recipes

Got Rye?

70% rye with whole wheat

Do you eat rye bread? I didn’t, really, until I started baking and discovered that rye just tastes good. It is earthy and sweet, although sometimes its sweetness is masked by the spices that are often paired with it, such as caraway seeds. To be honest, I prefer my rye unspiced most of the time.

Rye is higher in fiber than wheat, which may explain why a recent study found that eating bread made with a combination of wheat and light rye flours for breakfast made people feel more full and less hungry through the morning than did bread with only wheat flour. Appetite was further decreased by eating bread with even higher proportions of rye bran. That just might translate into some very good news for my waistline, since I’ve been eating this 70% rye bread for breakfast all week.

Consider this bread for all your rye needs. It is based on the “70 Percent Rye with a Rye Soaker and Whole-Wheat Flour” in Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. The original recipe calls for rye chops (chopped rye berries), which I don’t have, so I put in all the cracked rye I had (there is supposedly a difference between cracked and chopped rye, but don’t ask me to distinguish them in a lineup) and made up the rest with rye meal (very coarsely ground rye berries).

Rye is more difficult to work with than wheat. This dough has the consistency of thick mud. You just have to deal with it. You will not be able to do a windowpane gluten test on this dough. And when you shape it into a log, for God’s sake don’t think about it or you’ll go crazy. Just turn your brain off and use a quick, light hand and a good amount of flour on the counter. Remember: hands on, brain off.

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Bagels Revisited

bagels

I am not a bagel expert. I do not claim to know how to identify or bake an authentic bagel. However, I do know what I like, and I like dense, chewy bagels. Bready bagels are just bread in the shape of a doughnut. What’s the point of that, please? And to get a chewy bagel, you need one thing: gluten, and lots of it.

I make bagels often, and normally use high-gluten flour (King Arthur Flour’s Sir Lancelot) to achieve the stiff, smooth, incredibly strong dough that yields optimal chewiness. This time, however, when I went to reach for that flour, I came up empty-handed. And because it was the hottest day of the year, I just had to have bagels. (You’re the same way, right?) Vital wheat gluten to the rescue.

Vital wheat gluten looks like flour but is essentially pure gluten. It is readily available, packaged or in bulk, in many grocery and natural foods stores, or can be ordered online. I found that replacing the high-gluten flour in my usual sourdough bagel recipe with a mixture of 97% flour (the regular flour I use for bread) and 3% vital wheat gluten gave me a bagel that was virtually indistinguishable from the original.

There are two schools of thought regarding bagel shaping. As with boxers vs. briefs, Mac vs. Windows, or over-the-roll vs. under-the-roll, people seem to fall uncompromisingly into one camp or another. Yes, I have tried the punch-a-hole-in-a-ball-of-dough-and-stretch-it-out method, but the roll-the-ends-of-the-snake-together method is far superior. It just is.

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Apricot Fritters… or Something

apricot fritter

If anyone can tell me what to call this, please speak up.

Here we have a whole fresh apricot filled with almond cream, wrapped in lightly sweet yeast dough and deep fried. Topped with rum sauce if you like your… thing… extra decadent.

Is it a dumpling? Every definition I could find says a dumpling is either boiled, baked, or pan fried; not deep fried. But then, I am certainly no dumpling expert.

Is it a fritter? Fritters are deep fried yes, but aren’t they batter, not dough? Clearly I’m no fritter expert either.

Is it a bread? Well, this dough does contain yeast, and I am sending it to Nick (imafoodblog) and Zorra (1x umrühren bitte) for BreadBakingDay #23 (theme: something you haven’t made before), but it’s a stretch, isn’t it?

How about a filled doughnut? When I brought these to work, one person pronounced it “the best doughnut I’ve ever had.” I hadn’t thought of them as doughnuts, but she knows more about food than I do.

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Whole Wheat – Semolina Crowns

whole wheat semolina crown

If I had to choose one word to describe this bread, it would be “wheaty.” Now that may seem odd, because isn’t most bread made with wheat flour, so isn’t all bread wheaty? Well sure, but but the four different wheat flours — “regular” white flour, whole wheat flour, white whole wheat flour, and semolina (coarsely ground from durum wheat) — and two preferments (sponge and poolish) give the bread an extra wheaty flavor. (OK, so it’s late at night and I’m not feeling very imaginative. It’s still good.)

I used white (hulled) sesame seeds, which lend a delicate sesame flavor and are not visually prominent in the bread, just because I had some on hand that needed to be used up. Regular sesame seeds, and toasted if you like, would also be lovely. You could also leave them out altogether. We’re nothing if not flexible.

ww-semolina slice

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Spelt – Hemp Seed Bread

gazpacho in spelt-hempseed bread bowl

This is the first time I have baked with hemp seeds, but it won’t be the last. Toasted, these are hands-down the crunchiest seeds I have ever eaten. Crunchy seeds that stay crunchy in the bread. A bowl of Rice Krispies has nothing on a slice of this bread.

And did I say delicious? So much so that since running out of the bread I’ve been eating the seeds plain, by the handful (don’t try this in the library, though). The seeds pack a nutritional punch, too, with all eight essential amino acids and high amounts of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.

Industrial hemp is grown for its fibers, which are used in textiles, and for its seeds (and derivative oil), which are used for human and animal food, cosmetics, cleaning products, and industrial lubricants. The plant is a subspecies of Cannabis sativa, of which marjuana is a different subspecies. However, industrial hemp contains only a miniscule fraction of the psychoactive compound THC that marijuana has. It is legal to sell these hemp products in the US; however, DEA regulations do not permit it to be grown here. Most of the hemp seeds sold in the US are grown in Canada and Europe, which accounts for their unfortunately high price.

When I shared this bread with some of my co-workers, the hypothetical question came up: could eating hemp seeds could cause one to fail a drug test? According to my reading of consumer-oriented websites as well as available medical literature, probably not; the THC concentration in the seeds is too low. However, please do your own research and come to your own conclusion if you are likely to be in this situation any time soon. In any event, it’s probably best not to buy your hemp seeds off the back of a truck.

I made some of the dough into 250-gram boules, and used their hollowed-out shells as bowls for the Andalucían-style gazpacho I made with Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s recipe from The Splendid Table. This type of gazpacho calls for bread as an ingredient, so the scooped-out bread didn’t go to waste.

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Pumpkin Seed Bread

On the day of my very first marathon team training back in June, I sprained my ankle. Not at the training, but later that afternoon, in my driveway. This is what I get for not wearing entirely sensible shoes.

Luckily, it was not a severe sprain, and I was able to resume training in a couple of days. That evening, however, walking was difficult. We had a plan to meet friends for dinner in Oakland, and when we got there my husband needed to go in search of an ATM. Not wanting to do all that walking, I parked myself in Diesel Bookstore on College Avenue. More specifically, I parked myself in the cookbook section and limited my browsing to the single shelf I could reach without moving around.

But don’t think I’m saying I wouldn’t have chosen Éric Kayser’s New French Recipes as my book (it is not possible for me to exit a bookstore without a book) if my mobility had been greater and my options less restricted. This is a lushly-photographed volume of beautiful, fresh, mostly accessible dishes. Kayser is a renowned French baker and, while not all of the recipes are for baked things, they largely feature whole grains, seeds, dried fruits, nuts, and breads in prominent roles.

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