Farine

Crazy for Bread

Search Results for: how to make bread

Soup baked into bread

It was a dark and stormy night… We slept on, blissfully unaware but when we awoke, the world was white and hushed. Mist shivered on the bare trees and the road had fallen silent.
After a long, long while, we heard the distant growl of the snowplow. It came nearer, nearer, And each time it rumbled by the house, the driveway became a little more impenetrable. We were stuck. Nothing that a good shovel and a bit of elbow grease wouldn’t solve but it had started raining cats and dogs and we hoped the rain would do the work for us.
So we stayed in and I looked for something to cheer me up. I had made a big batch of bright green pea soup the day before (from a recipe I found ages ago in The Three Ingredient Cookbook by Jenny White and that we love it so much I have made it countless times since) and I recalled reading that in the country, when they have leftover vegetable soup, they sometimes mix it with ripe starter, add flour until they get the right consistency and bake it.
I had ripe starter galore (never a problem in my house), I had flour, I had soup, so I decided to have fun and bake a pea pod bread!

Ingredients:
For the soup (these proportions are enough for the bread and for soup for 2 the night before)
2 bags of frozen peas (454 g x 2) (for the soup, I like the Trader Joe’s brand because the peas are tiny and never floury but if you are going to make bread with them, maybe floury isn’t that bad! Anyway I only had the regular supermarket brand in the freezer, so that’s what I used)
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1 bit of butter
500 ml water or broth (just enough to cover the peas. Bouillon cubes can be used if broth is not available)
For the bread (enough for 1 big bread and 1 roll)
186 g mature firm starter (60% hydration) (the starter I used was 50% white whole wheat)
620 g unbleached all-purpose flour
640 g soup (mixed with an immersion blender)
salt (I can’t give you the precise amount because it depends on how much you salted the soup. You’ll just have to taste. I know I underestimated the proportion)
freshly ground pepper (to taste)

By the way, even if you don’t plan to make pea pod bread, I would still encourage you to make the soup. It is such an easy and tasty recipe to have in a recipe repertoire that it’s worth trying to see if you like it and, the day after, eat the leftover with beet chips. It’s so delicious that, by right, Julia Child should have invented it! Maybe she did, for all I know…

Beet chips are no-fat and easy to make : wash and peel some raw beets (I happen to love the taste of yellow beet but any color would work), slice them really thin, put the slices on a half-sheet pan covered with foil, drizzle lemon juice over them (I used Meyer lemons which I had bought by mistake thinking they were organic and couldn’t use for baking because their skin isn’t “zest-able”) and bake 2 or 3 hours in the oven at a very, very low temperature. Sprinkle some salt over the chips when they come out of the oven and enjoy! By themselves, beet chips are pretty addictive but with the soup (just lukewarm is fine), especially with this (Meyer-)lemony aftertaste, wow!

Method:

For the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan
  2. Add the garlic and let it soften a bit (but not color)
  3. Add the frozen peas and mix with a wooden spoon (I cover the pot half-way with its lid at this point to get the peas to thaw faster)
  4. When the peas are more or less all separate, pour water or broth to cover
  5. Let simmer about 5 minutes, uncovered
  6. Add pepper, if desired
  7. Mix with an immersion blender
  8. Eat hot or warm (in the spring or summer, the soup can be eaten cold with chopped fresh mint)
  9. If using the soup for the bread, make sure it cools to room temperature. Conversely, if the soup has been kept in the fridge, put it in the microwave for a few seconds to bring it to room temperature. (I had made the soup the day before and even though it had remained at room temp – 64ºF -, it was pretty cold considering the fact that the flour came from the garage and was at 53ºF. I wanted the dough to come out at 76º F. So I heated up the soup to about 120º taking care to mix it with a bit of cold flour before letting it touch the starter)

For the bread

  1. Read above, step 9, to adjust the temperature of the soup, keeping in mind that the desired dough temperature is 76ºF
  2. Mix starter, flour and soup until medium soft consistency and low gluten development (short mix)
  3. Taste to adjust salt and pepper
  4. Transfer to the counter and knead by hand for a few seconds, then put in an oiled dough bucket or bin and let it ferment 40 minutes
  5. At 40 minutes, take the dough out, give it a 4-point fold and put it back in the bin or bucket
  6. Let it ferment another 40 minutes
  7. At that point, I had 1442 g of dough. I divided it in 1 1-kg piece and 1 442-g piece.
  8. Pre-shape the big piece as a boule or as a cylinder. Divide the smaller one in 6 small boules Let rest covered for 15 minutes
  9. Shape the six boules tightly to make them look like peas (only 5 will go into the pod, the other one will be used for tasting)
  10. Shape the big piece first as a tight batard, sprinkle flour along the middle and crease it with a thin rolling pin, pushing the bottom of the dough against the counter to make it flat but taking care not to tear it. Remove the pin and dust the dough at the bottom with some more flour, put 5 of the little boules into the crease (taking care to flour them on the sides where they touch, so that they remain separate when baking)
  11. Set the peapod and the small boule to ferment, right side up, in a big plastic bag on a half-sheet pan covered with semolina-dusted parchment paper
  12. Pre-heat the oven to 470ºF/243ºC with a cast-iron pan at the bottom and a baking stone on the middle shelf
  13. After 40 minutes, check the loaves and if ready (the indentation made with your finger springs back only slowly), score them as desired, pour 1 cup of water in the hot cast-iron pan (watch for the steam!) and bake for 5 minutes at 470ºF, spraying some more water into the oven twice in the first 5 minutes
  14. Lower the temperature to 440ºF/227ºC and bake for 20 minutes, then turn the loaves around so that they don’t brown more on one side than the other and bake another 15 to 20 minutes, or until their internal temperature reaches about 210ºF/99ºC
  15. Cool on a wire rack.

Boule for tasting: the crust

Now comes the $100 question: what does the bread taste like? Well, surprisingly enough, not at all like soup! It tastes half-way between a chestnut flour bread and a sweet potato bread and since the soup wasn’t sweet, it can only be because the wild yeast found some sugar in the peas and chomped on it.
Perhaps because of that sweet taste (which wasn’t perceptible when I was mixing the dough), the bread isn’t quite salted enough. However the black pepper makes up for it, quite serendipitously, by giving it a welcome bite.
So, yes, I like the bread but (there is a but!)… I am disappointed by its color. I wanted a green bread, if not the bright green of Irish soda breads on St-Patrick’s Day, at least some specks of emerald here and there to make up for the grayness outside. But, as you can see from the picture, the bread is greenish at best.
Oh well! Perhaps next time I should reserve some of the peas and hand-mixed them in the dough at the end (maybe even still frozen peas which would thaw and bake in the bread and so keep their gorgeous color?). But that will be for another snowday…

Boule for tasting: the crumb
The Pea Pod Bread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Chestnut Flour Bread

This chestnut bread is the first recipe I make from the book Crust by Richard Bertinet. I have had the book for close to a year, I have looked at the gorgeous photos quite a few times but I have never watched the DVD that comes with it and never baked from the recipes.
What turned me off, I think, is that the bread that “talked” to me the most was the one he made with Cabernet grape flour. I was longing for this incredible purple crumb and imagining the taste but, first of all, when I checked, the flour was out of stock and then, when it was back in stock, it was so expensive (and shipping was extra) that it just wasn’t worth it. I must have been sulking because I didn’t open the book anymore.
But last time I was in Paris visiting my mother (she lives 5 minutes away from a fantastic health food store), I bought some organic chestnut flour and I remembered it when I saw Trader Joe’s vacuum-packed steamed chestnuts the other day. I don’t know about you but if there is one thing I won’t do is cook and peel a large number of chestnuts.
In my youth, whenever my mom made her signature chestnut milk soup – so delicious! – we had to prepare everything from scratch and I figure I have enough hours of chestnut peeling behind me to last me a lifetime (the white skin inside is the worst!). No more, thank you! So Trader Joe’s to the rescue, as usual!
Armed with chestnut flour and steamed chestnuts, I started looking through my books for a recipe and Crust practically jumped at me from the shelf. I guess time-out was over, I was done sulking and ready for something new. So here it is. Bertinet’s chestnut flour bread! One dough, four shapes and a lot of fun!

Here are the four shapes that Bertinet suggests. His loaves are beautiful but I wanted something a bit more holiday-ish (I won’t have much time to bake before Xmas as I’ll be barely be back from visiting my mom), so I tried different things. The “chestnut” one was “de rigueur” to go with tiny tots (we have plenty of those) and Santa (which we have too as one of our menfolk is always called upon to put on the costume, the beard and the hat and to ring the doorbell, whereupon the tiny tots usually start running for cover, unless this year they finally figure out that Santa sounds strangely familiar, even if they can’t see his face too well behind all this white hair).

Anyway I also wanted to make a loaf that looked like a chestnut. I don’t think I really succeeded. First of all, the scoring opened up much more than I thought it would, then the shape isn’t quite right but who will notice? (I used molasses to get the glazed look in case you are wondering. My family loves molasses, so I won’t get any complaints but if you want to make the bread and don’t like molasses, you may want to start thinking of alternative glaze).

I made the hedgehog shape because I find irresistible! I’ve always loved hedgehogs and not only because of Beatrix Potter…

And finally I made a Christmas carol loaf. I had cut out paper stars which I stuck on the loaf before dusting the whole thing with flour but they disappeared during the baking, swallowed up by the huge chiasms that opened up wherever I had scored.
Since it was my first time ever baking chestnut bread, besides playing with the shapes, I pretty much followed the recipe (except that I used my mixer and Bertinet does it by hand). The only real thing I changed is that I made the pâte fermentée (basically “old dough”) with liquid starter instead of commercial yeast. That’s it.
Everything else is the same, down to the last gram of water. I wasn’t really too sure what to expect, water-wise, since I don’t know whether or not the recipes in the book sold in the US had been re-tested with American flours (somehow I doubt it) and I know nothing about British flours. So I reserved a fair amount of the water (more like 15% than my usual 10%) but I ended up putting it all back in. The chestnut flour sold here (I know Whole Foods carries one from Italy) may absorb more or less water than the one I brought back from France. So exercise caution with the water amount. It is always a good idea anyway.

Because of the pâte fermentée, this bread is made over two days.

Ingredients (for 4 small loaves)

For the prefermented dough

  • 175 g mature white starter
  • 494 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 258 g water
  • 26 g raw wheat germ
  • 12 g salt 

For the final dough

  • 750 g unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 400 g chestnut flour
  • 700 g water
  • 450 g fermented white dough (for a possible use of the surplus fermented dough, click here)
  • 5 g instant dry yeast (Bertinet uses 15 g fresh yeast but I didn’t have any)
  • 25 g salt
  • 200 g whole, peeled vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, crumbled into chunks 

Method

For the fermented dough

  1. Mix flour, water and white starter until the flour is well hydrated, cover with a cloth and let rest 20 minutes
  2. Add salt and mix until you get a gluten window (when you stretch some of the dough really thin, you see strands of gluten and almost-see through spots)
  3. Put in an oiled bowl and cover tightly
  4. Let rise at room temperature for about two hours, then put in the fridge for up to 48 hours
  5. Remove from the fridge at least two hours before using

For the final dough

  1. Combine the flours in the bowl of the mixer, add the water and mix well. Cover with a cloth and let rest for 30 minutes
  2. Add the fermented dough and yeast and mix until the dough is smooth and elastic
  3. Sprinkle the salt over it and mix some more (the dough is really supernice to work with and very fragrant)
  4. Very lightly flour your work surface. Place your dough on it, rough-side up, and flatten it out with your fingers
  5. Spread the chestnut pieces over the top and press them well into the dough
  6. Fold a few times so that all the chestnuts are incorporated into the dough
  7. Form the dough into a ball, put it into an oiled bowl, cover with a cloth and let it rest for 40 minutes
  8. Lightly flour your work surface again, and turn the dough out on it
  9. Fold the dough (on all four sides), then put back into your bowl, cover with baking cloth and let it rest for another 20 minutes
  10. Lightly flour your work surface again, turn out the dough and divide it into 4×630 g pieces
  11. Shape as desired (I made two boules and two batards)
  12. Place on a semolina dusted parchment paper over a sheetpan
  13. Let rise, covered with baking cloths, for 1 ½ hour or until just doubled in volume (mine didn’t quite double) (my oven is too small to bake 4 loaves at a time, so I let 2 of them proof in the basement where it is much cooler, so that I could stagger the baking)
  14. Meanwhile turn on the oven to 500ºF/250ºC with a baking stone in it and an empty cast iron (or metal) pan on the bottom shelf
  15. When ready to bake, score the breads the way you like, pour 1 cup of water in the cast iron (or metal) pan and slide the breads (still on their parchment paper) onto the baking stone, spray some water into the oven and close the door quickly
  16. After 5 minutes, turn the oven down to 440ºF/220ºC and bake for another 20 minutes
  17. Check to see if the loaves need to be turned around or if they need to switch places, then bake for another 10 minutes as needed
  18. Let cool on a rack.

Bertinet doesn’t provide a picture of his crumb, so I can’t compare. Here is the crumb I got, not that great but not too bad either, considering that the bread contains a high percentage of chestnut flour. The taste is unusual and very delicate. I like it a lot…

These Chestnut Flour Breads go to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Sweet Potato Bread

The countdown has begun and I am feverishly getting my act together. As most of you probably know first hand, it isn’t that easy to plan a turkey meal for 14 while working full-time. But it is what it is. The trips to the supermarket have been taken care of, I have started on the stuffing and tomorrow I plan to get up early to sneak in the roasting of a few root vegetables before I have to settle down to real (as in “money-making”) work (it helps that I work from home).
But today was bread day! I baked three loaves of sweet potato bread (there is only two on the picture because the third one is half-way gone already) and I still have to bake my banana feather bread. As some of the family members coming for the celebration are from Latin America and love their sweet rolls for breakfast, I also mixed the dough for John’s Vermont Feather Beds (what’s with Thanksgiving and feathers? The turkey effect?).
That particular dough is supposed to rest on the counter overnight, which makes me a bit nervous since it contains a raw egg… But the temperature in my house at night being very close to that of a refrigerator, I am not too worried. Besides all these bacterias will be baked out of their mean little minds, right?
So today was Sweet Potato Bread Day. I borrowed the recipe from my beloved Breads from the La Brea Bakery by Nancy Silverton (Nancy calls it Pumpkin Bread even though there isn’t any pumpkin in it!) and surprisingly I didn’t change anything to the recipe, except (ha!ha!) that I didn’t roast the sweet potatoes in the oven to later mash them to a pulp… No, no way I could do that within the time-frame I had. I used Trader Joe’s canned organic sweet potato puree and didn’t look back! Not once! And the breads still came out tasting great. What more does the people want?

This bread is made over two days.
Ingredients
280 g sweet potato puree (either homemade or store-bought)
198 g shelled raw pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
339 g cold water (55ºF/13ºC)
227 g mature white starter
34 g raw wheat germ
1.5 g ground cumin (I am not a die-hard cumin fan but in this recipe, it does a good job of showcasing the taste of the sweet potato)
511 g unbleached all-purpose flour
198 g whole wheat flour (I used white whole wheat because we like it much better)
18 g sea salt

Method

  1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF/177ºC. Place the pumpkin seeds on a baking sheet and toast them in the oven until puffed and very lightly browned (about 15 minutes), shaking the sheet once during baking
  2. Remove from the oven and let cool at room temperature
  3. Place water, white starter, wheat germ, cumin, yam puree and flours in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook. Mix on low speed for 4 minutes, scraping the dough from the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as necessary. The dough should be wet and sticky
  4. Add salt and mix on medium speed for 7 minutes. Add the toasted pumpkin seeds and mix on low speed until incorporated
  5. Remove the dough from the mixing bowl, place it on a lightly floured work surface and knead it for a few minutes by hand
  6. Put dough in oiled bowl tightly covered with plastic wrap and let it ferment in the refrigerator 6 to 10 hours
  7. On the second day, remove the dough from the refrigerator. It should feel moist and should have grown half its original size. If it hasn’t, cover it with a cloth and leave it at room temperature for about an hour
  8. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured work surface, cut it in 3 equal pieces, tuck under the edges of each piece, cover with a cloth and let rest for 15 minutes
  9. Uncover the dough and roll each piece first into a boule then into a batard (football-shaped loaf)
  10. Place the loaves onto a cloth-covered board, seam side up. Pinch the cloth so that they are kept separate the ovals from each other
  11. Slide the board into a big plastic bag and close the bag securely
  12. Place in the refrigerator again and let the dough proof another 6 to 10 hours (with the Thanksgiving food shopping in the fridge, there was no way I could fit the board in. So I took it down to the basement – which stays at 55ºF/13ºC pretty much all year round – and left it there for 4 hours
  13. Preheat the oven to 500ºF/260ºC at least one hour before baking, making sure the baking stone is in (if you have one) and placing an empty cast-iron baking dish on the lower shelf or on the sole of the oven
  14. When the dough’s temperature reaches 60 to 62ºF/16 to 17ºC, lightly dust the loaves with flour, invert them well apart on a baking sheet covered with semolina-dusted parchment paper and holding a single-edged razor blade perpendicular to the first loaf, slash an elongated X across the top of the dough, 1/2 inch deep, keeping the ends of the cuts 3/4 inch from the ends of the dough
  15. Then make one long, straight cut in the center of the V created at each end of the X (keeping 1/4 inch away from the intersection of each V and 1/4 inch away from the end of the dough
  16. Open the oven door, pour 1 cup of water in the cast-iron baking dish (watch out for the burning steam) and slide the loaves onto the baking stone (still on the parchment paper)
  17. Spritz the oven heavily with water from a spray bottle and quickly close the door
  18. Reduce oven temperature to 450ºF/232ºC, spritz the oven two more times during the next five minutes, then bake without opening the oven door for the next 20 minutes
  19. After 20 minutes, rotate the loaves if necessary to ensure even baking. Continue baking for 10 more minutes, for a total of 35 minutes
  20. Remove the loaves to a cooling rack. The crust should have a burnished brown color and the interior should have an even texture (not the open, airy structure of a country bread).

These Sweet Potato Breads go to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Featherlight Banana Bread

Feathers must be the latest fad. Last week while John from The Lost World of Drfugawe was making scrumptious-looking Vermont feather beds, I was busy turning rather sorry-looking bananas into a Banana Feather Loaf, a bread which Rose Levy Beranbaum (in whose Bread Bible I found the recipe) describes as the lightest of all her breads.
Needless to say, I was intrigued by this assertion, so I gave it a shot. And she’s telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I am not a huge fan of bananas in general and banana bread in particular, but this one, oh! this one is different. Yes, it does have a slight banana aftertaste (which Rose says intensify when you toast it) but it mostly tastes intriguingly sweet and the delicate crumb structure has a pleasant way of melting in your mouth.
Rose says she eats it with lemon curd and also with peanut butter. I like it just as it is, especially when it’s freshly baked but I bet it would make a most delicious French toast.
I will try a sourdough version to see the difference and also because I always have so much ripe levain on hand that I feel I am constantly swimming upstream as fast as possible to avoid being carried down the wild yeast rapids. But this yeasted version will make a regular appearance on our breakfast table from now on, especially around the holidays where some family members like an alternative to sourdough.
This bread is best when made over 24 hours to give the sponge time to develop enough aromas.

Ingredients (for one loaf):

For the sponge (for the big loaf on the picture, I doubled the amounts)
80 g unbleached all-purpose flour
103 g water @ 70 to 90º F/21 to 32ºC
20 g honey
0.8 g instant yeast
For the final dough
207 g unbleached all-purpose flour
2.3 g instant yeast
20 g dry milk (preferably non-fat)
18.5 g almond oil (not roasted) (Rose actually uses softened unsalted butter but some of us need to watch their butter intake, so I usually do not use any)
1 very ripe medium banana, lightly mashed
6.6 g salt

Method: (can be mixed by hand or with a mixer. I tried both and thought the mixer came out ahead)
For the sponge

  1. In a large bowl, combine flour, water, honey and yeast
  2. Whisk until very smooth to incorporate air, about 2 minutes. The sponge will have the consistency of a thick batter
  3. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature at least one hour and 24 hours maximum (I went for the 24-hour option which has)

For the final dough

  1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour (reserve about 60 g if mixing by hand), yeast and dry milk.
  2. Sprinkle this on top of the sponge and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Allow to ferment 1 to 4 hours at room temperature (during this time, the sponge will bubble through the flour blanket, which is actually pretty cool to watch)
  3. Add oil (or butter), mashed banana and salt to the bowl and stir (with wooden spoon or with your hand) until all the flour is moistened
  4. Knead the dough in the bowl until it comes together, then scrape it onto a lightly floured counter
  5. Knead for 5 minutes, adding as little of the reserved flour as possible to keep it from sticking
  6. Use a bench scraper to scrape the dough and gather it together as you knead it. It will be very sticky
  7. Cover with the inverted bowl and allow to rest for 20 minutes
  8. Knead for another 5 minutes until very smooth and elastic. It should be still tacky enough to cling slightly to your fingers. It still too sticky, add some of the remaining reserve flour, or a little extra
  9. Using a dough scraper, transfer the dough to a slightly greased bowl, push it down and lightly oil the top. Cover with lid or plastic wrap
  10. Allow to rise, ideally @ 75 to 80ºF/24 to 27ºC (which is pretty hard to achieve in the cold season, so the best way might be to place the bowl in the cold oven with the oven light on), until doubled (for 1 ½ to 2 hours)
  11. Using a dough scraper, scrape the dough onto a floured counter and press down on it gently to form a rectangle. Try to maintain as many air bubbles as possible
  12. Fold the dough from all sides into a tight package (or give it 2 business letter turns) and set it back in the container
  13. Let rise again until doubled (1 or 2 hours)
  14. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured counter and shape it into a loaf. Place it into a greased 8½ by 4½ inch-loaf pan, seam-side down, cover it with a large container or cover it lightly with oiled plastic wrap and allow to rise until the center is about one inch above the sides of the pan, (1½ to 2 hours) or until it keeps the indentation of your finger when pressed (I baked the bread in a pan the first time around but didn’t like the way it looked, so this time I free-shaped it. To make a feather, you first make a batard, then you elongate and curve the ends)
  15. Preheat the oven (make sure the dough isn’t in it!) to 475ºF/246ºC one hour before baking, placing a baking stone or baking sheet on the lowest-level shelf with a cast-iron skillet or a baking sheet on the floor of the oven
  16. Quickly but gently sit the pan on the baking stone, pour one cup of water (Rose uses 1/2 cup of ice cubes but I always use cold water) into the skillet and immediately shut the door
  17. Turn the heat down to 450ºF/231ºC and bake for 15 minutes (Rose bakes this bread at a lower temperature but in my oven at least, this wasn’t a good idea. So this time, I adjusted the temperatures back to what I usually use. You may want to check the loaf after 20 minutes or so to make sure it isn’t browning too fast (if it is, lower the temperature slightly and tent foil over the loaf)
  18. Turn the heat down to 430ºF/221ºC and continue baking for another 15 minutes or so, until the bread is medium golden brown and an instant-read thermometer reads about 190ºF/88ºC inside the loaf. Halfway through the baking turn the pan around to ensure even baking
  19. Remove the bread from the oven and set it on a wire rack. If a glaze is desired, brush with melted butter
  20. Un-mold (if using the pan) and let cool for about one hour on a wire rack.

Sorry, no crumb shot today as I am saving the loaf for breakfast tomorrow. I’ll try to remember to take a picture then. I am curious to see how it came out…

This Banana Feather Bread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Wild Rice Bread

Here is my first time baking from Peter Reinhart’s latest book, Artisan Breads Every Day. I can’t really say very much about the book in general since I haven’t read it. I just zoomed in on this recipe and decided to give it a go as I had some firm starter to use and no time to bake.
The beauty of this recipe (the original recipe is called Pain au Levain in the book and doesn’t contain wild rice) is that you make the dough and stick it in the fridge where you can keep it for up to four days until you are ready to use it. That fit right into my schedule for this week. I suppose other recipes in the book feature the same approach (which has already been the subject of a few books in the last couple of years) but I can’t vouch for it.
I followed the method but adapted the formula somewhat, replacing some of the all-purpose flour by white whole wheat in the final dough and adding cooked wild rice for texture as well as some olive oil to improve the shelf life and to counterbalance the drying effect the wild rice might have on the crumb. I also baked the bread inside a Dutch oven to avoid having to preheat the oven.
Reinhart gives the option to add 7 g of commercial yeast to the dough but I chose not to go that way.
The crumb is a bit tighter than what I was expecting considering the soft consistency of the dough but that might be due to the weight of the rice and/or the addition of white whole wheat. The taste of the levain comes through very nicely and is actually complemented by the flavor of the wild rice.
Since wild rice is native to North America, I think this loaf would be quite at home on the Thanksgiving table. More authentic than frozen Parker dinner rolls anyhow… 🙂 Although, besides corn bread in one shape or another, I have no clue what kind of bread the pilgrims actually put on the table, do you?

Ingredients:
For the starter
71 g firm mother starter (65% hydration)
142 g unbleached all-purpose flour
85 g white whole wheat flour
151 g water at room temperature
For the final dough
All of the starter (458 g)
312 g water @ 95ºF/35ºC
304 g unbleached all-purpose flour
150 g white wholewheat flour
130 g wild rice, cooked, drained and cooled down
19 g olive oil
17 g salt

Method:
To make the starter

  1. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl
  2. Using a large spoon, stir for about 2 minutes until well blended
  3. Transfer to lightly floured surface and knead for about 30 seconds
  4. Place in lightly oiled bowl, cover and leave at room temperature 6 to 8 hours or until about one and a half time its original size (Reinhart says that if you plan to use the starter the same day, you should let it increase to twice its original size but that if you plan to use it later, now would be a good time to put it in the fridge) (in my case, the starter was mixed between 8 and 9 AM, kept at room temperature and used to make the final dough around 5 PM)

To make the final dough

  1. Cut the starter in a dozen pieces and put it in the bowl of the mixer
  2. Add the water, mix until incorporated
  3. Add the flour and the salt (Reinhart doesn’t have us do an autolyse. I’ll do it next time though just to see what kind of a difference it makes in the final product)
  4. Mix at low speed for 3 minutes and let the dough rest 5 minutes
  5. Resume mixing for 3 minutes, adding water as necessary
  6. Add the wild rice and the olive oil
  7. Continue mixing at low speed until incorporated
  8. Put the dough on the counter and knead it by hand for a few seconds
  9. Form a ball and let it rest on the counter for 10 minutes uncovered, then do a stretch and fold, reaching under the front end of the dough, stretching it out, then folding it back onto the top of the dough. Do this from the back end, then from each side, then flip the dough over and tuck it into a ball
  10. Cover the dough and let it rest 10 minutes
  11. Repeat this entire folding process two more times, completing all repetitions within 30 minutes
  12. Immediately form the dough into a ball, place it in a clean, lightly oiled bowl large enough to contain it when doubled in size and cover the bowl tightly
  13. Let the dough sit at room temperature for 2 hours, then refrigerate it (the dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 4 days)

On baking day

  1. Remove dough from the refrigerator at least 4 hours before baking, shaping it after 2 hours
  2. Let it rest shaped and covered on a flour-dusted parchment paper inside a cold Dutch oven (cast iron or other oven-resistant material)
  3. When the dough is ready, dust it with flour and score it, then cover the Dutch oven again and place it inside the cold oven
  4. Turn on the oven to 470ºF/243ºC and bake for 45 minutes
  5. After 45 minutes, take the Dutch oven out of the oven and the loaf out of the Dutch oven and place it back in the oven on a hot baking stone (my stone always stays in the oven, so it is hot whenever the oven is on)
  6. Lower the oven temperature to 450 and bake another 10-15 minutes or until the bread’s internal temperature reaches 210ºF/99ºC
  7. Remove from the oven and let cool on a rack.

This Wild Rice Bread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.