this wonderful, highly recommended book. As she says, ‘it’s a keeper’, aber doch so ist es!

Hamelman's Linseed Rye Sourdough

Edit: A little more on flaxseed – A simple search on Wikipedia reveals there are two colours of seed, brown and yellow, and as you can see I have used the yellow or ‘golden linseed’ here. A little further googling around reminds that one should always soak linseed before consuming it. On a related note, linseed/flaxseed oil is sold as a ‘health supplement’ in many stores as it has lots of GLA. It is good for the bowels providing it is soaked. Bet you wanted to know that! On one site though I came across a warning that if one was taking blood thinners or had epilepsy one should avoid taking the oil capsules. I don’t know if this applies to the whole seed, but it is worth consulting a pharmacist or doctor if you are concerned.

Pain au Levain x 2 – Mellow Bakers

: Pain au Levain with whole wheat

This month the Mellow Bakers are tackling a traditional style of sourdough loaf from Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman which is described as “emphatically French”. As far as I can tell, this bread differs from the Vermont Sourdough breads we made last year mainly in that it uses a ‘stiff’ or firm sourdough starter rather than a liquid one. Now my taste memories aren’t that good that I can remember exactly how a bread tasted last year when faced with a new slice. To my mind these pains au levain came out a little bit more sour than the Vermonts, but that could be down to to other factors. It’s really hard to know without controlled test baking! There are three different versions of this bread in the book, I have done two here, the Pain au Levain and the Pain au Levain with whole wheat.

The main advantage as far as I can see in using a stiff levain to raise the bread is that a stiff levain takes up less space than a wet levain and ferments more slowly. It may well have a different flavour profile and other more complex characteristics but they are beyond me at the moment. The disadvantage is, as I have mentioned before, and as Melanie noted in a comment here, that it can be hard to tell when the stiff levain is ripe. I have taken a photo for Melanie to show what the stiff levain looks like when it is ripe. The levain expands and looks puffy. When you open it up you can see a clear network of gluten and bubbles.

In the earlier post I described converting my 100% starter to a stiff starter. A 100% starter, for anyone dropping by, is shorthand for a mixture of live natural yeasts and bacteria, flour and water, in which the proportion of flour to water is 1 :1 by weight (not volume). e.g. 100 grams of flour to 100 grams of water. Some bread recipes call for much more liquid starters, some for dryer starters and if one is trying to stay true to the spirit of the recipe then one should play along, at least the first time you bake the bread.

To recap I made a quantity of stiff levain or starter

by converting my 100% starter to one with a 60% hydration. So 10 grams of the original starter plus 24 grams water and 40 grams flour. That’s about as close as I’ll get without ‘A’ level maths.

: Ripe Stiff Levain

I did this again around midday, discarding what I didn’t need, and then in the evening I built the levain to give me enough starter to make both the Pain au Levain and the Pain au Levain with Wholewheat flour. I have rounded up and down figures to whole numbers here to suit myself. For the original formula you will need to get hold of a copy of the book which I would recommend anyway. The levain build was created as follows:

30 grams of the stiff starter
10 grams of fine rye ( I used French Farine de Seigle 118 a present from Tutak)
145 grams of French T65 ( a present from Gill the Painter – I am in a ‘use up bits of flour phase’ at the moment)
95 grams of water

Double refreshments definitely give you a more lively and active starter if you have the time to do them.

Early the following morning I weighed out the flours for the two loaves.

Pain au Levain

400 grams of strong bread flour
20 grams of fine rye flour

Pain au Levain with wholewheat

300 grams of strong bread flour
100 grams of wholewheat flour
20 grams of fine rye flour

Each was mixed with 280 grams of water and left to autolyse* for an hour.

After an hour had elapsed, I took each dough out of the bowl and stretched it out, sprinkled 9 grams of salt over the surface, and snipped 125 grams of levain for each dough into pieces and spread it over the stretched out dough. I didn’t use the Kenwood to mix these doughs as the quantities were relatively small. I had a small quantity of stiff levain left over which I used to make a sourdough pizza dough (more of which in a future post).

I then mixed and kneaded the dough for about five or six minutes to get the levain mixed in evenly; doing a short knead on one batch, and then on the other, taking it in turns.

Once they were nice and silky and I couldn’t see any patchiness in the dough, I left them in lightly oiled covered bowls for a total of three hours, stretching and folding them three or four times during that time.

: Here the dough is proved and ready to bake

After that I shaped each dough into a rough boule using a little flour, left for a further twenty minute rest. Reshaped the boules more tightly by cupping my hands round the boules and dragging and turning them across the worktop.

Once I was happy with their forms I put them upside down into floured bannetons and left them covered to do their final prove. I put one in a cooler part of the house to prove a little more slowly as I planned to bake them one after the other.

I baked them about three and a half hours later after slashing them with a razor blade.

Proving times vary so much from week to week and it really is something that comes with experience. If you want to bake faster, you need to mix the dough fairly warm using warmer water, and have a warm proving place. It can be done; you get good bread with a milder flavour than you get from the longer proves. You can of course also use a little yeast to really speed the process up should you need to. It’s your bread, you make it the way that suits you!

I baked the loaves on a kiln shelf preheated to 230 º C with a steam tray beneath. The first loaf I remembered to turn the temperature back after 20 minutes, the second loaf carried on at full temperature and turned the colour of an old mahogany table. Both were baked for 45 minutes each.

My thoughts on these breads:- The dough is quite firm and I was surprised to see that the crumb was still quite open and airy. This gives you what I call a dry sourdough as there is no oil or fat in the crumb. It is an excellent keeping bread with definite sour notes and I like the texture and the flavour very much.

: Crumb shows a well developed aeration through the whole loaf

Sourdoughs like these should last for at least four to five days and I often prefer them when they are a day or two old. They are wonderful with all sorts of toppings, from simple butter and jam, to artisan cheeses, smoked meats, and cooked eggs. The bread makes crunchy toast and is excellent turned into breadcrumbs and croutons if you don’t quite get to the end of the loaf in slices.

: Pain au Levain on the Left and Brian’s bread on the right – crispy bacon, avocado and salad sarnies with a yoghurt and mayonaise dressing

As always, please join in, have a go at this or any of the other breads we are baking this month, there is a lovely hazelnut and fig bread that I’ve got my eye on…

Have a look to at what the other Mellow Bakers are getting up to this month. Geraint has set up his new website, a new business and still found time to bake all three of the Pain au Levain and Paul, now settled on the West Coast in his new home with his new oven, is getting back into the groove here. Any questions about this bread or any others we have baked, either ask me here, or over on the Mellow Bakers forum where you’ll be more than welcome!

* A small footnote on autolyse

I use the term autolyse to describe mixing flour and water only and leaving it for a period of time,usually an hour, prior to adding salt or yeast/leaven. Other people use the term to describe various combinations of water, flour, salt and yeast/leaven. I find this confusing so I stick to the one usage of the term when I write up the breads I bake.