Category Archives: Bread

April 11th, 2015

Bread Baking for Beginners VIII: Wild Spring Herbs Bread

Category Bread, Bread baking for beginners Tags: Giersch, Hand kneaded, Liebstöckel, Mint, only with yeast, Pimpinelle, Poolish, Sauerampfer, wild Garlic 23 Responses

In the last days, the weather was warm and sunny and it finally feels like real spring. The first trees started to flower and the leaves will develop soon and the world will be green once again. And already the first fresh herbs can be found in garden and forest, like wild garlic, ground elder and salad burnet. Blended together this herbs yields an aromatic paste which adds a great flavour to this crusty bread and turns the crumb slightly green.

As preferment I used a poolish. A poolish is made with the same amount of water and flour and a tiny little bit of yeast. It rise for 14-16 hours and has to used while its surface is still doomed. In contrast to a biga, which is really forgiving when used half a day later then planned, a poolish has only a limited time window in which it can be used. After that it starts to degrade and collapse. But it helps the dough to rise well and adds a mild, complex flavour. The name poolish comes from the polish bakers who brought this kind of dough to France in former times. Here he is used often for baguette dough.

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April 5th, 2015

Schiacciata di Pasqua

Category Bread, Special Occasions Tags: Eastern, Olivenöl, Orange, Sweet starter, Vanilla 11 Responses

Sometimes you stumble over a recipe and then it catches you so much, that you change all your plans just to bake it. For me this happend when I read about the Schiacciata di Pasqua, the Tuscan Easter bread similar to Panettone. It is baked with olive oil, what tempted me very much. And because I was feeding my sweet starter anyway to bake a Colomba pasquale I decided to make to festive breads for Eastern in parallel.

For my recipe I checked many formula available in the net but had to realize that the amount of olive oil varies a lot. At the end I placed my recipe somewhere in the middle. A little change to the original formula is that I avoided to add anise seeds which I do not like at all. But I added them in the recipe in brackets, because the traditional Schiacciata di pasqua has to contain these seeds.

It is a very delicious bread in the end, sweet with a subtle hint of olive oil and very slight sourness from the sourdough. The crumb can be teared into long fibers and is very light. A perfect gift for the family on Easter Morning!

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March 28th, 2015

Bread baking for Beginners VI: Zuckerplatz (Sweet Bread)

Category Bread, Bread baking for beginners, Special Occasions Tags: Anfänger, Biga, Eastern, only with yeast, Orange, Perlzucker, Raisins 13 Responses

Last weekeend I realized how near Eastern is when my mom told me on the phone about her plans of dyeing eggs with her kids at school. And so I changed my plans for the bread baking course and developed a sweet recipe perfect for the Easter Breakfast. It is a sweet bread called which is made with the biga preferement. The subtle acidity of it helps to strengthen the gluten network. For a tender crumb the dough contains cream, egg yolk and some butter. By replacing the butter with cream the dough can rise in the fridge if needed.

For all doughs with a lot of sugar or butter it is important to develop first the gluten network before butter and sugar. Both can inhibit the gluten development. The fat in the butter can coat the gluten proteins so that they can not connect with other gluten proteins to form strands while the sugar draw the water away from the proteins which again strongly reduce the forming of gluten strands. That’s why we will add the sugar in small increments after 10 min of intense kneading. You will realize while kneading in the sugar that the dough will become softer. This is due to the water which is no longer bound by gluten proteins because of the sugar. Continue reading →

March 14th, 2015

Breadbaking for Beginners IV: Buttermilk Loaf

Category Bread, Bread baking for beginners, hand kneaded Tags: Anfänger, Buttermilch, only with yeast, Rye 54 Responses

The next recipe for beginners is a bread made with buttermilk and some rye flour. These ingredients make the bread hearty and if you proof the dough over night in the fridge, the flavour will be even more complex. But if you need a fast bread, it is possible to let the dough rise for one hour instead.

In contrast to the other breads we prepared in the little series, the dough will be a little bit sticky after kneading. This is due to pentosane in the rye flour and because of the higher water content. When kneading sticky dough I tend to leave the dough in the bowl and knead the dough by pulling the sides of the dough into the middle. One hand holds the bowl, the other do the folding. After 10 minutes the dough should come together nicely and can easily pulled away from the bottom of the bowl. Continue reading →

February 27th, 2015

Bread baking for beginners II: Simple bread

Category Bread, Bread baking for beginners, hand kneaded, Overnight Tags: Anfänger, Hand kneaded, only with yeast, Über-Nacht 79 Responses

I got a lot of positive feedback to my idea of making a small virtual bread baking course. I’m very happy about it and will start to post more beginner recipes on the blog in the next weeks. And if you have questions, ideas or wishes: Please tell me! I will do my best to include it.

The bread we will bake today is a simple one, and similar to the recipe last week it is a “no kneading” bread. The dough rises overnight in the fridge and we can concentrate on forming the loaf. For a plus on flavour I added some rolled oates.

The bread is baked seam side up. The seam is created when forming the bread and is the weak point where the crust can expand during the oven spring (the rising of the bread in the oven). This is important because it ensures that the bread can rise to its maximum and helps to create a bread with a good volume, good crumb and good look, too.

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January 31st, 2015

Whole Grain Country Loaf

Category Bread, Overnight Tags: only with yeast, Pâte fermentée, Rye, Spelt, Über-Nacht, wheat free, whole grain 41 Responses

Breads with spelt are still highly requested. There was for example the question if the Country Loaf could maybe be baked without wheat and with only whole grain flour. I thought a little bit and changed some details and sent my first draft to the reader. It took some time until I could test the recipe in practice. Here I had to realize that the hot soaker would be better with more water, and so I changed the recipe accordingly. But the rest of the recipe worked as planned.

And the bread is very delicious. Because it is whole grain the oven spring is a bit weaker, and the crumb is denser, but due to the soaker it stays fresh the whole week! The Pâte fermentée makes the flavour mild but complex and the long cold proof in the fridge even improves the aroma. It is really could when there are recipe questions to recipe question :-D!

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January 18th, 2015

Pure Spelt

Category Bread, hand kneaded Tags: Brühstück, Cold Autolyse, Hand kneaded, Poolish, Spelt, wheat free 48 Responses

A reader asked for pure spelt recipe here on the blog and I realized that there a only few and that recipes without sourdough are even fewer. And so I baked a pure spelt bread last weekend. It is a light bread with a little bit whole spelt flour, a poolish and a long rise to enhance the flavour. I put the whole spelt floor into the poolish, so it had enough time to soak properly. Another part of the flour I mixed with water and placed it overnight in the fridge. The next morning I mixed the autolysed dough together with the poolish and a hot soaker. The hot soaker prevents the dough from baking dry, an often occurring problem with pure spelt bread.

The bread turned out to be a highlight: Great oven spring, crisp crust, soft crumb and a fantastic flavour.

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January 11th, 2015

Wholegrainy Wheat bread with sweet Starter

Category Bread Tags: Sweet starter, Wheat, whole grain 28 Responses

There are these days when I I have to realize after a look into the fridge that there is no bread anymore. Those days when there is no bubbeling sourdough waiting on the counter. This are the days when I love my darling sweet starter most. After three hours (sometimes even faster) he is ready for baking. And when I combine him with a cold proof over night, then I get a bread with a deep complex flavour.

Last weekend it was one of these days and because I was longing for a bread with a big part of whole grain flour I decided to feed the sweet starter with freshly milled whole wheat flour. I kept a close eye on him because he still very active and the minerals in the whole grain flour tends to make a sourdough ripening faster as well. And indeed after two hours the starter was ready and I could knead the dough.

After proofing the loaves in the fridge I baked them early in the morning and was very happy with the bread I pull from the oven. It has a crisp crust and a soft crumb with the great flavour of a long, cold proof. It is a good bread for cheese or honey and keeps fresh for a long time!

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December 22nd, 2014

Christmas Wreath

Category Bread, Overnight Tags: Christmas, Sahne, Sweet starter, Über-Nacht, Weihn One Response

Du you already have a plan for breakfast during the holidays? I prefer baking the one or other overnight recipe where either the dough rise over night or the already shape rolls. And during the holidays I love everything which is made with sweet brioche dough. But the high butter amount in this dough get solid in the fridge and hinder the dough to rise properly. A solution for this problem is using cream as liquid in the dough. That adds enough fat to make the crumb soft but will not keep the dough from rising.

This Sunday I made a test run and baked already my Christmas wreath. It is made with sweet Starter (if you have no sweet Starter please refer to the Biga recipe at the end of the recipe as replacement) and some cream makes its crumb nicely soft. The segments of the wreath are formed by dough “roses” made of four circles each. I saw this idea somewhere in the internet some time ago but I did not save the site. But luckily it worked with the facts I still had in mind.

As finish I glazed the dough with a cooked sugar glaze. A sweet bread with sugar glaze is somehow essential for my Christmas breakfast!

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December 13th, 2014

Santa Claus Bread

Category Bread, Christmas Cookies, Special Occasions Tags: Christmas, DUBB, Pâte fermentée, Rye, Sourdough, Wheat 31 Responses

My entry for the christmas party in the lab looked like that: Bread (of course homemade). That was an easy decision. It was more difficult to decide what to bake. We are a very international team and everyone should bring something special from his country. And so I decided to honour the swabian part of my family history and baked pretzels. For the second kind of bread I chose my favourite bread. With this dough you can do every “mischief” you can imagine when forming a bread. And so I decided to bake a Santa Claus bread. I saw similar breads before but I did not like the fact that they were painted with food colouring and the way how they were formed did not fit to my ideas complexly either. But I had my own ideas already…

… and the ideas worked well and the breads turned out to be the most photographed part of the buffet. And one colleague asked me to bake such a bread for christmas eve for her (what I will love to do).

About the bread itself I can just repeat what I said before: It is delicious crusty with a soft crumb and great flavour. It is my personal favourite. And that makes it a good candidate for Michas new permanrnt blogevent where she looks for “Undiscovered Blog Buster” (german: Der Unendeckte Blog Buster =DUBB)!

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