#9: Transitional Rye Hearth Seigle

This is the next step with rye. With this loaf, we have gone from 33% rye to 56% rye. And the rye flavor is beginning to come through.

With this loaf, we are shifting over to using a starter. Reinhart calls for a stiff (63% hydration), whole wheat mother starter. Unfortunately, my mother starter is a bread flour starter with 100% hydration. With this in mind, I worked backwards adjusting various levels to mimic what Reinhart calls for. Here's what I did: 71 grams of Reinhart's mother starter would contain 27 grams of water and 44 grams of whole wheat flour. So I used 54 grams of my mother starter (27 grams flour and 27 grams of water) to get the correct hydration and then added an additional 17 grams of flour. Also, I replaced 44 grams of the bread flour with whole wheat flour. Finally, I gave the starter for the loaf a little extra time to catch up.

And, (surprisingly?), this all seems to have worked quite well. This was a very pleasant loaf. I got a nice rise. It wasn't at all heavy. And it tasted great with peanut butter, the ultimate test for any rye bread.

#8: Transitional Rye Hearth Meteil

With this loaf and the next, we seem to be working our way through rye breads, slowly increasing the percentage of rye. And thus far, everything has gone fine.

As can be seen, I'm playing with flour and slash patterns. This one worked fairly well. The spiral was made with a series of short slashes. With rye breads, I sometimes have problems with the oven spring not fully filling the slashes. This time the spring was okay, but perhaps on the edge of what is acceptable.

I've been using medium rye flour from King Arthur's on these last few loaves (and the next). These have all be pleasant loaves, but none have had a particularly strong rye taste. For this loaf, I used the optional molasses and the lemon zest. There was a strong lemon aroma from the oven, but this did not carry over to the loaf.

For me, this was another good, solid competent recipe, but I was not blown away by the results.

#7: Transitional Multigrain Hearth Bread

So here is another multigrain bread. In baking this bread, I used all the optional seeds. And, as is my habit, I used a cloche. Everything went okay with the baking. With the scoring, I could only use a small stencil and didn't get a very clean edge. And, clearly, I didn't manage to get a very good picture.

I generally prefer this kind of multi-seed bread so I thought it was an okay bread. There certainly weren't any problems with it. But I really can't get excited about it. I've made a lot of breads in this style, and this one just didn't stand out. Perhaps it was this particular loaf. I don't have plans to make it again to see. There are simply too many other loaves that I know work and that I know I like to invest any more effort in this loaf.

#6: Transitional Country Hearth Bread

This was a very straight forward country loaf. I tried this recipe a couple of times. As can be seen, I played with a stencil the first try and tried to do some simple decorative shaping the second time around.

The stencil worked very well. This was a plastic stencil I bought at a hobby and crafts store. It was simply a matter of holding the stencil on the bread, dusting with flour, and carefully removing the stencil. This, of course, is done just before the bread goes into the oven.

With the shaped loaves, I did the cuts too soon. These cuts should have been made just before the loaves went into the oven. When I made the cuts, I wasn't quite ready to put the loaves into the oven. As a result, I didn't get the nice clean definition on the cut areas and the edges tended to round too much. It seems I learning how to make decorative breads one mistake at a time.

Overall, the loaves were quite pleasant. The preparation was straightforward and the directions were clear. Still, I've not been won over to whole grain breads yet.

#5: Transitional Challah

Challah was one of the first breads I learned to make, and I've made it many times. Frankly, a whole wheat version seems just a little strange to me. But then, challah is not part of my cultural heritage so perhaps this is just me.

At his presentation at the 2010 Asheville Bread Festival, Peter Reinhart remarked that the secret to good challah is the realization that egg whites tend to dry out the loaf. Replacing some or all of the whites with yokes gives a less dry loaf. This realization seems to have come to Reinhart gradually. In his 1999 book, Bread Upon the Waters, he uses four eggs. In both his 1998 Crust & Crumb and his 2001 Bread Baker's Apprentice, he uses two whole eggs and two yokes. By 2007, this transitional loaf calls for one egg and four yokes. In 2009, his Artisan Breads Every Day call for four-to-five yokes per loaf with no whites. This last recipe produced the best challah I've ever made by a wide margin. With this in mind, it might be interesting to make a similar adjustment to the transitional loaf. This is certainly something to keep in mind for our eventual return to Challah.

In making this bread, I used four strands of dough since this was the easiest way to do the division. (In the past I've played with other patterns including on attempt at a star. See the posts for my Hamelman Challenge for October 2010 if you are interested.) As it worked out, one strand was a bit too long so I had a little dough left over. I used this to add a bit of decoration to the loaf. (Gilding the lily perhaps?) Unfortunately, I ran this diagonally across one end of the loaf and as the loaf expanded, the decoration broke into two pieces.

Overall this is a good loaf but I prefer Reinhart's more recent recipe.