Dave Miller's formulas for einkorn, Renan & Sonora breads (Grain Gathering 2015)

Related posts:

• The Grain Gathering 2015
• The Grain Gathering 2015: Dave Miller on milling and baking

After the Grain Gathering, Dave Miller very kindly sent me the formulas he used in class. Please remember that he dries his levain from one bake to the next (see Meet the Baker: Dave Miller).

Process for levain (for all three breads)

First feeding

• Sieve out dried sourdough bits
• Add water to soften, create a mush, let sit 1 hour
• Add back sifted-out flour, should make stiff ball (DDT: 78°F)
• Ferment for 10 to 12 hours

Second feeding

• Ferment for 4 hours (DDT still 78°F)

Third feeding

• Ferment for 3 hours (DDT still 78°F)

My heartfelt thanks to Jacqueline Colussi for her help with inputting the formulas into BreadStorm.

Einkorn Bread

Renan Bread

Sonora Bread

100% Whole Grain Spelt & Kamut Pavés

Maybe because it is summer and I bake constantly to feed my family, I find I have become a minimalist when it comes to bread: I like doughs that require minimum intervention on my part (an autolyse and a few folds and they are on their way) and yield loaves that bring smiles to everyone's face while providing good nutrition (the more whole grains the better). These pavés (pavé is French for cobblestone) satisfy on all counts.
The inspiration came from a facebook post by French SHB Thierry Delabre who created a half-kamut and half-spelt bread he called a "fanette". Thierry used a firm levain, hydrated the dough at 75% and retarded it for 16 hours at 43° F/6° C. The result (which I wish I could show you but the pictures are on facebook, not on the web) was a beautifully golden rustic loaf.
I had freshly stoneground whole kamut flour which I had bought across the river in Ontario the day before and I had a bag of Quebec spelt grains I could mill but I was all out of mature firm levain and I couldn't go beyond eight hours' total fermentation time as we needed bread for dinner: there have been six of us here at camp in upstate New York for the past ten days and I don't believe I have ever seen such bread eaters as these three little kids - one seven-year old and five-year old twins. I bake and bake and barely keep up. Whenever they are hungry, bread is the first thing they ask for, quite often with no adornment, not even butter, like true bread purists! It keeps me pretty busy but I love knowing that the taste of bread is being passed down to their generation.
Plus they see me mix dough everyday, usually when they are having breakfast. Maybe one day when they are all grown-up and crave honest bread, they'll remember that all it takes is a big bowl and two hands and they'll want to learn how to make their own. One can only hope, right?
I didn't have a working firm levain but I had plenty of the liquid variety and it smelled so good I had to bake with it or I would be tempted to eat it with a spoon (just kidding!). To come back to the kids (and I promise I won't mention them again in this post), another thing that goes straight to my baker's heart is that they all three love the fragrance of levain and breathe it in with relish whenever they have a chance (they say it smells like bread!). Ok, so enough with the grand-kids and on to the dough.
I decided to borrow Thierry's idea and go for a 100% whole-grain loaf that would be 50% spelt and 50% kamut but I would use liquid levain and I would up the hydration a bit. Like him, I would do one post-fermentation fold in lieu of pre-shaping and cut the folded dough into rectangles without further shaping (hence the pavé shape). Unlike Thierry - whose dough had a different consistency - I wouldn't score.
The bread came out seductively "moëlleux" (a French word I always have trouble translating: it means "mellow", "tender", "cushy" and "smooth" at the same time -it can also mean "sweet" when applied to wine- and I don't think there is an exact equivalent in English) and yet it is the word that comes irresistibly to my mind when I think about kamut. Spelt tends to be a bit drier in the mouth but it is sweet and fragrant in its own right and combined, the two grains conjure up the scent and taste of summer itself, sun-baked fields and all. These pavés may not be much to look at: I lack couches here at camp, so they spread a bit as they proofed, especially because both kamut and spelt are low in gluten, but they do pack a wallop in the mouth.

Ingredients: (all organic)

• 493 g whole kamut flour
• 493 g freshly-milled whole spelt flour
• 749 g water
• 295 g mature wheat levain at 100% hydration
• 18 g salt

Method: (hand-mixed)

1. Mix both flours with all the water until no dry flour remains and let rest, covered, 20 to 40 minutes
2. Add the levain and mix until incorporated
3. Add the salt
4. Cover the dough and let it rest, doing as many folds as necessary to obtain medium soft consistency
5. When the dough is ready (it took about seven hours at my house with folds every thirty minutes for the first two hours but then the outside temperature was otherworldly hot and we had the A/C on all day), transfer it out of the bowl on a floured surface and fold it once over itself length-wise forming a long rectangle (no overlapping)
6. Pre-heat the oven to 470°
7. Using a wet dough scraper, cut the dough into four even pieces
8. Transfer the pieces to baking sheets lined with parchment paper (heavily dusted with semolina) (as mentioned before, I have no couches here, hence the paper, but if you can, it would be better to proof the pavés upside down on heavily floured couches, turning them right side up prior to baking)
9. Cover and let rest for 30 to 45 minutes
10. Bake with steam in pre-heated oven (470°F/243°C for 10 minutes then lower the oven temperature to 450°F/232°C and continue baking for another 20 to 25 minutes, turning the loaves half-way through to ensure even baking (again these temperatures are given solely as an indication. Here at camp, the oven is small, very old and rather weak and I have to crank it up to the max. I actually set it on 500°F+  for the initial 10 minutes and on 470°F for the remaining 20 minutes or so but, from past experience with my regular home oven, I would say 470° F and 450°F should do the trick. If your oven is very efficient however, these temperatures might need to be adjusted down)
11. Cool on a rack
12. Enjoy!

The Whole Spelt & Kamut Pavés go to Susan from Wild Yeast for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Pain de l'Abbaye Saint-Wandrille (Abbey Bread)

The recipe for this bread was devised by William Alexander during his stay at Saint-Wandrille Abbey in Normandy. As related in his book, 52 loaves, the monks had been baking their own bread for ages but their baker had left two years earlier and since none of the remaining monks possessed the necessary skills, they were happy to have a baker come and make "un peu de pain pour la communauté" (some bread for the community). They wrote that they would also be grateful if their helpful guest could show one of them how to make bread.

Not feeling qualified enough, Alexander almost wrote back to say he couldn't possibly live up to the monks' expectations but then he reflected: "I wasn't just being asked to train a monk or to bake some bread; I was being asked to repair a broken thirteen-hundred-year old chain, to return fresh bread to this abbey, to reignite a tradition what had tragically been extinguished. It was an opportunity to repay a debt, to do for this abbey what the abbeys of Europe once did for the rest of us - keep knowledge alive during dark times...." You've got to love a man who thinks like that!

Once at the Abbey, he discovered the monks were reluctant to commit to the rigorous feeding schedule of a levain (although I wonder why... What did the monks use in the old days but levain?). They agreed however to feed the one he had brought them on the nights preceding baking days. Alexander didn't argue, he adapted his recipe for fresh yeast (with a bit of levain thrown it for flavor) and, two years later, at the writing of the book, the monks were still baking his bread three days a week and hadn't gone back to the local baker. They even asked for brioche and croissant recipes!

If their village baker made bread that was anything like the one we sampled last year in France near Bourg-en-Bresse, I fully understand why the monks were calling for help. We had stopped for breakfast in a tiny village on our way to visit an old mill. The owner of the café told us that she didn't have any bread but that we could cross the street and buy some from the bakery and that she would happily provide us with butter and jam.

So I went to the bakery where I observed with amazement voluminous loaves which looked like oval balloons: the label said they weighed 1-kg but they were gigantic. Logically they should have weighed much more. I bought a half-baguette which I brought back to the café. We tried it. It was very white and bland and its texture recalled that of cotton candy. Apparently the village baker had mastered the dubious art of producing the worst possible kind of French bread by using no preferment and mixing the dough at high speed.

The café owner saw our faces and she said: "Well, now you understand why I don't have any bread to offer you. Not only is the bread pretty bad but it goes stale so fast that if I buy it before 9 AM, I have to go back to the bakery before lunch hour begins and still my customers complain! Unfortunately we are stuck with it as he is the only baker in the village."

Well, the monks were lucky enough to have all necessary (albeit rather old-fashioned) baking equipment on the premises and their determination to go back to "real" bread paid off. The "pain de l'Abbaye" is of the quiet variety (just like them) but it delivers. It has lovely rustic undertones, thanks to the addition of whole wheat and whole rye, and the combination of poolish and levain gives it a satisfying complexity. It rises beautifully in the oven and bakes to a ruddy burnish.

I baked a big batch as I needed bread to give away, to bring to a party and to freeze and I had fun with the shaping and the stenciling.

Alexander reports that the monks insisted on a blunt-end cylinder shape with no points "so that everyone gets the same-size piece". I guess the monks are nothing but egalitarian! I didn't have the same concern (some of us - meaning myself - love the pointy ends while some others - meaning my significant other - don't - how lucky is that!), so the blunt shape wasn't a requirement. I tried however to make my ends as rounded as possible. I had to make my loaves shorter than the monks' as my oven is rather small and they ended up stubbier.

As it is, I settled on 7 680-g loaves (raw weight): 4 short and fat bâtards and 3 boules (one of the boules weighed a tad more, 710 g, I think). Only six loaves can be seen on the photos as one was given away while still warm from the oven. The last loaf was rather overproofed even though I had tried to delay things by putting the dough to ferment in the cool basement. The day was pretty hot and incipient summer weather does make a huge difference in fermentation time.

Generally speaking the loaves all ended up proofing a bit too fast. Maybe for that reason, I didn't get all the holes I was hoping for in the crumb. It could also be because I used more whole grain than indicated, both in the poolish and in the levain. Anyway like the Olympic torch, the burning desire for the perfect Abbey loaf has now passed on to me and this summer I plan to forge ahead in my own quest for the holey crumb. I also plan to tweak the recipe a bit by adding no commercial yeast at all in the final dough.

William Alexander has kindly allowed me to post the original recipe (which is in the book but not on his website). The recipe you'll find below is my adaptation. I used all organic flours and grains.

Ingredients: (for 7 loaves)

Poolish

400 g all-purpose flour (I used King Arthur's)

267 g high-extraction flour (I used La Milanaise's sifted flour)

111 g freshly milled whole wheat flour (red hard winter)

56 g freshly milled rye flour

834 g water

15 g fresh yeast

Final dough

1,433 g all-purpose flour

223 g freshly milled whole wheat flour

112 g freshly milled rye flour

154 g high-extraction flour

1,012 g water

334 g mature levain (100% hydration) (originally a 42% whole-grain firm levain based on a mixture of wheat, spelt and rye, changed into a liquid levain and fed once with high-extraction flour the night before the bake)

all of the poolish

31 g fresh yeast

54 g sea salt

Method:

• I pretty much followed the indications given by Alexander in the original recipe, except that I did the autolyse before adding the salt (salt tightens the gluten networks, slowing down their development, which is the opposite of what the autolyse is supposed to achieve. See Hamelman's Bread, page 9). Alexander may have the monks add it earlier so that they don't forget it later (as happened to him once).
• I also did one fold after one hour and another one 30 minutes later. I also baked at 475 F instead of 500 as my oven gets really hot and at 500 F, the bread turns dark before it is fully baked.

Le pain de l'Abbaye Saint-Wandrille goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Rustic Batard

As we (don't) say in French, the proof is in the pudding, so as soon as I got home, I decided to give my new levain a run for its money (for info concerning this levain, see here and here). I chose to make simple batards, using 30% organic whole grains (60% red wheat, 30% spelt and 10% rye) which I milled in my little handmill (I have since purchased an electric one for various reasons, chiefly because I couldn't get fine enough flour with the handmill and ended up wasting a lot of the nutrients present in the grain).
The bulk of the flour was Whole Foods' 365 all-purpose organic and I used some raw wheat germ as well (to compensate for the coarse elements I had to throw away). Dough hydration was 85%, quite high but necessary considering the proportion of whole grains.
The resulting bread is true to its name, namely rustic in appearance and redolent with the flavor and fragrance of whole grains. Its crust and crumb are very pleasing. Since I now own an electric mill and will be able to mill flour to the exact degree of fineness I choose (without having to sift), I will probably try several different different combinations and permutations of flours, grains and hydration rates in the future. But at least I found out that the levain works well and is very flavorful, not sour at all...
I keep it at 65%, which I find a good compromise between firm and liquid. It isn't too stiff to fold by hand (since the folding needs to be very gentle, it doesn't stress my wrists which I have to watch as I already had surgery on both) and with the daily addition of 30% freshly milled whole-grain flours, it would become too hard to control if the hydration was higher, especially since I keep it at room temperature. I use 1% sea salt at each feeding to prevent the enzymes from running amok anyway. It is still a very young levain (not even one week old) and I am curious to see how it will evolve.
Calvel recommends using salt in the levain in Le Goût du pain (The Taste of Bread) (p. 61 in the French edition. I was unable to get the English translation from my local library, so I can't give you the page number in English. Sorry about that...). I wanted to find out a little more about the science behind this recommendation and found the following explanation in an old professional baker's manual (J-M. Viard : Le Compagnon boulanger – Ed. Jérôme Villette – 1984, now sadly out of print, p. 229) : "Pourquoi ajoute-t-on toujours un peu de sel au rafraîchi ? Parallèlement aux levures sauvages, l’acidité se développe, ainsi que certains enzymes appelées protéases. Ces enzymes ont une action néfaste sur le gluten et le liquéfient, ce qui rend la pâte molle et très collante ; le sel ajouté au rafaîchi bloque l’activité des protéases". (Why add salt to each feeding? Parallel to wild yeast, acidity develops [in the levain] as well as some enzymes, called proteases. These enzymes have a harmful effect on gluten which they tend to liquefy, making dough slack and very sticky; salt blocks protease activity) (my translation).
And now, on to the bread...

  Process

1. Mix the flours with most of the water (at the required temperature to produce a dough at 76ºF/24ºC) in the bowl of the mixer and let rest 45 minutes to one hour (autolyse)
2. Add the levain (cut in small pieces like fluffy little pillows) and mix on first speed
3. Continue mixing for a few minutes, adding the salt at the end (salt hardens the dough and according to Viard's Le Compagnon boulanger mentioned above, adding it towards the end of the mixing protects against too much tenacity in the dough. I have heard and seen other bakers add it right after the autolyse in order to slow down the fermentation. As it was my first time adding it at the end, I can only say that it worked fine. But is it a rule or just because my house is kind of cool in the winter and fermentation is slower anyway? I don't have the answer. I guess each of us would need to try both ways several times to see what the advantages and inconveniences would be in his home environment)
4. Adjust the hydration with the remaining water (different flours require different hydration rates), continue mixing for a minute or two and turn off the mixer. The dough should be soft
5. Transfer to a tightly closed oiled bin and set to ferment at 80ºF/27ºC (since my house is only at 64ºF/18ºC in the winter, I used the proof box the Man built for me, using the detailed explanations generously provided by Steve B. from Bread Cetera)
6. Give the dough a fold inside the bin after one hour
7. Give the dough another fold inside the bin one hour later
8. Transfer the dough to a flour-dusted work surface and give it one fold (north-south), wait 10 minutes and give it another (east-west). Repeat until dough is strong enough for shaping (it took three folds at 10 minute-intervals in my case), keeping the dough covered between folds (in my case, the first fermentation lasted a total of 3 hours and 30 minutes)
9. Pre-shape as desired, let the dough rest 30 minutes, covered
10. Preheat the oven at 480ºF/249ºC (my oven doesn't heat very well. A lower temperature setting might work just fine in your oven), taking care to put it in a baking stone and, underneath, a heavy metal pan for steaming (mine contains barbecue stones which we bought solely for steaming purposes)
11. Shape as desired (in my case, two 500g-batards and three 330g-small boules, raw, respectively 417 g and 276 g after baking) and set to proof on a couche at 80ºF/27º (or use baskets if you have the right size available. I didn't)
12. When the loaves are ready to be baked (the imprint of a finger bounces back quickly), dust with flour, score (trying to make the cut shallow) and bake for 35 minutes, pouring a cup of cold water in the metal pan for steaming and turning the heat down after the first 10 minutes (in my case to 460ºF/238ºC)
13. Remove from the oven and cool on a rack before slicing open

The Rustic Batard goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.