Lately I’ve been pushing our concept of bread to the limit. While I’m inching back a little bit, the idea of using different kinds of grains in bread remains something I want to explore further.

Beer is called “liquid bread,” because the combination of grains and yeast is transformed into a delicious, wheat-y, amber-colored beverage. However, those grains are usually discarded after the mash stage is over. Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads takes up where the beer brewer left off, and creates a bread with tons of flavor using these spent grains.

So what do spent grains look like? Mr. Bread Maiden was brewing a wheat stout, so the grains are characteristically dark:

The bread begins as Reinhart’s typically do, with a biga and a soaker the day before baking. The spent grains are mixed in on the second day for the second and third risings. The biga is partly sourdough starter and partly a mixture of water and flour to get it up to the necessary weight for Reinhart’s formula.

Here is where the math comes in. If I need 398g of 75% hydration biga, how do I get that if I only have 130g of 75% hydration sourdough starter? Obviously, if the biga was 100% hydration and I had 130g of 100% hydration, I could just subtract the amount of starter I have from the total I need, and then divide the left-overs and add 50% water and 50% flour. 75% hydration is trickier. You can’t just calculate it in your head.

I warned you my breadbaking has gotten totally wonky.

My friends, this is actually really easy. It’s a set of two formulas, the second of which you learned in the previous blog entry.

The first is to calculate how much flour you’ll need. If you need 398g of biga, but you have 130g of starter, subtract 398-130 so you’re just calculating how much you NEED. You need 268g. ok.

now set up the equation like this:
Flour= (needed biga weight)DIVIDED BY(1 plus hydration)

so Flour= (268)/(1.75) = 153g of flour.

Now you need to figure out how much water you need.

Water= (Flour) TIMES (hydration)

so Water= (153) * (.75) = 114g of water

Wasn’t that easy? You can even check the math:
114+153+130=397. Ok, not 398, but pretty darn close.

Ok, now we can move on.

On the second day, check on your doughs. Mix them together, then add in the 113g of spent grains. That’s the weird dark stuff in this picture.

Now add the rest of the ingredients for the final dough.

Knead everything together for a few minutes, then let rise for 60-90 minutes in an oiled bowl.

After the second rise, shape and transfer the loaf to a sheet of parchment paper lined with rice flour. Let it rise another 45 minutes or so while you preheat the oven to 450 degrees with your dutch oven inside.

Once the oven is preheated, score the top of the loaf with a razor blade or sharp knife and stick in the oven. Turn the temperature down to 350 degrees. Let it bake for 25 minutes with the dutch oven lid on, then take the lid off and bake another 20 or so minutes.

Here is your spent-grain loaf! It comes out much darker than it came in because, according to Peter Reinhart, the spent grains have tons of extra enzymes and sugars that help to brown the bread and give it that nice golden color.

I’m slowly making my way through Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads book. Every recipe has been a new adventure as I develop my “bread toolkit.” It is so clear that Reinhart really respects his audience; once you get the rhythm of the biga and soaker down, the recipes are nearly foolproof. While I don’t get everything he says about the enzyme activity, by separating the “rising” stuff from the “absorbing moisture” stuff, you can really see how the parts of bread fit together.

That being said, my most recent baking session tested the limits of what most people would consider bread.

So what is bread?

The easiest, most basic bread is made of flour, water, and yeast.
What if you take out the flour?

This is what Reinhart does in his sprouted grain bread. You use whole wheat berries, soak them, blend them up in a food processor until they make a pulp, then add water and yeast and some other things. Bake it up and you get bread! With no flour whatsoever!

Neat huh?

I had bought a big bag of whole wheat berries a year ago at the farmers’ market and was slowly making my way through it by grinding up a cup or so and throwing it into regular recipes. Here, you soak the berries overnight and then drain them and wait for them to grow little white tails.

See them?

Then you grind them up. It took about five minutes. If the processor starts to get hot, turn it off and let them rest for 10 minutes before continuing.

at this point, you can do one of two things. Make 100% Sprouted Grain Bread, or be a wuss and make a sprouted grain and whole wheat mixed bread. I did both, just because I soaked so dang many berries and you have to use them within 24 hours of them sprouting.

So first, the sprouted grain and whole wheat bread. Both of these recipes take 24 hours to make, so start the grains the night before you want to use them, drain them the next morning, and bake in the evening.

You need a starter or biga for this recipe. When you are preparing the grains to soak, mix together a 75% hydration starter that totals 398g.

1. Add in a large bowl:
your starter
284g of ground-up sprouted grains
56g of whole wheat flour
I can’t remember how much water; not much.
7g of salt
9g of yeast
28g of honey or brown sugar
14g of melted butter or vegetable oil
10g of vital wheat gluten (optional)

2. Mix it all up and knead a bit.

3. Put in an oiled bowl, cover and let rise for 45-60 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, what are you going to do with the rest of the sprouted grains?

5. Measure out the rest of your sprouted wheat berries. How much do you have? Do you have 680g of berries?

No? Here is where the math comes in.

Bakers’ percentages are what you use when you don’t want to or can’t make the exact amount in a given recipe or want to tweak it a bit without going overboard and doubling or tripling the recipe. Luckily, Peter Reinhart shows the bakers’ percentages of all of his recipes so it just takes a quick calculation and you’re all set. You just need to keep in mind that you are always using the weight of your flour as the baseline for the rest of the measurements.

Here is what my baking has become.

I had 610g of wheat berries. I needed 16.5% of that in water. So I multiplied 610 by 0.165 to get 104g of water. See? Wasn’t that easy? Now, I just tweaked the recipe a little bit for each of the other ingredients, because getting them accurate is not as important as getting the hydration level right.

6. In a bowl, throw in:
Your sprouted wheat berries, ground up
add a little bit of water at a time until you get the right consistency.
6g salt
7g yeast
21g honey or brown sugar
10% of your wheat berry weight in vital wheat gluten (so in my case, 61g of vwg) that seemed like a ton, so I used 20g.

7. mix it all up and knead on a WET surface with wet hands. I forgot to add the water a little at a time so I ended up with impossibly wet dough and had to break down and add flour to the dough. Next time I will be more careful.

8. Once it reaches a good consistency (sticky and wet but good), put in an oiled bowl and let rise 45-60 minutes.

9. Now it should be just about time for your Sprouted & WW dough to begin the second rise. Prepare parchment paper with white rice flour and form your dough into a ball. Cover the ball and let rise on the parchment paper for another 45 minutes. With 20 minutes to go, you should preheat the oven to 450.

10. Once the bread is in the oven, turn it down to 350 and let bake for 40-50 minutes, taking the cover off your dutch oven half-way through.

11. When the sprouted & WW is in the oven, prepare a buttered bread pan. Shape your 100% sprouted grain bread dough and place into the pan. Cover and let rise until the other dough comes out of the oven.

12. First dough comes out, second dough goes in. Bake as before.

13. Yummy bread!

The past few weeks have been crazy for Mr. Bread Maiden and myself, going on a weeklong trip and then having visiting relatives. Our fridge has been empty and we have not had the time to prepare anything for lunches. I am just now beginning to make our daily bread to eat for breakfast, but using sourdough starter and the no-knead method adds an extra two days above baking the thing. Ugh!

I am a subscriber on The Fresh Loaf, and it’s fun to watch different recipes and methods become “trendy” as people try to make them and add their observations and advice. One that’s been popping up lately is this onion-poppyseed bread. I would probably have never come up with this combination myself, but it’s really good! The raw union provides wonderful light sweetness as do the poppyseeds, which I’ve only really seen used in sweeter breads like lemon-poppyseed.

This was the first recipe I made when we came home from our trip because I wanted something delicious and fast! Anyway, my additions to this recipe were: use a medium-sized onion, and one more teaspoon of poppyseeds. Also, I put the loaf in a breadpan instead of baking it freeform.

* 1 small onion, finely chopped
* 2 tsp vegetable oil
* 2/3 cup warm water
* 1 tsp sugar
* 1 tsp salt
* 1-1/2 tsp active dry yeast
* 2 tsp poppy seeds
* 1-1/2 cups bread flour
* 1 egg white
* poppy seeds

1. Dissolve yeast in the water. Combine yeast mixture with oil, sugar, salt, yeast, and 3 tsp poppyseeds.

2. Add flour 1/2 cup at a time until a good consistency. Knead as best you can, although with all the onions I added, it was very mushy and unmanageable which is why I decided to use a breadpan.

3. Let rise once in an oiled bowl covered with seran wrap and then again in the buttered breadpan.

4. Preheat oven to 350 and allow pizza stone to heat up.

5. Gently whisk egg white and then brush onto the top of the bread. Sprinkle top with poppyseeds.

6. Place breadpan carefully onto the pizza stone. Bake for 40 minutes or until inside is about 200 degrees.

7. Remove loaf from pan and let cool before slicing. You will want to do this because the bread is very soft and crumbly at first and will fall apart easily.

I think I WAY over-greased the pan because the bread came out really oily.

But so delicious!

So, after a long hiatus, your Bread Maiden has returned to report on some new adventures in bread. While I have as little time as always, I will try and update this thing more often.

So, picnic bread. You remember it:

The original version came out fine, but I was disappointed that so few of the ingredients contributed to the overall flavor. Plus the taste of the anchovies became too much to bear after only a few days. Mr. Bread Maiden had the inspiration to add bleu cheese and sausage, so we agreed that a Round Two was necessary.

The recipe is the same as the first one, but I decided to throw a little whole wheat flour into the dough. I also added bleu cheese, one hard-boiled egg, plenty of sausage, ground beef, and barbeque pork, and little onions.

I changed up the pattern and added way more toppings. I put the cheese in the middle, then made an inner inside ring of egg and meat. Then I put the top layer of dough in place and made an outer ring of toppings.

Baked…

Oooh, so delicious…

And here’s the inside:

Dear Diary,

Today I ate the most delicious picnic bread ever. Also Mr. Bread Maiden winked at me. I wonder if he likes me?

Love,
Bread Maiden

I am nothing if not a woman of my word. Am I right? I have been coveting this bread ever since I saw it on Brown Interior’s blog. I just had to make it. I promised you I would make it. So here I am.

The recipe is fairly simple and took about 5 hours to make from start to finish. While it made dinner last night a late one, it was tasty. Mr. Bread Maiden is already thinking about variations.

Wild yeast starter is the base for most of my breads, but 1) I didn’t have any at the moment, and 2) I wanted the bread NOW. Well, 5 hours from now, not 25 hours from now.

And so it goes.

Here are my variations on the recipe: I used commercial starter, and mixed in some spelt, all-purpose, and whole-wheat flour into the bread flour, and I included potatoes on top.

Recipe for Picnic Bread

You will need:

For the Sponge
316g flour
316g water
2 teaspoons commercial yeast

For the Final Dough
316g flour
100g water
10g salt
1 tsp yeast

For the decoration
4 eggs
5 fingerling potatoes
5 pearl or other small onion
5-10 anchovies
1 egg yolk

Tools
Pastry scraper (not really necessary)
cookie sheet
parchment paper
oil for the bowl
rolling pin (again, not really necessary, but helpful)

Instructions:

Mix together the sponge ingredients and let this sit for an hour.

Add the flour and water from the Final Dough and knead for about five minutes. Autolyse for 30 minutes (autolyse means just to let it rest for a bit to give the flour time to absorb the water).

Now add the Final Dough salt and yeast.

Knead for a few minutes more and then transfer to an oiled bowl and let rise for 1.5 hours, folding it once at 45 minutes.

While the dough is proofing, rinse and cut up about:
5 fingerling potatoes
5 pearl or other small onions. I used golden onions.

Also, set out about 8-10oz of soft sheep’s or goat’s milk cheese and four eggs.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. When the dough is fully risen, divide it into two pieces. Set one piece aside. With the other piece, roll it out to about 1/2 inch thickness. Transfer it to a cookie pan lined with parchment paper and sprinkled with flour. Set the cheese in the middle.

With the piece you set aside, divide that in half and set one piece aside. With the other piece, roll out the dough into a circle slightly smaller than the first one. Use this piece to cover the cheese and use a little bit of water to seal the edges.

Now comes the fun part! Decorating! Take your eggs and poke a small hole with a needle or pin in each end. Supposedly this is to keep it from cracking but mine cracked anyway.

Take the final piece of dough and cut it into long strips. Use these strips to surround some of the pieces in a decorative way.

Now slop the whole thing with the egg yolk.

Bake for 25 minutes at 400 and then turn it down to 350 and bake another 25 minutes. Make sure it cools before cutting into it.

oh baby.

Nom nom nom.

So how does it taste? The bread itself is pretty basic (maybe next time I’ll use a starter to make the flavor more complex). But I loved the flavor of the anchovies and the cheese together that soak into the bread.

The onions were nice and sweet. The potatoes were, eh, I dunno. They were ok. Needed salt. That’s one of the problems of this bread- the eggs and potatoes are cooked raw, and the egg is in the shell, so it doesn’t impart any flavor or take flavor from the other ingredients.

The verdict? Mr. Bread Maiden wants to try the recipe again with bleu cheese, sausage, and the onions. Stay tuned.