#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.

Aside: Using a Cloche

I've mentioned a couple of time that I use a cloche or Romertopf lid frequently in baking. If you are interested, here is a brief description of what I do. If you are unfamiliar with it, a cloche is an unglazed stoneware dish with a bell-shaped lid (as shown in the first picture). Dating back to early Greeks and Romans, traditionally, it was used as a portable oven. Food was placed in the dish to bake, covered, and the embers were placed around the cloche. A cloche can be used for any form of baking, not just breads.

The cloche shown in the picture is a Superstone(r) La Cloche that's I had for years. Typically, the loaf is place in a dry cloche at room temperature and then the cloche is place in a hot oven. However, this is not what I do. Inspired by a demonstration by Lionel Vatinet at the Asheville Bread Festival a couple of years ago, I now pre-soak the lid. That is, I fill it with water and let it sit for 15 minutes or so as the oven, with a pizza stone, preheats. I carefully drain the water from the lid, place the loaf on the pizza stone, and then cover it with the lid and close the oven. (I do not use the bottom of the cloche.) After about 10 or 15 minutes, I carefully remove the lid and allow the loaf to finish baking.

CAUTION! You need to be very careful when removing the lid because a lot of steam and water vapor will be released from under the lid when you remove it. It is very, very easy to get a nasty burn if you aren't careful. Having a handle on the lid is a real convenience!

If you don't have a cloche or if you are working with a longer loaf, you can substitute a Romertopf lid for for the cloche lid. I use the cloche lid for boules and the Romertopf lid for bâtards. When working with the Romertopf lid, however, it is much more difficult to remove the lid from the baking stone safely. I slide the lid slightly to one side so it overhangs the edge of the stone, and I'm very careful to keep something between me and the escaping steam and water vapor.

Why bother? The cloche or Romertopf lid provides a micro-environment with a very large amount of steam. With this approach, I get much better results than I've ever gotten with the other approaches at generating steam, be it a cast iron pan filled with boiling water or ice on the floor of the oven. Indeed, there is no point in bothering with any of these other approaches if you are covering the bread with a cloche or Romertopf lid.

With this approach, you'll get a great oven spring. In fact, you need to be very careful. If you have a large loaf to begin with, it may expand enough so that it sticks to the lid!

Is the soaking really necessary? I don't really know. I've baked a second loaf following a first without resoaking the lid (for fear the hot lid would shatter if I tried to soak it), and it didn't seem to make much difference. I've also replace the lid once with a disposable foil pan when the loaf was clearly too big to fit under either of the lids I own. This is something I have heard about from others and it also seemed to work fine. But I already own both the cloche and the Romertopf so I've stuck with what I know works. But perhaps I play around with alternatives in the future. Stayed tuned.

#4: Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread

In The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Peter Reinhart has an extraordinary recipe for Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Bread that I've been making for several years. This is a wonderful, rich bread that stands on its own, or, that can be used to make an astonishing pain perdu. (I strongly recommend the recipe from America's Test Kitchen.) This bread is one of my all-time favorites.

So, when I bought a copy of Whole Grain Breads, the Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread was one of the first recipes I made. I've use this recipe to make both loaves of cinnamon bread and cinnamon rolls.

This is certainly a recipe that you can do variations on. For example, I often add nuts along with the cinnamon sugar prior to rolling up the loaf. An I've been known to augment or replace the raisins with dried cranberries or dried cherries. This time around, I went back and made the basic loaf using half the dough. (This is the bread on the right in the photo.) With the other half of the dough, I made a minor variation (shown on the left). After flattening the dough and dusting with cinnamon sugar, I added walnut before rolling the dough into a loaf. Also, when I took the loaf from the oven, I brushed it with butter and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on top, a suggestion from The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

This transitional recipe produces a very nice loaf of bread. The dough was shaggy and a bit harder to work with than most. The cooked loaf, while not what I would call dense, was substantial and chewy. The flavor is excellent and is almost as good any cinnamon bread that you are likely to find, whole grain or otherwise. Almost. In this case, Chef Reinhart has set the bar too high with his original recipe. And, compared to the original, this new loaf just doesn't quite measure up.