Birdseed Loaf

Day 13: By its very nature, my "Birdseed Bread" is more dense than sourdough or white bread, being comprised partly of millet flour. It has a lightly nutty flavour which I sometimes enhance with the addition of golden flaxseed meal and/or flaxseeds. Experimenting with the formula to create a Dutch-oven version, I substituted 50 grams of millet flour for bread flour in a no-knead, 70% hydration recipe which called for 500 grams total, and added 8 grams of gluten because millet flour has none. Baked in my new loaf-shaped, lidded cast-iron bread pan, it came out perfectly, cancelling any plans I had for increasing the amount of millet flour in the future. Slathered with real butter, this bread is almost a meal in itself. It also makes excellent French toast.

Although I used parchment paper here, I invested a whopping six dollars in a pair of silicone bread pan liners to help me get rather wet and oozy doughs into the pan. I'll try them out in my next experiment, but that may be a ways down the road because I now have three loaves of bread in my freezer, and I have got to make space for a Thanksgiving turkey.

Any Excuse

Day 9: I really never need an excuse to make bread, but since the recipe which came with my new "Dutch oven" style loaf pan suggested an 80% hydration dough, my scientific curiosity pushed me forward in an experiment. My regular sourdough is roughly 60% hydration (560g flour to 330g water, counting the poolish), so I realized this white bread was going to be a much wetter mix and harder to get in the pan. How would it turn out? Well, there was only one way to find out. The recipe starts yesterday. Combine 450g bread flour with 360ml water, 1/2 tsp. dry yeast and 1.5 tsp salt into a wet, shaggy dough (I use my bagel-twizzling stick to stir mine...wooden spoon handle works well, too). Cover it and let it proof in a warm place for 12-18 hours until it's nice and bubbly. Pour it out onto a floured surface, try to shape it into something remotely resembling a loaf (I did tell you it's a very wet dough), cover and let rise for an hour. Halfway into that hour, start preheating the pan and lid in an oven set to 450 degrees. When the full hour is up, make a slit down the center of the loaf to release steam, coerce it into the pan (I lined my pan with parchment), put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid, bake for an additional 15 minutes. And this is what you get: a lovely high loaf with a crisp thin crust and a light, airy texture perfect for sandwiches or toast.

A Proper Loaf

Day 7: As much as I prefer the convenience and end-product quality in baking bread in a Dutch oven, it has had one drawback: it's hard to cut a round or oval loaf into same-size pieces for your breakfast toast. I was bemoaning the fact that I had never seen a loaf-shaped Dutch oven to my weaving friend Ed, whereupon he sent me a photo of one which put me on a new search. And I found scores of them! After several hours of comparison shopping I opted for an enameled one (lidded) which weighs almost 10 pounds, and this morning, I turned out my first loaf of sourdough after having adjusted my customary recipe to make it just a little smaller. In hindsight, I think I could have used the full recipe, but I like the height of this loaf. The sides got a little wrinkled as I dropped it into the pre-heated Dutch oven because my banneton is just a little too long and wide for a 9" x 5" pan.

High Hydration Loaf

Day 26: Since discovering the joys of baking no-knead sourdough in a Dutch oven, I've been wanting to expand my repertoire of breads. I finally got around to hunting for recipes, and found one for a high-hydration loaf (85%) raisin bread from a reputable source. This is not a sourdough recipe, mind you. It's good old-fashioned raisin bread. It uses instant yeast, and at first I blamed the low amount of oven spring on the fact that it is added dry to the flour, but then I realized I had forgotten to slash the top of the dough to let the steam escape. Setting that small oversight aside, it is delicious! I'm going to do some fine tuning of the recipe, though, using part of the water to activate the yeast ahead of time, before adding it to the flour. I like to see my yeast working before committing it to a dough. I may also give the dough an additional rise (it only had two of half an hour each), which also means one additional round of stretching and folding. This bread is worth perfecting!

A Good Ear

Day 252: When my sourdough starter died of causes unknown approximately a year ago, I was plunged into a period of existential crisis which lasted about six months. During that period, I could not turn out a decent loaf of bread. Oh, they were fine as far as taste was concerned, but invariably, the second rise would be weak and I would get very little oven spring. I blamed the weather. I blamed the cold. I blamed the yeast and the wheat crop and the flour mills. I tried waiting for a warm sunny day. I changed brands of flour and yeast. I bought a bread machine. But for the life of me, I could not figure out what was causing my loaves to be flat and dense. In over fifty years of bread-making on a ten-day schedule, I had had a few unresponsive doughs, but never such a long run of failures. "I think," I said to myself, "that I've lost my mojo."

I was lamenting the issue to a friend one day, and he offered me some of his sourdough starter. I am tempted to say I prefer sourdough over yeast breads, but the truth of it is that I simply prefer homemade bread regardless of the type. I took Ed up on his offer, and after doubling his starter a couple of times, I made a sourdough loaf. The results fell somewhat short of my expectations, but I could see there was hope. Then I started poking around for different recipes and came up with a high-hydration "artisan" loaf which required baking in a Dutch oven. It has now become my favourite version of sourdough.

This loaf should have the perfect "ear" typical of artisanal breads, i.e., it must be shallowly scored with a bread lame or sharp knife so that when oven spring occurs, it does not burst along the top or sides, but opens along the cut. It tends to get rather crisp along the edge and is inconvenient when slicing the bread, so after my loaves have cooled, I make a horizontal cut to prune the "ear" from the top of the loaf. You understand, of course, that this is for purely functional reasons. It has nothing to do with wanting to have a piece of fresh-baked sourdough lavished with butter for a nibbly-bite, nothing at all.