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Five baked loaves, slashed with a well-developed crust in which can be seen some of the many seeds that stud the bread

This is a firm favourite and quite impossible to find anywhere in the city. I’ve been making it forever, based on the original in Hamelman’s Bread adapted for a natural leaven and seven rather than six seeds.

  • 50% wholemeal leaven at 75%
  • 50% strong white flour
  • 20% mixed seeds, soaked (see below). I use oats, corn, pumpkin, sunflower, millet, linseed and sesame.
  • 1.8% salt.
  • 21% additional water (there’s lots in the leaven and the soaker)
  • 5% honey. Optional. I’ve gone off the idea.
  1. Prepare soaker by pouring 125% boiling water over seeds. So, for 200gm seeds, 250gm boiling water. Leave for at least 2 hours.
  2. Mix all ingredients. Knead to incorporate and ensure there is no dry flour. Return to bowl.
  3. Stretch and fold roughly every hour for about 4 hours.
  4. Turn out, pre-shape and rest, shape and proof for about 2 hours.
  5. Preheat oven and a casserole to 220°C. Slash the loaves and bake for 50 minutes, removing the cover and lowering the temperature to 210°C after 25 minutes.
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Two loaves of rye bread, scored across the top, on a dark red checkered cloth with two candlesticks and some other objects in the background.

Two light rye loaves, which could probably have used a little longer proof.

Having recently managed to move this site to a new host, the least I could do is bring it back to a kind of life. I’ve been baking solidly all through its existence, but got out of the habit of posting because I really have nothing new to say. I bake bread. I share it. We eat it. That’ll do.

On the other hand, why not share my formulae here?

Light rye with caraway seeds

  • 40% Whole rye flour, as ripe 100% starter
  • 60% Strong white flour
  • 70% Water
  • 4% Caraway seeds
  • 2% Salt
  1. Mix all ingredients roughly together in a bowl.
  2. Turn out on the counter and ensure the dough is well mixed and uniform.
  3. Replace in bowl, cover, and leave for 50 minutes.
  4. Lightly oil counter, turn out dough, knead hard and fast, about 5 folds, and return to the bowl.
  5. Repeat as required each hour until the dough has doubled in volume.
  6. Turn out, pre-shape and rest, shape and proof for about an hour.
  7. Bake in a covered casserole in a pre-heated oven at 220°C for 50 minutes, removing cover and turning heat down to 200 °C after 20–25 minutes.
  8. Allow to cool at least 18 hours before eating.
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A couple of weeks ago, I read a fascinating post on The Fresh Loaf, in which Kendalman described his interesting approach to stretch and fold and offered an alternative explanation of what is going on, because he believes the conventional view is mistaken. As near as I can tell, he says that there are two glues at work in the dough, a short-acting glue that preserves the shape of the loaf for about 30 minutes, and a longer lasting glue that maintains the whole mass as a whole mass. Stretch and fold activates the short-term glue, holding the loaf together while the bubbles caused by fermentation grow larger. It is the bubbles, ultimately, that give the dough its shape and hold it up.

Nearly round bubbles packed together keep the shape of their gluten foam better than any other bubble shape and the bigger the bubbles the better because that spreads the dough weight over a bigger surface area and so makes it easier to hold up.

Anyway, Kendalman helpfully linked to a video of his procedure, which he calls a kendalroll, that I watched absent-mindedly. The video certainly demonstrated that he got a lovely, well-risen loaf with no kneading and a lot of rolling. Proof of concept, as they say.

Loaf of bread, well-baked, showing impressive rise thanks to rolling method of shaping

A couple of days later I discovered that we were almost out of bread, with a few days still to go before the big weekly bake, so why not give it a go.

I made a standard white sourdough at 75% hydration, mixed only enough to incorporate everything, and then proceeded to roll the log about every 30 minutes. I was a bit concerned that it might take a lot longer than Kendalman’s yeast-powered dough, so I used double my normal amount of starter; pre-fermented flour was thus 40% of total flour.

Rolling the dough is a bit of a messy business, hence the lack of photographs, but it is obvious rolling is building strength and structure in the dough. In the and, after four hours, it seemed big enough to bake. Getting it onto the stone was tricky without being able to simply invert a banneton onto a peel, but I managed.

Halfway through the bake, when I opened the oven to remove the steam pan, I was very pleasantly surprised by how little it had spread. The end result was a really good loaf, with a fine crisp crust and a good, light and even crumb. Judging by the minor blow-out at the bottom of the loaf, I could even have left it to rise a little longer. The gummy bit at the bottom of the crumb photograph maybe confirms this. Very passable.

My kitchen doesn’t really have room for doing more than one loaf this way (whereas bannetons stack nicely), so I cannot see adopting the kendalroll for everything, but for occasions when I want a good white loaf, especially for sandwiches, it is a winner.

Crumb of rolled loaf is mostly even, with small bubbles

Final conclusion: I think I have a better understanding of stretch and fold, and I have a new arrow in my shaping quiver, which is a win all round.

Syndicated from jeremycherfas.net.

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Today, 7 February 2021, sees the start of the Roman festival of Fornacalia, namesake of this website. Curio maximus Farrell Monaco (or should that be Curia maxima?) decreed it so, as is her right. She suggested we bake Bread for the Gods: Mola Salsa; I am not ready for that and so, once again, I baked a very un-Roman bread. I’m sure the Romans knew of rye, but I don’t think they baked with it. Caraway they knew, sunflower seeds absolutely not. Anyway …

This is now the third time I have baked David Kaminer’s 100% rye sourdough. The recipe seems complicated at first glance, but it really isn’t, and I am sharing it here (finally) only because I have successfully reduced the quantities to make two good-sized loaves (about 2.1 kg of dough) and need to have a reference for myself. It takes a while, but very little of that requires any activity. Ideally, if you start to build the leaven on the morning of day one, you will have bread to eat on the morning of day three.

Slices of rye bread with sunflower seeds

It goes roughly like this:

  • Day one, morning, first build of leaven

  • Day one, late afternoon, second build of leaven

  • Day one, late afternoon, make soaker

  • Day two, morning, mix final dough

  • Day two, 3–4 hours later, bake

  • Day two, allow to cool completely and “settle”

  • Day three, you may now eat your bread

Leaven

  • 675 gm at 100% hydration

I build the leaven in two stages. It really does not matter what kind of starter you start with. I generally use my 75% hydration wholemeal starter, but given that it makes up only about 2% of the leaven, it makes no difference.

  • 15 gm starter
  • 30 gm whole rye flour
  • 30 gm water

Mix up the first build of the leaven and leave to double or more in volume. Mine usually takes about 6 hours to do so.

  • 75 gm leaven
  • 300 gm whole rye flour
  • 300 gm water

About 4–5 hours before bed time, build the leaven again. It wants some time at room temperature before you put it into the fridge to continue fermenting overnight.

Soaker

  • 140 gm whole rye flour
  • 140 gm toasted sunflower seeds
  • 9 gm caraway seeds
  • 20 gm salt
  • 145 gm water
  • 70 gm old bread

I usually make the soaker immediately after the second build of the leaven and, as per David Kaminer’s tip, I make it in the final mixing bowl, because cleaning.

The only tricky part is the old bread. If this is your first time, you might not have any. That doesn’t matter, just leave it out, but try to save 3 or 4 slices from this bake for the next time you want to make this recipe, which you will. It adds a lot of depth. David is suitably vague about the amount of old bread, but I have found that 70 gm of dry bread is good for me. At the very start of the process I put it into a jug of water to absorb all the water it can.

Toast the sunflower seeds, either in a big skillet or under a grill, until you get a good whiff of that nutty aroma. Mix with the flour and salt. Add the old bread, squeezed, but not too much, and broken up as best as you can. Then add the water and stir everything to combine well. Cover and leave to stand overnight.

Final dough

Mis en place for final dough mixing

  • 675 gm leaven
  • 525 gm soaker (approx.)
  • 450 gm whole rye flour
  • 470 gm hot water (40°C)
  • Loaf tins

Before you begin, prepare your loaf tins. Mine are quite small in cross-section, and I keep meaning to invest in some larger ones, but thanks to Brexit I can’t get the ones I should have got last year. No matter. Although the tins are supposedly non-stick, a decent coating of oil helps a lot.

Remove the leaven from the fridge and add it to the soaker in the bowl. Add the rye flour and the hot water. (I have a kettle that tells me the temperature of the water, so I set it to boil and remove it when it hits the mark.) Measure the water and pour it into the bowl. Now things get sensuous.

Keeping one hand clean and a scraper handy, squidge the dough through the fingers of your other hand. The video here shows exactly what I mean. You cannot knead this dough, but you do need to ensure that it is very well mixed. It feels somewhat strange at first because the water is hot and the leaven is cold and you move from one to other in unexpected ways. Soon, though, the whole thing is of an even consistency and temperature.

Scrape your hand clean and then persuade the dough into the tins. I like to use a scale to ensure that the tins contain the same amount of dough. With wet fingers, pat the dough down to level it in the tin. Now sift a little rye flour over the top of the dough, aiming for a light and even covering.

Put the tins somewhere warm to rise. They are ready when you can see nice cracks opened up in the rye flour, but in truth in my tins the dough only rises about 1 cm, if that.

Preheat the oven as hot as it will go, starting roughly when you notice the first small cracks in the rye flour. The loaves will be ready to bake 45 minutes or so later.

Bake at about 245°C for 20 minutes, then lower the temperature to about 205°C for another 60–70 minutes. Remove the tins from the oven and allow to cool for about five minutes before extracting the loaves and then allowing them to cool on a rack for at least 18 hours. Most bread, and especially rye bread, is a lot tastier after it has been allowed to cool properly, and rye needs a good long while to become soft and moist rather than gummy.

At some point before you finish the loaf, cut three or four slices and allow them to dry before putting them somewhere safe, so that next time you can add the old bread as you should.

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Many of the online food events that have sprung up during the pandemic take place at times that are not ideal for me. An honourable exception is the classes from the Colorado Grain Chain, which generally take place on a Wednesday morning, Mountain Time, an excellent early evening for me. In addition to Julie Zavage’s introduction to the role of rye in a mixed farm. the most recent class featured David Kaminer’s Rye Bread. It was, literally, an inspiration.

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