Or should I say, Flat Sophia’s Emmer Bread? See, I got the recipe from a flyer on the Bluebird Grain Farms‘ table at the Ballard Farmers Market in Seattle when I bought a bag of their beautiful emmer grain. But I actually baked the bread with Sophia, my 7-year old grand-daughter who lives 3,000 miles away in New England. Sophia has been helping me bake practically since the day she was born. She mastered the switch on my SP5 mixer before she knew how to talk and she always loved scaling ingredients (getting her jammies all floury in the process). She adores raw dough (especially naturally-leavened) and slices of rustic batard with honey are her favorite snack at my house.
It was a lot of fun. Ok, I admit, not as much fun as baking with the real Sophia, but still! I for one will be sorry to see Flat Sophia go. I found that doing things with her and taking her sightseeing was a great way of staying connected to her namesake, dreaming up adventures that she would enjoy reading about and sharing with her teacher and her classmates. Still tomorrow she must be slipped into the big yellow envelope and mailed back…
- 420 g freshly milled emmer flour
- 165 g unbleached all-purpose flour
- 1.3 g instant yeast
- 11 g fine sea salt
- 360 g water
- I milled their emmer grain instead of using their flour
- I didn’t sprinkle the dough with coarse sea salt before baking
- I used rather more water than they do
- I fermented the dough for 22 hours (first 8 hours at 74°F, overnight at 70°F and the last 4 hours at 74° F again)
- I proofed it in a Dutch oven and when ready, put the Dutch oven in the cold oven with the lid on. I baked the bread for 45 minutes at 470°F, took it out of the Dutch oven and placed it directly on the hot baking stone. It baked for another 15-20 minutes at 450°F. It made a nice hollow sound when thumped. That’s how I knew it was done…