Today, I made a 40% kamut sourdough bread.

But what is kamut?

Kamut is an ancient grain thought to be a cousin of durum, with a grain that is at least twice the size of modern wheat. This grain comes with nice stories behind it and has many given names. In 1949, a US airman purchased 36 kernels from a vendor in Cairo who claimed to have taken them from a tomb of an ancient Egyptian king. He brought this grain to his father who had a farm and planted them. They called it King's Tut wheat but they had only small local success with it. It was just later in the 1990 that kamut became a commercial success after being trademarked to protect and guarantee that it would be grown organically and unmodified. Demand started to grow when people found kamut to be more easily digested and more flavoured compared to modern wheat varieties.

Although the last part of the story is certain, the origin of this grain is debatable as it is highly unlikely that wheat grains could sprout after 2000 years as the seeds' ability to germinate is almost lost during this time.

Another legend says that Noah brought this khorasan wheat with him on the ark, from where, another name for kamut is the “Prophet’s Wheat".

Also, the farmers in Turkey call the grain “Camel’s Tooth” because of its specific shape.

Kamut flour has a yellowish colour and tends to have higher water absorption. A dough made with it, forms good elasticity but is less well performing in extensibility, resulting in dough with less volume and denser texture.

 

I baked on purpose the same dough with different seed additions. This is the 3rd one of the series. The speciality of this bread is the sunflower seeds. Compared to the previous ones (chia and poppy seeds), the sunflower seeds are bigger in size. Its tip is very stiff and acts like a needle when touches a bubble. 

I did not hydrate the seeds before because I still wanted them on the crunchy side. Therefore, no wonder that from all, this was the less bumpy loaf.

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In terms of taste and flavour, the poppy seeds version had the most pronounced nutty version. Which one do I prefer the most....hmmm difficult to choose from these fantastic loaves. Each is different and each is gorgeous. Maybe I should continue the experiment with other types of seeds. But until then, here is the recipe...

Should I call this Poppy Seeds Sourdough Bread or Poppy Seeds with Sourdough Bread?

 

When I put myself on autopilot because I just need bread for our family I go for a recipe that I know it works. This doesn't mean that it has to be boring. Adding seeds at the lamination step may change the game. Depending on the type of seeds you add, the flavour is enriched with a nutty-specific taste from the seeds.

My next 3 posts will be about the same recipe but each time I change the seeds. This first one is with chia seeds. Chia seeds are super thirsty, you do not want to add them as such in your bread. You'll need then to keep them in water to become moist. Do this the evening before or at least when your mixer combines the flour with water, in the morning.

Adding seeds to bread not only enriches the taste but also adds nutritional value to the loaves. As you might already know, chia seeds are a very healthy ingredient, so I can only see advantages in adding them to the dough.

What do you think? Does it worth a try?

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Making artisan sourdough bread is not simple and I recognise it. It took me years to experiment, learn,  note, understand and progress. The pandemic time made sourdough a star... it became so popular that everybody wanted to do it. Many made their own starter, others borrowed starter. Many launched themself into baking, some got the sourdough "virus" and continued to bake, and others slowly slowly dropped making it due to less time or they were not very satisfied with the results and finally, their starter died somewhere in the fridge.

But there is a huge mass of people hearing about sourdough who never tried or, tried once, failed and easily gave up. Do you recognise yourself in one of the categories above?

I find myself in the category of people starting to bake bread with sourdough years before the pandemic, intensifying and learning much more during those 2 years and continuing to experiment nowadays. Learning about sourdough is a subject that I'll probably do my whole life as you never feel you know enough.

But for those newbies and for those busy persons who never have time to make 15 steps to put a loaf on the table I made a recipe that simplifies the entire process:

Simplifying is a complex process in itself when you talk about sourdough. You can take out a step if you know what is the impact. Would you be able to still get an acceptable result? I've run maybe a dozen of bakes for this recipe to get it right. But I've learned even more about the importance of each step.

I need to confess that I have a love-and-hate relationship with open-crumb sourdough bread. While I am super excited when I cut it and see these lovely big alveoli and feel proud that I managed to catch the fermentation just at the right moment, my excitement goes lower when I agree with my daughter saying "mommy, there are too many big holes in this slice for the butter to stay!" To this practicality issue, no argument that "it is the best fermented bread" and that "I mastered the process" does not stay up.

I've played so much lately with semolina flour for making bread because I like its taste and because I find it such a fantastic type o flour. 

Semolina is my new obsession. I knew about semolina since I was a child and my mother was making milk porridge with it. It was one of my preferred breakfasts. Little did I know that it will later become one of my favourite ingredients for bread.

 When you make a dough combining multiple types of flours you should be very careful about the effect each dough has. Usually, if you put a type of flour in a percentage lower than 10%, the influence is minimal in the dough consistency and mild in the taste. When you increase this percentage, the characteristics of this specific flour start to be noticed. 

I made this bread with 3 types of flour: whole wheat, spelt and bread flour. Whole wheat is more absorbent and impedes the gluten network to develop easily. That's why a trick is to hydrate the whole wheat flour the day before so that the bran is softened through better hydration. The spelt flour adds elasticity to the dough. This means that you can stretch it more. The extensibility of the dough then has to be created by adding an extra coil fold. (the 4th one). The bread flour I used, although with 13% protein content was also very extensible and less absorbent than others I normally use. With these characteristics, making this bread is tricky.

First time I tried it I was not very happy with its dough structure and I over fermented it. The bread was perfectly eatable but for sure, was not what I expected it to be.

With the lessons learned from this first failed attempt, I focused on improving 2 things: dough handling and reduced fermentation time while keeping the list and quantity of ingredients exactly the same. To build a better structure, I added a 4th coil fold. For the fermentation, I definitely understood that this combination of flours, had to have a higher ph than 4.15 (as my previous test was). I shaped it then at ph 4.33 and put it in the fridge at 4.25. Only these 2 changes transformed a recipe from zero to hero.

This is a perfect example of improving the method and not changing the ingredients or their quantity. The method matters! There are many methods out there that make fantastic loaves of bread but you need to master yours and know the implications of changing it.

Open crumb is a dream for any baker for its imposing outside and inside look. 

Open crumb was and still is for me a challenge. The truth is that I do not chase it every time. There are other types of bread catching my attention too from different perspectives. But open crumb is about perfecting the fermentation which is the most important in the sourdough baking process.
It is the jewel of a baker although I know many who will not make or buy an open crumb but a more dense one.

I tried to gather in this video all my lessons learned and share them with you. I hope that you take a shorter way to perfect open crumb than I took, and I offer you what I wish I had known 8 years ago when I started baking sourdough bread for me and my family.

However, this is not the bread to spread butter on.  Pick rather a sandwich loaf.

Do you believe in baking moods? Do you believe that your mood will influence your baked food? I don't. However, there are many times when I am not too much in a baking mood but I have to bake bread to feed my family. The results are most of the time in line with my mood. Other times, when my baking motivation is high, the results are diverse: worse, medium or over expectations.

Lately, I haven't been very inspired to bake bread but I did it anyway because we needed it. But baking for me is a passion and when I feel tired or uninspired I just need a break to recharge. 

This is exactly what I did. Last week, I took a little break from everything, from job, from baking, from other passions and generally from the daily routine. Instead, I visited a dear friend, brought the kids to a zoo and to an animal wild park. These few days made miracles, and everybody from the family enjoyed it. In the last day, I felt I missed my kitchen and trying new baked things. Yes, that was exactly what I was looking for and this little break put me back on track as I came home full of energy and with plenty of new ideas.

I switched to a new recipe that I believed it would fit to my open crumb purpose. I went for a 20% whole wheat, a high hydration bread closed to 80% and planned to change some variables to see how the results would influence my loaves.

These photos are probably speaking by themselves. Leaving the modesty behind, I call this one of the best open crumb I've ever made. Open crumb for me was never the perfect bread I can produce. Open crumb is about mastering the process in order to control the results. But perfection comes with the process, not with the end result. There is no such thing as one perfect bread, there are many perfect loaves but depends on the occasion and what you are trying to achieve. There can be perfect sandwich bread, perfect rye bread, perfect whole wheat bread and so on,  and yes, there can be the perfect open crumb bread. This is what I was targeting, this is what I've got. Was this related to my high baking mood? It is an interesting link but I believe in science and practice more than in the alignment of the stars in my horoscope. 

Do I master the process then? Well, this comes with consistency in baking and most probably I have stepped with the right foot ahead. However, the journey is much more enjoyable than the result itself, right?

To my classical process, I made little changes and I will take them one by one to speak about these changes. In my next bake, I will try to isolate the variables to see the direct impact on the final product but for this bake, they worked very well together.

1. Hydration of the whole wheat in advance.

Hydrating the whole wheat flour in advance is not new to me. I've done it before and the results were noticeable. There is a simple logic behind it: whole wheat contains the bran of the wheat grain and it is taking much longer for the bran to hydrate than it takes for the flour. This recipe contains 20% whole wheat flour. So, the day before making the bread I hydrated the whole wheat with almost the same amount of water (reaching 100% hydration for this mini dough)and left it on the counter in the kitchen overnight. My kitchen is cold these days during the night, it barely gets 15ºC so no worries about extra enzymatic activity in the flour through my 8 hours time sleep. During the summer, I would put it in the fridge to stay safe.

2. More frequent coil folds

The bran from the whole wheat acts as a barrier in the gluten formation. Reorganising the dough more often helps with the structure and makes that only the strong bonds are kept and the weak ones are rebuilt into new stronger ones. I had started with the idea of making one coil fold every 30 minutes. This resulted in 8 coil folds. I have never done so many for a dough. As a practice, it was a little disturbing to babysit the dough every 30 minutes with a coil fold but well... when you are motivated you are not too much bothered.

3. Increased fermentation.

Pushing the fermentation to a higher extent is one of the key elements in achieving an open crumb bread. I knew that and the most tricky question is how much? What was the sweet spot? I usually put my loaves in the fridge for the retard when the ph is around 4.2. But what if I would stretch it up until 4.1? Would this be too much? Could I push it lower than 4.1?

4. Optimise the time between scoring and baking.

One of the things I've noticed is that my 2 loaves that I bake together look different. They come from the same dough so fermentation is not a high factor. But my usual process is to decorate and score the first loaf and then pass to the second and put them both together in the oven. I also tried to put already the first one in the oven after the scoring and decoration were over but it was not the best process as this first loaf would bake alone without steam until the second one was ready to go in the oven. So what I have tried was to decorate both the loaves, pass to scoring both and then put them in the oven. In this way there was no bread waiting for the other after scoring.

All these changes had for sure an important role to play in the process but some probably influenced more than the others.

Let's analyse a bit each of these changes.

The hydration of the whole wheat flour in advance was for sure a good idea. I felt in my hands a dough that was not breaking easily. This is for sure a keeper for my next attempt.

The frequent coil folds had a good impact in organising the dough and it made a fantastic net in the crumb. But, man... 8 coil folds... is a bit overkill. More coil folds is a good idea but distanced at 45 minutes maybe it would be easier (hoping that it won't destroy the beautiful crumb) next time.

Fermentation was an absolute key here. With a perfect gluten development, the fermentation at 4.14ph when shaping and 4.11ph when putting it in the fridge was matching perfectly. I am sure it would accept  even a bit lower ph but not without an impact:

• bigger holes. I actually do not want them bigger, I want a slice still to remain tangible without seeing everything through it. Like this, it is perfect to accompany any dish and even to spread butter on it. Larger holes would make the loaf only suitable for soups and won't be able to hold anything soft on it. 
• losing the ear. It is very probable that with a higher fermentation when exposed to heat, the bacteria won't have enough power to open an ear. Even if this is just a visual aspect and I know people who would avoid bread with ear when choosing from a shelf, it is for me proof of catching the sweet spot of fermentation.

I continue the adventure with traditional French loaves and I travel from Bordeaux (in one of my previous posts) to Lyon. Similar flower look but with a different way of shaping it. Wich one do you like better? I think each one has its own charm, so for me is difficult to choose.

Like the previous one, the dough is made by a number of dough balls arranged in a circle in the basket. Both Bordeaux and Lyon versions have a flap. For the Bordeaux version, one of the balls is flattened and the dough balls are put over. In the case of the Lyon version, a flap is created for each ball of dough. This version has a more petal look and the other one is more of a circle that is rising in the oven. Both of them are outstanding in terms of design and I can only thank the French to invent these amazing loaves.

Like the other crown bread, this one is traditionally based on sourdough and made from white flour combined with a bit of rye flour. The crust is crunchy, the crumb is dense but soft and this is the way is traditionally made. The dough needs to be stiff to keep the shapes of the balls. The bread is straight, meaning that there is no overnight retard, for the same shape reasons. 

I visited Lyon more than 20 years ago and unfortunately, I was not aware back then of this fantastic bread. If I have the chance to visit again this beautiful town, trying this local bread would be one of the first things to do.

I know that Christmas is gone already for 1 month but this bake was too interesting to wait for the next Christmas to post.

I wanted to try this loaf from the moment I first saw it. I though to be a complicated one but I manage to get it from the first attempt. The special thing about this bread is not the crumb, not the rise but the shape. It is about rising a thin piece of dough on top of the bread to achieve the look of a crown.

There was a type of bread that I wanted to bake and it was  time to try it. The marbled bread.