"Shapeless" sourdough bread with wine, rye and spelt

Look at the silly title. Maybe to call the post "all-round kitchen leftovers bread" or even "crisis bread", because of using up leftovers, would have been more accurate.

The shapeless thing is because it hardly has any shape, you can see it in the picture. I didn't feel like deflating the fermented dough very much, so I just folded it like a ciabatta, but without much interest. I had a lazy day. Another one. The leftover thing comes from using a mix of a white spelt leftover from a 5 kg sack, mixed with semi-whole rye and spelt, Dutch sourdough and last but not least, some Viña Mayor red wine which had been standing in my fridge for ages. It's not that I don't like wine, but it lately doesn't seem to agree with me and my partner-in-crime prefers beer... damn him. Mr. Lepard, the king of leftovers usage, would be very proud of me.

And... I told myself I could bake half the bread in the artifact that's shown in the picture, just to pass the time. The German name is "Römertopf", the same as the trademark. The meaning is "roman pot", quite nice. As far as I've read it's quite common in Germany. My mother got it as a gift thousands of years ago. She didn't find it interesting to use, so she passed it to me. She knows I love kitchen gear. So far I have used it mostly for roasting chickens. The result is delicious, they get a perfect browned and crispy skin, in spite of the lid, and you get plenty of sauce.

As in any clay pot the heat is well distributed and being that you must soak it in water for 10 minutes before putting it in the oven, all these moisture is supposed to be released inside the pot to keep the food tender and juicy.

Therefore, on a beautiful and warm April night I got down to work... ahem. I'm giving the formula but I don't know what for, it makes no sense:

Leftovers sourdough bread with wine

• 390 g semi-whole rye and spelt sourdough, 50% hydration, just doubled in volume, perfectly bubbly
  
• 130 g red wine (I was afraid to put too much and end up with a black-and-blue bread)
  
• 80 g water
  
• 120 g white spelt flour (the leftover flour in the sack)
  
• 290 g semi-whole spelt flour
  
• 2 teaspoons Himalaya salt
  
• 2 tablespoons gluten (Mrs. Guru advice, though I didn't dare to add as much as she does
  

I put everything into my stand mixer (my precioussssss), except the salt, and I mixed it just to blend. I left it to stand for some 10 minutes and then I added the salt. After some brief shakes I left it in an oiled bowl, well covered with a night cap, to proof overnight in the fridge. By the way, after the advice of Nils the Great, I added the wine cold from the fridge.

The next day I took it out of the fridge and left it to temper at around 9 AM. Then I left it ferment for 5 hours, till 2 PM, with an intermediate folding exactly like a love letter. I never get these kind of dough, with spelt and rye, to grow much, so I never quite know when to stop the fermentation. I divided the dough in two parts and folded them like ciabattas, more or less, trying to deflate them as little as possible, and left them standing for another hour. Then to the oven for 45 minutes, previously heated up to 250 ºC. I put then one in the Römertopf (which had been lying in the oven after soaking) and the other one on the tiles in my oven. The latter got 4 water sprays along the first 10 minutes baking. The result is plain to be seen: The loaf in the pot looks wonderful, it's ripped in the middle without any score and has a white floured surface. And I can tell you I got my glasses all misted up when I opened the pot because of the amount of steam inside. The load outside the pot was a lot uglier, too toasted on some sides, and the flour on the surface is not apparent because of the water spraying, I guess. Also the loaf opened down under, uneducated behaviour, what an ill-mannered loaf.

And... the bread is delicious, with a more airy crumb than ever before, I guess because of the added gluten, I don't know. The crust is perfect for me, neither too soft nor too hard, crispy, crispy... mmmm so thrilling. I've already had two slices and I only regret that I've run out of butter, damn damn damn. It has the sour flavour of sourdough, but I hardly notice the taste of wine, it's not even evident in the color. My fear to add too much wine was pointless. Next time I will soak the bread in wine... hics.

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Rye sourdough bread with cider

I'm still in the mood for baking bread, experimenting. Now with a semi-whole rye sourdough, originally developed from some sourdough my friend Lourdes, who lives in the Netherlands (dutch yeasties!), kindly brought me and adding only white wheat bread flour, everything from Rincón del Segura. And to use up some leftovers, with natural cider I had in my fridge for ages instead of water.


Rye sourdough bread with cider

• 270 g semi-whole rye sourdough
  
• 470 g plain bread flour
  
• 260 g cider
• 2 teaspoons salt
  

I used the same method as in the previous post, so I won't repeat it. The only difference is that I baked one of the bâtards inside my dutch oven and the other one outside, just on the tiles I have in my oven for baking stone. And as it can be seen in the picture both bâtards have a different look in spite of them having undergone the same process and having almost the same size. The bread baked in the dutch oven is the right one. Besides growing more symetrically, the crust had a more uniform and nice color, toasted and orange, instead of brownish. The dutch yeastie beasties liked my dutch oven... Both breads had the richest smell of cider in spite of it not being very evident in their taste. A delicious bread, with a crispy crust, with the scores nicely open and showing gluten fibers. Maybe the bread could have had a bigger oven spring even though the initial dough was not very liquid. No doubt I will use the dutch oven again for baking bread, it's a pity my oven is not big enough to fit the two dutch ovens I have.

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Sourdough bread with rye and spelt

I'm in the mood for baking bread. I've taken up again on sourdough and feel like practising different techniques. I've got the impression that my stand-mixer doesn't bring out the best in the dough. I decided to hand-knead this bread, French method here. As I always end up with absurd amounts of sourdough because I refuse to throw away a single bit, the recipe I used is as follows:


Sourdough bread with rye and spelt

• 500 g (18oz) whole spelt sourdough, 50% hydration
• 200 g (7oz) refined spelt flour
• 150 g (5.3oz) semi-whole rye flour
• 150 g (5.3oz) water
• 1 tablespoon wheat germ
• 2 teaspoons Himalayan salt (or any other good salt)
• 1/2 teaspoon gluten
  
• Splash of maple syrup (optional)
  

All these flours are organic and come from Rincón del Segura. I added the maple syrup on an impulse, I'm hooked lately, it's deliciousssss.

To add gluten... well, if rye and spelt flours have less gluten than white wheat, why not supplement with some added gluten? I've found some references on adding gluten to rye breads, but I'm not sure of the ratio. I've got to make some tests.

Back to my point. Mix all the ingredients (I did use my stand mixer for this), except the salt. Leave it to rest for 10 minutes (autolysis) and then add the salt. Integrate the salt and put the dough on the counter. Be rough on the dough "a la française" at least during 10 minutes (the guy in the video talks about beating it 600 times), shape it into a ball, put it into an oiled bowl, cover with plastic and leave it in the fridge overnight.

Next morning take the bowl out of the fridge and let it warm up to ambient temperature. Rye and spelt dough doesn't rise as much as white wheat dough, at least mine didn't, so don't expect it to double in bulk. Shape the dough as you like, I made bâtards and heat up your oven to 250 ºC (480ºF). I usually leave the shaped dough to proof on an oven tray with a floured cloth and inside a plastic bag. This is a recommendation by Peter Reinhart. After one hour more or less I put the bread in the oven with my mock wood peel on my mock oven stone... and then sprayed it three times with water during the first 5 minutes. For a super rustic look I had sprayed the bâtons with water and sprinkled some rolled cereal just before putting them in the oven. They baked for half an hour, more or less, but I always check for doneness with a thermometer. According to Peter Reinhart the inner temperature must be somewhere around 95 ºC (200ºF) when properly baked, at least for white bread. And then out to cool down on a grid.

In the picture it can be seen that in spite of the dense crumb characteristic of rye and whole breads, my bread had some big holes in it. I don't really know where they came from. The bread had a delicious flavour. It was a great success in some family meal and there wasn't a single crumb left.

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Doughnuts according to Dan Lepard

This doughnut recipe comes from the book "Baking with passion", by Dan Lepard. It is a traditional dumplingish recipe, similar to many used throghout Europe and the final result is very much like some doughnuts I've had in some areas of Spain. It's not difficult to make but you have to consider that the three leavening periods take time, so you better make it some day you're planning to be at home. I thought it was a great idea for some "merienda" with friends and their kids, without preservation nor coloring agents, perfect for impressing the other mothers, in spite of them being friends... By the way, I strongly recommend the book, I've already made a lot of the recipes and all were good. Here goes the recipe:


Doughnuts by Dan Lepard

• 1 package quick acting dry yeast
• 175 ml (0.7 cup) tepid milk, around 20 ºC
• 170 g (6oz) all-purpose flour
• 280 g (10oz) bread flour
• 1 teaspoon Maldon salt (I used pink Himalayan salt, sorry!)
• 85 g (3oz) softened butter
• 2 beaten eggs
• Lemon peel
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• Sunflower oil

Prepare the sponge mixing the yeast, plain flour and tepid milk. Mix well, cover with plastic and leave to rise at least one third in volume or until active and bubbly. The recipe calls for 2 hours rising, but my sponge doubled in half an hour, scary. This yeast I used is not superquick, it's virulent! It depends on the milk temperature though, I didn't check that it was exactly at 20 ºC. Well, my sponge almost overflowed the counter and crawled to the dining room. Apart from this dangerous virulence, once the sponge has run wild, mix it with the bread flour and the salt. You can use whatever you like for this, a stand-mixer, do it by hand, you name it. Then add the butter piece by piece and mix it thoroughly. Then the eggs all at once and mix again. Finally add the sugar, lemon peel and cinnamon. I didn't add the cinnamon, just in case some of the kids had some cinnamon trauma, and I put liquid lemon extract instead of the peel, it's easier... so what? I felt a sudden struck of laziness.

Once all the ingredients are mixed, knead the way you prefer, by hand or machine, until the dough is smooth and elastic. Then form it into a ball, place it in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic film. Leave it to double in bulk.

Once risen, put the dough on the counter and spread it so that you can cut it in 20 equal pieces (well, more or less equal, you know artisan doughnuts are very whimsical...). Roll each piece into a ball, if you've ever made sand balls at the beach you won't find it difficult. You can either make a hole putting your finger through the center to make doughnuts or just flatten them a little bit and leave them as they are to have something similar to Berliner ballen (I've got to try these some day, filled with cream...). The hole must have a minimum diameter of 2 cm and the doughnut ring must be slim, because they rise up quite a bit.

Put them on a floured surface in whatever shape you prefer, cover with a cloth and leave to rise for 40-50 minutes. I left them for a longer time, although they seemingly dried a bit too much on top because of the very dry atmosphere of the bleak arid Iberian plateau where I live, different from the humid England where the recipe comes from... Maybe I should have sprayed the cloth with some water. But the drying was not an obstacle for them to rise up another bit while frying. So once they've risen enough, fry them in a pan with a couple centimeters or less than an inch sunflower oil. Sunflower oil is recommended in Spain for frying sweetmeats, because of its mild flavor. Be careful with the oil temperature, it mustn't be too hot, because the doughnuts brown quickly. Please don't do anything else in the meantime, test the temperature and concentrate on it! Fry them around 2 minutes on one side and 1 minute on the other. The recipe advises to pat them dry with a paper towel and then cover them in sugar. I skipped the paper towel thing, didn't look like absorbing too much oil to me, so I put them in the sugar straight away (well, in fructose for my jelly rolls to grow 1 1/2 inch instead of 2 inches). You can keep them for some days in a plastic bag, but they taste much better just out of the pan. And we found them indeed delicious, very light and fluffy. The children loved them and the doughnuts they left were eaten by the adults... no food wasted at my place!

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Sourdough ciabattas with spelt

I hadn't baked bread for days so I was eager to do it again. I spent 2 days affectionately feeding my little whole spelt sourdough, out of the fridge, till it was ready to be used for baking a bread. The black spots in the picture are raisins which I used to kick the yeastie-beasties resurrection. If you're interested in good tutorials and advice on bread baking and sourdough, check this site. There's everything you wanted to know about sourdough but never dared to ask.

I frequently use Ibán's recipe for a simple 2-pounds bread: 0.4lb sourdough, 0.6lb water and 1lb flour. (I talked about Ibán here.) As I had 0.88lb of sourdough instead of 0.4lb and I wanted to use it all, I adapted Ibán's quantities like this:

• 0.87lb whole spelt sourdough
• 0.37lb water
• 0.77lb strong white flour

But I got lost somewhere on my way and I swapped the flour and water quantities... so after mixing with my precioussss radiant-red Kenwood Patissier stand-mixer I got something very similar to a baby's pap... what had happened? I had put my foot in it again? Yap. So I had to add tons of flour to get to something kneadable. Of course I didn't measure the excess flour, that's why I can't give you the exact amount. Typical of me. Scientific method is called. Thanks to my wonderful planning skills I ended up with something close to 3lb of dough. Never mind. Of course you have to add at least 2 teaspoons salt. I usually do it after the initial mixing and a 5-minute rest. Being that my stand-mixer doesn't admit any more than 1.2lb flour I had to knead by hand, not very good for my tennis elbow. I used Richard Bertinet method, perfect for very wet doughs like ciabatta's. Please check this video. I was extremely lucky to learn this method live from Ibán at La cocina de Babette. Incidentally, I strongly recommend the book by Bertinet "Dough" that, in spite of not using sourdough, it's a good book and includes a very illustrative video on his kneading method.

After the initial kneading I left my dough resting in a bowl for say... more than an hour and a half, I had some translations to do! I'm a working woman! So I had to postpone some Bertinet violent kneading till after lunch. Kneading is so amazingly good to get rid of all your frustrations... I kneaded it for 10 minutes till the dough was nicely elastic and then I put it in an oiled bowl covered with a nice plastic shower cap, the kind you get in hotel rooms (another thing I learnt at Babette).

Once the dough had doubled in volume, I spread it on a well floured counter, deflated it just a little bit with the palm of my hand and folded it in four ciabatta shapes. I carefully lay the four ciabattas in four nice linen-lined baskets, dredged in flour. There's no way I could explain it better than in this video. I put each basket inside a plastic freezer bag and put it in the fridge overnight.

The morning after I took them out first thing in the morning for them to temper and heated up my oven to the maximum (250 ºC, 480ºF). They had expanded quite a lot in spite of the cold.

I decided to try and bake them in a dutch oven, according to Bea's advice. This type of pot is called "dutch oven" in some places, but for me it's always been a "cocotte", the French name well known to many Spaniards, owners of a very famous cookbook by Simone Ortega. And I've had a "mademoiselle cocotte" for years that of course I had never used to bake bread before! Voilá!

I baked 2 ciabattas in the cocotte and the other 2 just on the garden tiles that I use as sophisticated baking stone... ahem. Frankly, dear, I didn't find a very clear difference between both methods. Maybe the crust color of the cocotte ciabattas was nicer, more golden and less chocolatey than the others. According to Bea of La cocina de Babette, spelt has a different behaviour than normal strong white flour. I should try with regular bread flour to really see the difference. Another pending test. By the way, I shouldn't say so myself, but the bread was de-li-ciousssss.

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Chestnut gnocchi

I don't remember how I came to find this recipe, but I thought it was very interesting. And good to go on with my recent chestnut craze. Also good to get rid of another foodstuff excess, of chestnuts namely. Chestnuts counterbalance the carbohydrates content of the gnocchi with some proteins. Besides I felt like playing with some dough, like a child at the beach. The recipe comes from this website of some chestnut growers in Michigan, with quite some original recipes.

Kuepper's chestnut gnocchi (adapted)

• 10 ounces potato, peeled
  
• 6 ounces chestnuts, roasted, peeled
• 1 each egg yolk
• 1 each egg
• 1/2 cup bread flour
• 1 pinch nutmeg
• 1/2 ounce butter
• salt, to taste
• pepper, to taste

Boil the potatoes with the chestnuts. Once cooked, rice them and mix thoroughly. Add the butter, egg and yolk and mix. Add the flour to this mixture until you obtain a dough that is stiff enough. Although the recipe doesn't say, after adding the indicated amount of flour I made one gnocchi to boil it and check the final consistency. The amount of flour depends on the amount of liquid and the flour's ability to hydrate, so it can be very variable. Eggs can have various sizes and the potatoes and chestnuts can absorb more or less water. I had to add almost double amount of flour. The final gnocchi must not dissolve in the water, it should feel similar to regular store-bought pasta. By the way, I used spelt flour instead of white flour, I'm a big fan. My gnocchi were acceptable the second time I tested the dough.

Back to my story... when the dough has reached the desired consistency, add a good pinch of nutmeg and salt to taste. Well, if you have a bottle of nutmeg ever since you got married, as if it was a wedding present like me, add two or three pinches, liberally. And now the funny part: roll nice strips of dough (mine were less than 1 cm thick and not very long) and cut them in small portions with a knife, like tiny butterfly pillows. Then you indent the pillows one by one with a fork, to make the characteristic indentations of well-bred gnocchi... I'm sorry, I haven't got any pictures of this step, my hands were far too sticky, but you can watch this funny video. By the way, after forming boil the gnocchi 4 or 5 minutes in salty water. The gnocchi that are not used straight away can be easily frozen scattered on a tray and later put into plastic freezer bags.


Picture of the frother addressing the masses. Observe the shabby look of the gnocchi... their look is far from perfect, but what a character! Isn't this the charm in handmade things? That there are no two of them that look the same? Don't they look like dough cubes that have been trodden by an astronaut? They're ugly, but I love them all the same. That very night I prepared them with some diced bacon, minced garlic fried in olive oil and the drippings of the bacon, plus some parmesan shreds (I had run out of manchego, porca miseria). I admit the chestnut flavour was far from evident... but who cares after spending half the evening at play with dough, cutting strips in gnocchi and getting dirty? Mmmmm, what a healthy regression to childhood.

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Doctor Zhivago and many more

No recipes today. Maurice Jarre died a few days ago. He wrote many familiar soundtracks like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's daughter and some others for director David Lean. Among his less classical works I love also The year of living dangerously and Witness... There was a time when the Oscar for best soundtrack went to people like him...

Check this video.

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