Sourdough Challah

Starter Ingredients
50g Liquid Levain (100% hydration, but anything around that will do)
122g Flour
138g Water

Final Dough Ingredients
310g (All) Liquid Starter
300g Bread Flour
34g Vegetable Oil
34g Unrefined Sugar (Palm sugar, Canela, Demerara, etc. I used dark Palm sugar)
10g Salt
2 Egg Yolks
1 Whole Egg

Starter fermented at 75-80 degrees for about 6 hours or until it is very active. Add to it all of the other ingredients and mix until a shaggy dough is formed, let rest for 20 mins.
Kneed dough until silky and smooth, about 5-10 mins. Place into a lightly oiled bowl and let rise for about 4 hours or until doubled.

Punch down dough and divide into 3, 4, or 6 pieces, according to how many strands you are braiding. Let rest for 20 mins.

Form pieces into tapering strands, braid. (Plenty of good braiding videos on youtube). Once braided, use reserved egg whites to glaze the bread. Let sit until bread about doubles in size, about 2 hours, re-glazing at 1 hour intervals.

Sprinkle sesame seeds over bread and bake in a 375F oven until dark chestnut color is reached, about 25 mins.

I love how this bread turned out, for quite some time I had been tweaking with recipes for a sourdough challah that just tasted right, and in the process converted many different recipes to different forms of sourdough. After looking at the “Baguette Redux” recipe from Local Breads I realized that the proportion of 130% hydration starter to flour would be exactly the same, once converted, to one of my favorite recipes for yeasted challah, from Wild Yeast Blog. Trying it out, I also replaced the honey in the original recipe with dark palm sugar, as I feel that the challah benefits from the buttery flavor that the unrefined sugar imparts. Submitted To Yeastspotting (http://www.wildyeastblog.com/category/yeastspotting/)

Happy Baking!

In the discount grocery store I found a few bags of Bob’s Red Mill Light Rye flour. I had been looking for white/light rye flour in San Diego for quite some time, and before this, been unable to locate it at all. Excited to try out some of the recipes that call for white/light rye in Daniel Leader’s book Local Breads I snatched up the bags and proceeded to re-read a few of the chapters in question to decide on which ones to do first.

There are two major types of Chelba (bread) sold in Warclaw, Poland. The Darker sort (which this recipe is) is considered more old-fashioned, and contains a larger portion of whole-grain rye flour, as opposed to the mainly white/light rye that is used in the Lighter chelba. Both of these however are started with a white rye sourdough, which is only fed white/light rye flour. In order to recreate this bread, feed your sourdough starter a few times with white/light rye in order to get it used to the flour, and bring the white rye percentage close to 100% of the flour. But enough background. Recipe.

Dark Silesian rye chelba
200g White rye sourdough (100% hydration
350g Water
350g Unbleached Bread Flour
150g Whole Rye Flour
10g Sea Salt
2TBS caraway seeds, crushed

Mix all ingredents together until a shaggy dough forms. Lightly dust the counter with white rye flour. Scrape the dough out of the bowl and kneed it with long, smooth strokes until it becomes smooth and springy. The dough will be very sticky, resist the urge to add more flour.

Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled container with a lid. let sit until it rises one and a half times in volume (2-2.5 hours). Shape dough at this point, placing it into a heavily floured (with rye flour) rising basket or banneton. Leave to proof until dough increases size by 1.5times (1.5-2 hours)

One hour before baking, pre-heat oven to 400F. Slash bread and bake on an oven stone for 40-45 mins, steaming the oven for the first 10 or so. Bake until a dark chestnut color is achieved.

This bread is an edit on Norwich Sourdough from Susan of Wild Yeast Blog (http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2007/07/08/my-new-favorite-sourdough/) Scaled down and with with a bit more and varied whole grains.  Makes two medium-sized loafs.  The strange mix of whole grains is due to my wholegrain starter, Logan, which is only fed 1/1/1 whole rye, wheat, and barley flour. If you don’t have one like this a white starter will be fine, just use 20g each of whole wheat, rye and barley in place of 60g of the white flour in the final dough mix

Barrio Logan Sourdough:
120g ripe 100% wholegrain starter (mine’s rye/wheat/barley)
320g Bread Flour
20g whole spelt flour
200g water
8g Salt

Mix all the ingredients together until a shaggy dough is formed and let sit to autolysis for 20 mins. Kneed dough until proper level of gluten is formed, set aside for first rise (about 2.5 hours) folding it at 50 and 100 mins.  Divide into 2 pieces and pre-shape, wait for 15 mins then shape into boules, placing them into a brotform or similar proofing basket (I used a basket with floured linen).  Let proof for 1.5 hours then score and bake at 450F with steam until proper color is achieved, about 25 mins (could be longer depending on your oven).

Submitted to YeastSpotting: http://www.wildyeastblog.com/category/yeastspotting/

Here is my take on a Pugliese Bread, combining a little knowledge, and the recipes from The Bread Bible, and Pane di Altamura From Local Breads.  this bread looks like a really wet dough, but in reality it’s not so, but I figure this is because the durum wheat flour I get from the local Italian market is really high in protein.  Normally when I make an all-durum wheat bread my hydration is somewhere around 85%.  This bread I did a mixture of durum and basic AP flour, with my durum wheat sourdough starter. Of note: the semolina used in this recipe is the powder fine grain type, not the sandy type most commonly seen in the US.

Pugliese
100g ripe semolina sourdough starter (100% hydration)
180g water
150g Unbleached AP Flour
100g Semolina Flour
7g Sea Salt 

If you don’t have a semolina starter just feed your white starter a few times with semolina.  Mix ingredients until a shaggy dough is formed, autolysis for 20 mins then kneed the dough (it will be really wet).  I prefer the “french fold” technique when working with really wet doughs.  When proper gluten formation is achieved, set aside to ferment for 3-4 hours, folding at both 30 mins and 1 hour to further develop the gluten.

Preshape then and shape the loaf (I did a batard), putting it into a proofing cloth or basket for about 1.5 hours, until doubled.  Move to a peel, slash and put into a preheated oven stone with the temp at 450 degrees. Cook with steam for the first half of cooking.

Happy baking.

1 Starter, 3 preferments

This is a picture of 3 different preferments for breads that I’m doing within the next few days.  All of them came from my whole-grain starter, Logan, which can be seen at about 2:00. Starting from there going in a clockwise fashion you get the sunflower seeds soaking in water for the Pain au levain au tournesol (Local Breads, page 124), the preferment (levain) for which is the firm ball in the center.  Next (7:00) there is the preferment for an edit to Norwich Sourdough (http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2007/07/08/my-new-favorite-sourdough/), which is using spelt in the preferment instead of rye in the final dough, same proportions though. Lastly there is the preferment for Pizza alle patate di Genzano (Local Breads, page 201) which is a potato pizza typical of the city of Genzano in Italy.  For this bread and the Spelt bread I’m lucky enough to be using a wood-fired outdoor hearth oven. We’ll see how it turns out, as I don’t have any actual experience with wood-fired ovens.

Use your local yeasts, Support the wild yeast revolution!

Pain a l’Ancienne: 06/29/2010

This bread was an attempt at the recipe (well, and method) outlined by DonD on TheFreshLoaf (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/17415/baguettes-l039ancienne-cold-retardation).  The concept is to combine a long autolysis with a long cold bulk fermentation in order to get as much flavor as possible out of the flour.  The original used all commercial yeast, which to me is a bit counter-intuitive when trying to get as much flavor as possible.  I edited it a bit in order to make it work with my whole-grain sourdough starter, Logan, as well as my grain mix, attempting to keep to the spirit of DonD’s process intact. As a point of reference, my wholegrain starter is 1:1:1 whole wheat, dark rye, and barley, so the mix contained 13.3g of each of these within the 80g of starter.

This is a long process dough, so be prepared to wait, but it’s well worth it.

before going to sleep:
80g Unfed wholegrain sourdough starter (100% hydration, straight from the fridge)
360g Unbleached AP Flour
260g Water

Mix together until a dough is formed. place in Tupperware into fridge overnight

The Next Morning
All of the pre-ferment
10g Salt
1/4 tsp Instant Yeast
50g water

Mix everything together, it will be messy (don’t let the salt touch the yeast directly), let it sit and soak in the water for a bit, then kneed everything together until proper glutin formation occurs. Let the dough rise for 3-4 hours, then place in back in fridge in a container for about 24 hours.

The Morning after
Take Dough out of the fridge and let rest, rise to room temperature, then double in size. Shape Dough into whatever shape you desire, I went with two torpedo-like shapes. Let double as oven with stone preheats. Bake with at 450F on an oven stone with steam for the first 10 mins, then until desired color/level of carmelization has occurred. The extra sugars produced during the long autolysis will let the baked bread reach a dark hazelnut color. 

My name is Graham. I am discovering a new hobby obsession. Baking.

This blog is here to share recipes, and catalog some tasty bread discoveries.

Most of the recipes I do are adaptations from the Bread Bible, online sources (which will be referenced), and Local Breads.  The latter is important to me as it shares a feeling that I have when it comes to breads, a love for naturally leavened breads with sourdough.

The blog might also go off onto tangents, or cover other fermented goodies made around the house.