Tag Archives: Poolish

November 19th, 2017

Kamut Packet

Category Bread  Tags: , , ,   7 Responses

Kamut-Packerl3

After a lot of recipe development for my last course I have a lot of little flour leftovers from various ancient grains. There was for example the packet of white Kamut flour which I bought before I decided that the ancient grain workshop would be a whole grain workshop, too. And so I decided to use the last bread baking day in the museum to cut down some leftovers and baked pure kamut bread.

The bread contains about 40% whole grain flour which is mainly added to the poolish. That allows the flour to take up a lot of water. Especially Kamut is able to soak up a lot of water – at least all the batches I worked with in the last month. Anyway it is a good Idea to start with less water and add the water while kneading – just in case. The mild flaovur of the poolish fits very well to the nutty aroma of the Kamut.

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November 9th, 2017

Berchtesgadener Stuck for the Blog-Anniversary

Category regional breads, Rolls  Tags: , , , , , ,   28 Responses

Berchtesgadener-Stuck-36Like each year at this day in November I want to add a “can you believe this” when I write down the age of this blog. With now nine years the blog feels sometime like a mammoth in a modern time. And just like Micha I sometimes miss the gone days when the blog world was small and young and mainly add-free. I miss the times when every blog had its own blog roll. Past then I could spent hours surfing through the favourite blogs from other bloggers, finding new favourites while I travel through the sites. Nowadays my journeys are often interrupted as many blogs does not share their favourites anymore. Why I can’t understand but I moan about the lost connections and interactions. And I’m more then happy when I find a blog that stands out from the mass and which has a blogroll of its own. Then I will add it to may blogroll, for which I still care a lot. I keep an eye on it so it contains only active blogs (inactive but good blogs can be found have their own special blogroll). You can the blogroll on the left side when you scroll down a bit. Continue reading →

November 3rd, 2017

Basler Brot

Category Bread  Tags: , ,   No Responses

Basler-Brot-36Sometimes I have the feeling that baking bread follows as many fashions as you can observe in cloth. The trend flour of the last years was the French ones. Nowadays it seems that Swiss Ruchmehl is the new “in” flour. (Ruchmehl is a light wheat flour that contains more bran than normal white flour.)  But this is not my kind of philosophy. I like to buy my flour in our local mill in which Wheat from the Rhineland and Spelt from The Bergischen Land is milled into very good flour. Just like Arndt Erbel I prefer to bake with the things that grow in my nighbourhood. And I firmly belief that every baker has to school his or her feeling for the dough for produce a great bread. Of course a great bread needs to have a great ingredients, too. But these can be found in your home region, too.

My rule is an easy one. I buy local flour. And when I in a new region, I buy the local flour there, too. This makes traveling much more exiting. And of course I bought some kilo Ruchmehl when we visited Basel – I like playing with new flour as much as everyone else does.

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June 16th, 2017

Potato Rye Bread

Category Bread  Tags: , , , , , , ,   49 Responses

Wrziges-Kartoffel-Roggenbrot-53Already for some time I had the idea of a mild aromatic pure rye bread in my mind. But I need  – as everyone knows – someone to share breads with high percentage. A big family get together for which I volunteered to bake all bread needed was the chance to bring my idea of this bread to life.

My wild sourdough was build in to stages to ensure both mild flavour and good strength to rise the loaf. But at the moment my sourdough is a bit to wild and the second stage doubled its volume after just one hour. That was to short to develop enough lactic acid and other flavour components. And so I placed the bowl at a cooler spot and let it ripe for another two hours until the flavour of the sourdough was right. But the amazing power of this sourdough was unbroken. After not even one  hour(instead of the normal two) the loaf peaked over the rim of the proofing basket.

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June 8th, 2017

Spelt Squares

Category Rolls  Tags: , , , , ,   38 Responses

Dinkelkissen-15

At the moment my heart belongs once again the wide variety of rolls. Especially the square once which are just cut from a high-hydration dough are favourites. And so it would be sad if this recipe would get lost in the whirlwind of inspirations in the last weeks. I baked this spelt squares already some weeks ago, their were part of our easter brunch as I felt that we would need some whole grainy beside pretzel rolls, cheese rolls, bakers rolls and my beloved Kieler Semmeln. And so I took the same matrix that worked so well for the Luftikus and this whole grain rolls: A long rise and a high hydration.

This time I used the combination of poolish, yoghurt and a long rise to give a complex flavour to the rolls, while the physiilum seed hulls helps to make the highly hydrated dough easy to handle. The Oat bran in which the crust is covered adds a crunchy effect to the crust and helps to achieve a fairly crispy crust which is not so easy for psyllium grain rolls.

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May 12th, 2017

Kieler Semmel (Brotzeit recipe)

Category regional breads, Rolls  Tags: , , , , , ,   No Responses

Kieler Semmel (1)_thumbSince I discovered the Kieler Semmel for me, they rank  very high on my personal favourite roll list. I love their tender crumb and the crisp buttery-salty crust with the slight hint of cinnamon. And so it was an easy decision what recipe I would bake at my course at the Brotzeit.

But the recipe vary a bit form the two recipes already published on the Blog: this time I use poolish as preferment and I had to use more yeast to compensate the short time window in the course. But I added a variant for more time below.

The dough of this rolls is rather firm and can be formed round easily. After forming the rolls need to be  rubbed in a butter mix which works some fat into the seam. This prevents the seam from sticking and so the rolls open nicely in the oven. To get enough butter in the seam needs a bit of practice –  and this can only be gained by practice 😉

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June 4th, 2016

Kifle

Category Rolls  Tags: , , , ,   16 Responses

Kifle (1)Some Weeks ago a reader send me a recipe asking if I could change it to less yeast and with the possibility to let the rolls proof overnight in the fridge. The recipe was – to use the famous words of Alfred Biolek – “interesting” as it contained not only a lot of yeast but baking powder as well.  So it was not very surprisingly that the recipe yielded roll which taste not so good and get stale very fast.

And my recipe variant only contains now hints of the old one. With a poolish, a water roux, adjusted yeast amount and no baking powder it is a complete different story. I had to adjust the amounts of flour as well as my first draft was getting slightly on the to wet side. The final formula has still a higher hydration then the original recipe, but the dough is good to handle when the gluten network is fully developed.

And I am more then pleased with the Kifle. They have very fluffy crumb and a perfect soft crust and develop a fine flavour due to poolish and yoghurt. A perfect roll for both sweet and hearty Spreads.

 

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May 9th, 2015

Breadbaking for Beginners XI: Basler Brot

Category Bread, Bread baking for beginners, hand kneaded  Tags: , , ,   93 Responses

Basler Brot (1) There are a lot of whishes’ for recipes for the bread baking course: the swabian “genetzes” Bread, Baguette, Bread with heirloom grains, yeasted cake, Westphalian Farmer Loaf, Sourdough and Sourdough breads, Salzstangerl, Bagel and Basler Brot.  And there are still my personal wishes, a whole grain bread and a multi grain bread. We are not running out of recipes or ideas 🙂
Today I would like to start with the Basler Brot. It is one of most famous Swiss breads, and stems – as the name suggested – from Basel. It has a very crisp crust and a soft crumb. It is a pure wheat bread is normally baked with the Swiss “Ruchmehl”. This flour is hard to get in Germany, and so I did a variant using Flour Type 550 and Whole wheat flour.  To increase the amount of water while keeping the dough easy to handle I added a hot soaker. This helps to create a soft crumb. A little bit of butter helps here, too.

To make sure that the crust is crisp we use the technic of “double baking”.Here the bread is baked a second time after cooling down for at least 30 min. This makes the crust very aromatic and crisp.

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April 26th, 2015

Bread Baking for Beginners X: Spelt Rye Bread

Category Bread, Bread baking for beginners, hand kneaded  Tags: , , , , , ,   64 Responses

DinkelbrotSo here is now the promised Spelt bread. I know that many of the readers of this blog like to bake with spelt, but baking with spelt flour is a little bit more challenging then baking with  wheat flour, so the recipe comes relatively late in my bread baking course.

Spelt is closely realted to wheat. But there are two thing to keep in mind when working with spelt. Flour made from spelt contains a different composition of gluten proteins which finally results in a more fragile gluten network. This makes it easy to “over knead” spelt dough, meaning that the dough is kneaded longer then it takes to obtain full gluten development which ends in breaking down the gluten network once again. Due to this fact I prefer to knead spelt dough by hand which gives me a better control then kneading with the kitchen machine. If kneading with the machine it is important to keep a close eye on the dough and testing the gluten development by the window pane test. Intervall kneading (kneading shortly with breaks in between) can be handy as well. Continue reading →