Tag Archives: Sourdough

September 4th, 2015

Göppinger Bread

Göppinger (1)

When I talked with my mum on the phone some weeks ago, she asked me if I had an idea for a recipe.  She had a rye sourdough fermenting in the kitchen and was now looking for recipes (I know where I got my tendency to start a preferment before deciding what to bake.) I just baked a delicious Wheat-Rye bread and some minutes later I had drafted a “sibling” of this recipe which fits to the preferment and sent it to my mum. The next day she send me some pictures and wrote that they all liked the bread very much, so I kept the recipe in the back of my head as “to be baked”.

When I was thinking what to bake as move-in present (in germany the classical gift for a new flat/house is the symbolic bread and salt), I remembered the recipe and I finally I baked it. And I like it as much as its faster sibling. It is an aromatic bread  with crisp crust and tender crumb. It is a perfect everyday bread and tastes delicious with sweet things like honey and jam as well as with hearty cheese.

 

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June 28th, 2015

Chubz

Chubz (2)Do you know this? You take a photograph, and another one, and another one. And nothing looks good. This Arabian flatbread, Chubz, is one of this cases. It is so … flat. After ten minutes of unsatisfying pictures my beloved one turn nervous and declared that bread and falafel would be better in our stomach then on a picture. And he was right, of course. So I put away the camera and we sat down to eat.

Chubz is a stable in the Arabian cuisine. In Germany you will find it falafel stalls where the chickpea balls are wrapped together into the bread. They are traditional baked in clay ovens, where they are place on the oven wall. They are simple breads made with flour, water, oil, salt and yeast. My variant of the flatbread uses wild yeasts from two kinds of sourdough what makes it very aromatic. They are baked at highest temperature in the oven (300°C) and there they need only 90 seconds until they puff up and got golden brown speckles on the surface.

The next day I give the picture another try and after a night of sleep my creative brain was working better.  I put the rolled leftover breads in a glass to gain some height which gave me a more appealing picture.

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June 17th, 2015

Bread Baking for Beginners XVI: Eingenetzes Brot

Eingenetzes Brot“Eingenetztes Brot” would be Net-Bread if translated literally. But the origin from the word “eingenetzt” does not stem from the German “Netz” (net) but from “Nass”, which means “Wet”. And making the bread is wet indeed. The sticky dough is easiest to handle when hands and tools are really wet. When the bread is placed in the oven its surface is wet as well. This helps to create the shiny crust which is characteristic for this bread. To get the soft dough in the oven without accident, a so called “Schapf”, a kind of ladle, is used traditionally. Even in my rather big kitchen collection, there is no “Schapf” and so I used a small salad bowl instead. And this worked fine!

For a good flavour I used only a little bit of yeast and let the dough rise very slowly. A tiny bit of  sourdough adds depth and complexity. The recipe works without sourdough as well, but its flavour is then a little bit flatter. Continue reading

May 31st, 2015

Bread baking for Beginners XIV: The first Sourdough Bread

Sauerteigbrot (1)The new Sourdough is ready to bake our first sourdough bread. As a freshly raised sourdough is still a little bit weak, it makes sense to do one (or even better two) sourdough feedings at warm temperature to rise some more yeasts. After this rounds of refreshing the sourdough starter is very active and can be used to prepare the sourdough for the bread.

As the bread is made with sourdough only, some patient is need while preparing the dough. Especially baking should be considered depending on the proofing status of the loaf and not on the clock. A good method to test if the bread is already ready for baking is pressing thumb carefully into the surface of the loaf. If the dent spring back directly, it still needs to proof for some time. If the dent is filling slowly, the bread can go in the oven, if a strong oven spring is desired. If the dent will stay it is really time to bake. The bread will have still some oven spring.

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May 23rd, 2015

Bread baking for Beginners XII: Rising a sourdough

Sauerteig

The oldest method to rise a bread is using sourdough. As soon as water is mixed with flour, yeasts and lacto bacteria which can be found in the flour starts to proliferate. Soon the first bubbles can be observed which is a sign of the microorganism activity. The microfauna starts to stabilize. In Spelt and Wheat sourdough the dominating species are the same, while in rye sourdough other bacteria species are predominant. The is the reason why rye sourdough is more sour than a wheat or spelt sourdough.

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May 1st, 2015

Tebirkes

Tebirkes (2)Today I’m quite happy that the first of may is a holiday because this gives me the time to bake something for the Bread baking day in the last second. Susanna asked us to bake Bread around the world and so I travled north in my mind and baked Tebirkes. Tebirkes are a danish poppy seed roll made with a kind of puff pastry. They are not only made with dark poppy seeds but can be topped with white poppy seeds as well. In my cupboard I found a forgotten bag with white poppy seeds I bought in the indian supermarket some time ago and so I well equipped for making Tebirkes. Continue reading

January 25th, 2015

Potato Knots

Kartoffelknoten (2)A short look through the kitchen cupboards produced a open glass of yoghurt, some boiled potatoes form our Lunch and a leftover of whole rye flour. Together with a little spoonful of sourdough (a idea I copied from Günther Weber) I kneaded them to a dough and let them rise over night. The next morning I formed and baked some rolls from this dough which rose highly while we splept.

The rolls I served shortly later for breakfast had a soft, fluffy crumb and a great complex flavour. A great roll for breakfast or brunch!

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December 13th, 2014

Santa Claus Bread

DSC_2740

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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November 15th, 2014

Pumpkin seed bread with roasted Pumpkin

Kürbisbrot (3)

The nice sales girl in my parents favourite bakery gave them some slices of bread to test, mentioning that she like it very much but strangely the other costumers did not buy it. My parents tested it and agreed that it is very delicious. At the end, they bought the last loaf.

When they told me about it my brain started to work immediately and soon I had a plan for the next baking day. The basis for the recipe is my favourite wheat and rye bread to which I added roasted pumpkin and pumpkin seeds. For the form of the loaves I tried to mimic a pumpkin, too.

The bread had a good oven spring and smelled divine when I pulled it from the oven. It was hard for me to wait until the bread cooled but my patient was rewarded. The bread had a crisp crust and a regular soft crumb speckeled with orange pumpkin and green seeds.

It is a great bread and for sure not the last time I baked it.

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