Pumpkin Seed Bread (a work in progress)

Pumpkin Seed Bread

When I was in Ireland, Egnatius' father brought home some bread. Usually, I'm not a big fan of sandwich bread, but this bread was fantastic. Really fantastic. It was some kind of multigrain or whole grain bread with pumpkin seeds. However, I couldn't figure out what was in it.

Scrolling though Yeast Spotting, I discovered this bread which looked exactly like it. So, I thought, why not try it?

Pumpkin Seed Spelt Sandwich Bread

Ingredients

• 250 g whole wheat 100% starter
• 200 g water + a little bit extra for adjustments and soaking the grains (maybe 50g extra?)
• 300 g fresh ground spelt flour
• 50 g bread flour
• 1 tablespoon flax seeds
• 1 tablespoon amarneth
• 4 tablespoons pumpkin seeds (mine were dry roasted, but you can do either)
• 6 g salt
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions

• Place all ingredients except salt, oil and honey in the bowl of the mixer. Mix for a minute low, cover and let stand 15 minutes. 
• Repeat a minute of mixing and 15-minute rest. I would do this by hand, because my mixer didn't like the dough for some reason.
• Add salt and honey and mix on low speed (or mix by hand), when they are integrated add oil, a tablespoon at a time, or five minutes when we got a soft dough up a little speed and knead for another minute. 
• Remove the dough and place it in a bowl, cover and leave for two hours doing slightly folded table in the same bowl every half hour, a total of three sets of folds. 
• Remove the dough to a lightly floured surface and spread with the palms of your hands into a rectangle, roll a way that is somewhat shorter than the mold that will be used. 
• Grease the mold slightly and place the bread inside, paint the surface with water and place a handful of pumpkin seeds over lightly pressing them to make them stick to the wet dough, and cover.
• Place it in the refrigerator overnight.
• In the morning, let it sit out for about half an hour while the oven heats up.
• Bake in preheated oven at 390 ° F, and bake five minutes and lower the temperature to 350 ° -375° F, bake half an hour in total, first 15 minutes under steam.

Bread

The bread still needs a lot of work. If anyone has ideas, I'd love to hear them. While the final proofing was certainly sufficient, I think that the bulk fermentation didn't quite work. Furthermore, I think that I'm still not quite getting the best results out of my home-ground flour. Supposedly adding diastatic malt powder will help. However, I'm up for any ideas.

Also, I think my pumpkin seeds were a bit old so they weren't quite as flavorful as I might have hoped.  I also cooked it way too hot because I wasn't paying proper attention and I didn't steam it properly.

The original version was much lighter and arier, but that might have been because she used white spelt and vital wheat gluten. I think this bread has potential, but I need to do some experimentation.

100% Spelt Bread

100% Spelt Bread; All pictures by Servia

My plan this weekend was to make some 100% Whole Wheat bread to continue the 100% Whole Wheat project. However, I got sidetracked.

Wondermill Junior Delux

As I mentioned, Egnatius gave me a grain mill for Christmas. I also mentioned that the tork on the grinder was threatening to break the table. Well, Servia went down to our garage and out that we hard a workbench-type-table that we hadn't seen in a few years (because it was upside down). So, we hauled it upstairs and, lo-and-behold, the grain mill works!

When I came back from mixing the dough, Gorgo was by the grain mill

Little Gorgo was so entranced she wanted to pose by it.

Anyway, I bought some whole spelt kernels at whole foods the other day. They were much cheaper than buying the flour, interestingly enough. So I decided to try out the grinder on the workbench last night. And it worked really well! The flour was a little coarser than one might get in a bag (I have had to use the metal grinders instead of the stone ones because there is still grit in anything ground by the stones). However, it was still awesome.

Hand-ground spelt

My father and his friend who was over for dinner said it was the best bread they've ever tasted. I thought it was delicious, but it was a little sweet for me.

First, I'd like to share my research. I decided to make the bread because of txfarmer's amazing bread. I decided that I wanted to make this, but the loaf looked like it was going to be quite small so I doubled it. I didn't want to double the sweetener, though, so I just used 40g of agave. I also stole a few tricks from the breadtopia recipe that she referenced.

Ingredients:
210g Spelt starter (100% hydration)
596g Spelt Flour
400g water
40g agave necter (you can replace this with honey).
14g  salt

Directions:

•  If you don't have a spelt starter, take a spoonful of your usual starter and feed it with X water and X spelt. Let it ripen until it passes the float test. If you have a spelt starter, skip this step
• Combine starter, flour, water, salt, and agave in a mixing bowl and mix until completely combined. I mixed a vitamin C tablet in with mine, but I actually don't think this helped the gluten like I thought it would. It didn't seem to negatively impact the flavor.

My new mortar and pestle that I used to crush the vitamin C tablet

• Let the bread autolyse for 20-60 minutes. I let it for 60 minutes because the kitchen was fairly cold.
• I did a few stretch-and-folds and then let the bread rise for 2h at 80 degrees F, with a stretch-and-fold every half hour.
• Then I put the bread, covered tightly with plastic wrap, in the refridgerator overnight.

The next morning:

• I took the bread out and did a preshape.
• I let the bread bench rest for 45 minutes.
• Then I did a final shaping and put it in the banneton.
• I let it do a final proof for 2.5h at 80 degrees.
• Then I baked it at 440 degrees F convection, under steam for the first 35 minutes and then for another 15 minutes. Unfortunately, this was far too hot, so I had to cover the bread with tin foil and then let it finish until it read at 212 degrees.

Servius and his friend said it was the best bread they've ever had. More information soon.

Land of Dreams? A Visit to Tartine Bakery

Tartine's Bakery

This has been quite a stressful quarter. So I came up with a crazy scheme to go to Anderson Valley with a bunch of my friends. Catullus II, upon hearing this idea, actually did all of the research and set up the trip. So Egnatius, Catullus II, and some other friends jumped in an SUV and toured Anderson Valley. On our way back, we stopped in San Francisco for the day. One of the places we went was the magical and wonderful Tartine Bakery which produces the book that saved my ability to bake bread, Tartine Bread.

Tartine Bakery is in a little unmarked building in the mission district. It's cute and all of the tables inside were taken. There were delicious chocolate cakes in the display case and you could smell it from an entire block away. I was really excited to be there at exactly 5pm to get the bread and I thought there would be a line out the door and only a few varieties of bread available like they say in the book.

Bannetons waiting for bread.

We got there at around 4:40pm. The bread, as it turns out, actually comes out of the oven at 4:30pm these days and there are tons of different varieties. The woman behind the counter listed at least five, although I only remember country, spelt, and white whole wheat. I bought a loaf of country and spelt.

You can barely see the country loaves rising on the shelf behind the glass.

I also got a croissant which was incredibly delicious and looked exactly like the one in the book. I was happy.

However, the bread did not look as it does in the book. The country loaf was great, but it was a tiny bit over-proofed (the crumb did not look like the gorgeous one in the book-- it was a little bit more honeycomb and thin although there were still plenty of irregular holes). However, one fantastic thing about this bread compared to mine did have one massive advantage. I usually use a national brand flour like Gold's or King Arthur. The local flour that they use at Tartine does have a lovely flavor-- especially when toasted-- that has a richer taste.

The spelt was fantastic although (1) it didn't taste much like spelt flour and (2) the crust was a little thin and the ears didn't bloom very nicely (see below).

Tartine bread: Country (left), spelt (right)

So, while the bread was still quite good, it was not quite the place I'd been imaging all year. I highly recommend giving it a visit. Have a croissant while you are there. It is delicious. But, while it is true that as Marie says in the video "no one should die without eating Chad's bread," you possibly can make it from his recipe instead of trekking to San Francisco.

While I was there, I did get a glimpse of the famous Chad. he was dressed like a hipster and hanging out directly outside the bakery. He seemed very nice and a little twitchy. He obviously wasn't in the bakery that day, just dropping by. But it was nice to see him. I sneaked a bad photo on my phone.

Although I leveled a bit of criticism against it, the bread was great. Also, as Eric says in the video below, a bit of the mood of the baker goes into the loaves each day. Maybe the bakers were just having a bit of a frenetic day.

One last thought: one of the things that I was most cut up about was the fact that there was no line out the door waiting for bread. I wanted to join the fray clamoring for bread at Tartine and experience the magic with other people. Instead, it was just me with a bunch of cranky people who had been driving for too many hours together and who had just had some stuff stolen (the car was broken into in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts). So I guess I just didn't get my magic moment. Maybe next time.