Whole Wheat Reproduction

Last week's whole wheat loaf was perfect.  The only problem was that it took a lot of adjustments along the way to get there.  This weeks goal is to reproduce that success in a more hands-off manner.  Last week's beginning recipe was

Whole Wheat, Take 5
Remove 4 oz. of starter from the fridge.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6-8 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Water	5 oz.
Whole wheat flour	2 cups
White flour	½ cup
Vital Gluten	1 Tbl
Salt	1 tsp
Oil	2 Tbl
Honey	¼ cup

I forgot to add the vital gluten, then I added ¼ cup of whole wheat flour and ¼ cup of white flour twice plus some more white flour to get the dough to the right consistency.

This week, I am eliminating the vital gluten on purpose, adding more flour and slightly less water to start.  My new recipe is

Whole Wheat, Take 6
Remove 4 oz. of starter from the fridge.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6-8 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Water	4 oz.
Whole wheat flour	2 ¼ cups
White flour	1  cup
Vital Gluten	none
Salt	1 tsp
Oil	2 Tbl
Honey	¼ cup

The dough ball looks pretty good during the first mixing process.  It is just a little bit sticky, but not so much that it gets stuck in the corner while the paddle is trying to knead it.

I peeked in a half an hour later and the dough had started to take on the blob shape that had me worried last week.  I tried pinching it, and it felt OK, so I'm not going to tinker with it.

After the second kneading cycle, it looked more like a ball.  I think it's going to work out.

It came out pretty well, but it seems to be yielding to peer pressure from the rye breads and donning the pompadour hairdo.

Take 5

In addition to being an excellent song by Dave Brubeck, this is my 5th attempt to incorporate my sourdough starter into my whole wheat recipe.  I've had such success with adding vegetable oil to my rye recipes, that I've decided to replace the butter with oil, this time.  Ordinarily, I am loathe to remove butter from any recipe.  Everything is better with butter, but prior successes suggest giving it a try.

Another reason that I hate to give up the butter is that I don't ordinarily measure the honey.  I just pour it over the pat of butter until it looks like that house paint logo. 

If I use a measuring cup for the honey, too much of it stays in the measuring cup.  OK, as a consolation prize, there is something delicious to lick afterwards, but I like just squeezing the honey bottle into my mix.

Another change is that I'm changing ¼ cup of whole wheat flour to white to help with the rising.  Those of you who remember the scientific method from school will notice that I am changing more than one variable at once.  Well, think of this as the more modern Taguchi method for design of experiments.

My recipe, now, looks like this:

Whole Wheat, Take 5
Remove 4 oz. of starter from the fridge.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6-8 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Water	5 oz.
Whole wheat flour	2 cups
White flour	½ cup
Vital Gluten	1 Tbl
Salt	1 tsp
Oil	2 Tbl
Honey	¼ cup

The dough ball is nicely cohesive and sticky in the pan.

After about an hour, I peeked into the pan and found this limp blob at the bottom of the pan.

Maybe that is why this hasn't been rising, the dough isn't stiff enough to hold itself together as the yeast releases carbon dioxide.  I added another ¼ cup of whole wheat flour and started the cycle over, again.

That had the dough stuck to the side of the pan to such an extent that it wouldn't leave its corner.  I tried forcing the issue, but the dough is still too sticky.  This is like when you are kneading dough by hand and it keeps sticking to the counter and your hands.  The solution, then, is to add flour to the counter top until it stops sticking.  I added another ¼ cup of white flour to try to get the desired effect.  It still liked to stay stuck in one corner, so I added about another ¼ cup of white flour.  I didn't actually measure it this time.  I just sprinkled flour from the scoop the way I would do if I was kneading it by hand.

It eventually turned into a single ball. 

After an hour it looks better than at first, but I'm still worried.

This experiment looks like it may be headed toward the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of irreproducible results, I forgot to add the vital gluten.

But, look at the end result.  This is my tallest whole wheat sourdough loaf, yet.

Now, the question is, "Can I do that, again?"

Ryer Rye

The last rye loaf rose so well, that sandwiches that I made with it wouldn't fit in a standard sandwich bag.  As I mentioned, the previous recipe was more like rye-flavored white bread.  This week I'm making the same recipe with some of the white flour replaced with rye.  Thus, I will have a ryer rye bread.

The old recipe was:

My Rye Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter from the fridge.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6-8 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Water	7 oz.
Salt	1 tsp
Caraway seeds	1 Tbl
Oil	2 Tbl
Vital gluten	2 tsp
Rye flour	1 Cup
White bread flour	2 1/3 Cup

Now, I'm tweaking the white/rye ratio to this:

Ryer Rye Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter from the fridge.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6-8 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Water	7 oz.
Salt	1 tsp
Caraway seeds	1 Tbl
Oil	2 Tbl
Vital gluten	2 tsp
Rye flour	1 1/3 Cup
White bread flour	2 Cup

That's only a little tweak.  I've moved 1/3 cup of flour from white to rye.  The previous recipe was so successful, that I don't want to make a big change.  The mathematically inclined readers will notice that I've gone from 30% rye to 40% rye.  That's not insignificant.

The dough ball looks good.  I didn't even need to scrape remnants from the rim of the pan.  The dough is one cohesive piece and it sticks slightly to the sides of the pan as it mixes.

Three and a half hours later, I have another well risen loaf of bread.  The characteristic rye bread hairdo has reappeared.

My wife had a good idea about the too-tall loaf.  She suggested cutting off the top and making sandwiches with that.  (I'm thinking hamburger buns.)  Then, use the decapitated loaf for the rest of the slices.

I think I can go a lot further in the rye-to-white ratio.  Next week I am going to make a bolder move than just 1/3 cup.

Rye My Way

I prepared my sponge in the usual way this morning, taking 4 oz. of starter and adding 4 oz. of water and 4 oz. of flour.  I hadn't decided at the time what I was going to make when I got home from work. I was really in the mood for rye bread.  I like the sour cream rye recipe, but I didn't have any sour cream.  Not only that, I've been itching to try the regular caraway rye recipe that I haven't made since February.

Well, for starters (no pun intended, but I'll accept it, now), my old recipe called for about 50% more starter. The original recipe called for adding 6 oz. of water and 6 oz. of flour to make my sponge.  So, right off the bat, I'm in wing-it mode.  I suspect that this recipe will work fine with the same sponge that my other recipes use, I'll just need to add some more water and white flour to the recipe along with the rest of the ingredients.  That means that I need 2 oz. more water and 2 oz. more white flour.  Two ounces of white flour is 3/8 of a cup.  I don't have that measuring cup, but it's close enough to 1/3.  Besides, the old recipe had so much more white flour than rye, I ought to call it rye-flavored white bread.  I might even try adjusting the ratio of rye to white upwards in future attempts.

My notes from before suggested that I might have had better success with a little more water, so I added an additional ounce.

One final change is that the old recipe didn't have any oil or butter in it.  The sour cream rye recipe uses 2 Tbl of oil, so I added that.

I've tinkered with this recipe enough that I think I can call it mine, now.

My Rye Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter from the fridge.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6-8 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Water	7 oz.
Salt	1 tsp
Caraway seeds	1 Tbl
Oil	2 Tbl
Vital gluten	2 tsp
Rye flour	1 Cup
White bread flour	2 1/3 Cup

The dough ball looks healthy.  It had lots of remnants stuck to the brim of the pan, at first, but I scraped them off with a spatula and added them to the dough ball.

I'm not sure what the secret ingredient was, but this loaf came out as tall as my whole wheat bread made with commercial yeast.

Here is this loaf:

Here is the non-sourdough whole wheat loaf that I last made:

I'm completely full from dinner, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow to taste it.

My Old Reliable Whole Wheat Recipe

OK, I know this is a sourdough blog, but this entry is not about sourdough.  I was out of bread and didn't have time for the whole refresh-starter (6-8 hours), sponge growth (6-8 hours), bread machine cycle (3-4 hours) routine.  I decided to remind myself what my old friend, whole wheat made with commercial yeast was like.

The advantage to this method is that it only takes 4 hours from start to finish, and only takes about 5 minutes of my time.  The recipe is

Whole Wheat
Water	9  oz.
Whole wheat flour	2¼  cups
White flour	1¼ cup
Salt	1½  tsp
Butter	1½ Tbl
Honey	¼ cup
Yeast	2½ tsp

Yep, just throw all of that in the bread pan, push the start button, and in under four hours you get this:

Check out that height compared to my tallest sourdough bread, the sour cream rye.

After eating all of these heavy sourdough loaves for the past several months, this light and airy whole wheat seems almost like eating Wonder Bread.  I like the challenge and science of the sourdough recipes, but this old favorite is still going to be in my baking rotation.

Good Old White Bread

This is a slight variation on the World Bread recipe from the book.  My starting point was

My World Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
White bread flour	2½  Cup
Milk	¼ Cup
Vegetable Oil	2 tsp
Sugar	2 Tbl
Salt	¾ tsp

First off, who has a ¾ tsp measuring spoon?  Not me.  I changed that to a heaping ½ tsp.  Next, there wasn't nearly enough liquid in this starting recipe.  During the first mixing cycle, the "dough" looks like this:

There is dry flour in the corners and clumps of partly mixed stuff stuck to the upper part of the pan.  I immediately added another  half of  ¼  cup of milk.  Yes, I know, I could have said 1/8 cup, but I don't have that measuring item, either.  I just guessed when my ¼  cup looked half full.

That mixture looked a little soupy, but I decided to let it go.  After mixing for a while, it looked pretty good.

and the end product looked pretty good as well.

It tastes much like the sourdough bread that I remember from when I lived in the San Francisco area.  I've been eating various types of whole-grain bread for so long that white bread seems like a guilty pleasure, but I'll make this again.  The recipe for success is now

My World Bread
Remove 4 oz. of starter.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
White bread flour	2½  Cup
Milk	3 oz.
Vegetable Oil	2 tsp
Sugar	2 Tbl
Salt	Heaping ½ tsp

Next, I revisited my tried and true whole wheat without sourdough recipe.

Perfecting the Sour Cream Rye recipe

My intention was to try the simplified two-step process with the sour cream rye recipe that I made a few weeks ago.  This was also going to be my first weekday sourdough loaf.  Yes, I have a day job.  I set my starter to refresh overnight and prepared the rest of the ingredients in the bread pan with the intention of preparing the sponge the next morning and adding it to the top of the other ingredients.  Then, I would set the delay timer to create a finished product in about 12 hours. 

The next morning, however, I figured, "WTH?  I'll be home from work in time to start the bread machine on a normal cycle and be there to monitor the progress if I need to add water." So, I just prepared the sponge as usual and combined it with the rest of the recipe after it had grown for 8 hours.  In the end, there was enough water in the recipe so that my two-step process would have worked.

What I didn't have enough of, though, was rye flour.  The recipe calls for 2 cups, and I only had about 1½ cups.  I made up for the shortage with white flour.  My whole recipe, then, was

Sour Cream Rye Bread, Take 2
Remove 4 oz. of starter.  Add 4 oz. of white flour and 4 oz. of water.  Set in a warm place for about 6 hours until it doubles in size.  Then, add
Sour Cream	½ Cup
Vegetable Oil	2 Tbl
Sugar	2 Tbl
Salt	1 tsp
Caraway seeds	1 Tbl
Vital gluten	1 Tbl
Rye flour	1½  Cups
White bread flour	2  Cups
Water as needed	5 oz.

Since I was home for the mixing cycle, I peeked inside.  The dough formed a nice ball

It hadn't picked up every last bit from the corners, but there was still plenty of time left in the mixing cycle.  The dough ball looked good, so in retrospect, I could use this recipe in a two-step processes.

The loaf rose better than I was anticipating for a recipe that has so much rye flour in it.

It had that break-away pompadour look that I am coming to expect from rye bread.  It is also quite heavy.  As before, it tastes great.

Next, white sourdough.