Whole Wheat and Oat Bread with Golden Raisins

I think that no matter how much bread I bake, I’ll always get a little nervous about it. You never know how much it will rise or how long it will take to rise or how it will look when you cut into the finished loaf. It makes bread baking exciting. Yes, waiting for hours for dough to rise is exciting! I said it. This is another loaf from Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes. It’s made with sourdough starter that’s mixed into a liquid levain the night before the dough is made. The dough is somewhat dense with whole wheat flour, oats, and golden raisins, so a scant bit of commercial yeast is used as well. The process was fairly quick with just under two hours for bulk fermentation before the loaves were shaped. With added fruit or nuts in bread, I fret the whole time it’s baking about whether or not the add-ins will be well-distributed in the end. I didn’t want to cut into a loaf and find most of the raisins clustered on one side. That added suspense as the baked loaves cooled and crackled when they came out of the oven. I told you bread baking is exciting. 

I always take my starter out of the refrigerator and give it a double feeding before I plan to use it. I tend to give it a small feeding once it comes to room temperature, and then a regular-size feeding about 12 hours or so before I’ll be using it. For this bread, a small amount of starter was mixed with bread flour and water to form a liquid levain 12 to 16 hours before the dough was mixed. To start the dough, oats were soaked in water for a few minutes before bread flour, whole wheat flour, water, commercial yeast, and the liquid levain were added to the bowl of the stand mixer and mixed with the dough hook. After the mixture came together, I left it to sit, covered with a towel, for about 15 minutes. Then, I added salt and a little more water and mixed for a few minutes before adding the golden raisins. I turned the dough out of the bowl, kneaded it for a few minutes and then placed it in a wide, oiled bowl which I covered with plastic. After one hour, I gave the dough a fold and turn in the bowl, and left it to ferment for about another hour. The dough was then divided into two pieces and shaped into round loaves. The loaves were covered with a towel and left to rise for an hour. I was able to fit both loaves on my baking stone, so they baked together for 45 minutes total with steam for first ten minutes. 

In this book, Jeffrey Hamelman writes “well-made breads never possess their finest aroma or flavor until they have cooled completely.” So, I waited. And, wondered. Finally, when I cut into a loaf I found those big, golden raisins speckled all about the bread just as they should be, and the crunchy crust gave way to a tender crumb with subtle nuttiness from the whole wheat and oats. The anxiety had ended for another delicious bread adventure. 

I’m submitting this to Yeastspotting where you’ll find some seriously well-made bread.

I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program.

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Ciabatta (at last)

You might be thinking “ciabatta, so what?” But wait, this is big news around here. For the longest time, I had a ciabatta issue. It was my bread nemesis. I could not make good ciabatta to save my life. I tried several different recipes, repeated the attempts, and had flat, boring loaf after loaf with no airy, holey structure to be found. I would sulk and avoid wet doughs all together for weeks, and then when the sting of defeat had dulled, I would eventually try again. I was sure there was something wrong with me like I was missing the gene that allows a baker to produce good ciabatta. Just last week, I worked up the courage to try it one more time, and boom, believe it or not, I finally got great results. I’ve been reading Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman, and that’s what inspired this latest attempt. No matter how many bread making books I read, I always learn new things when I pick up another. This book breaks down each step of making bread and clearly describes not just what to do but why and exactly how. For mixing dough, there’s a chart that shows the time necessary for different types of mixers since speeds vary. The book is detailed enough for instructing professional bread bakers, and it’s extremely informative for curious home bakers as well. Because of the chart, I knew exactly how long to mix the dough at each step of the recipe for ciabatta, and I finally got the proper gluten development that was off in all those other attempts. As the dough fermented, I could tell it looked better this time. I didn’t get my hopes up until I pulled the loaves from the oven, but I was pretty sure the dough was headed for success.

I used the formula for Ciabatta with Stiff Biga. There are a couple of other varieties of ciabatta in the book as well, and I’m thinking of trying those next to see if my luck continues. The biga was mixed about fourteen hours before I planned to make the bread dough. Bread flour (6.4 ounces), water (3.8 ounces), and an eighth of a teaspoon of instant dry yeast were mixed, covered with plastic, and left to grow overnight. It is a rather dry mix, but the biga grew into a domed shape by the next morning and was ready to go. In the bowl of a stand mixer, bread flour (1 lb. and 9.6 ounces), water (1 lb. and 3.6 ounces), salt (.6 ounce), and .13 ounce instant dry yeast were combined. After mixing on low for a few minutes, the biga was added in chunks. The recipe is written for a spiral mixer which is common in commercial kitchens, so I referenced the handy chart which converted the mixing time for a standard KithenAid stand mixer. I mixed on second speed for five minutes. It’s worth noting that wetter doughs like ciabatta develop more slowly than drier ones, and extra mixing helps in creating dough structure. I transferred the dough to a big, oiled bowl for the three hour bulk fermentation. During that time, the dough needed to be folded twice, and the folding is another thing that helps in creating dough structure. And then, I veered from the instructions. Rather than pouring the dough onto a floured board to do the folds, I just folded the dough in the big, wide bowl. If you remove the dough from the bowl for folding, you should try to avoid working in extra flour. Extra flour can appear as white lines in the bread when it’s cut. So by folding in the bowl, no flour is even needed. After fermenting, the dough was active and bubbly. I turned it out on a well-floured surface. I prepped three sheet pans with parchment dusted with semolina. I divided the dough into three portions and placed them on the parchment-lined pans. Wet dough like this isn’t shaped other than being carefully pulled into a rough rectangle while hoping none of the gas bubbles deflate. The loaves were left for a final fermentation of one and a half hours, and the oven was heated to 460 degrees F. I left the loaves on the parchment pieces and loaded them onto the baking stone with a peel. They baked for about 36 minutes with steam added in the first five minutes.

As promised in the book, the loaves had a “thin, blistered crust” that “splintered” when cut. The crumb was delightfully chewy and holey and everything that my previous failed ciabatta attempts were not. Now that I’ve finally found success with ciabatta, I’m excited about bread baking again. Maybe now some other kind of bread will become my new nemesis.

I’m submitting this to Yeastspotting where you’ll find some seriously well-made bread.

I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program.

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