The Grain Gathering 2014: Wood-Fired Artisan Bread with Richard Miscovich

Richard Miscovich is the author of From the Wood-Fired Oven: New and Traditional Techniques for Cooking and Baking with Fire, a book you definitely want to check out if you haven't read it yet, even if you don't have access to a WFO (as is my case). WFO owners will love to find out how to make optimal use of their oven's heat cycle and serious home bakers (or anyone wishing to bake bread at home) will treasure the wealth of information it offers on mixing, fermenting, dividing, proofing, etc. I like it that the book is never dogmatic and that the reader feels Richard's presence every step of the way. In the fall of 2011, I had the privilege to attend a BBGA class he taught at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island (where he is an associate professor at the College of the Culinary Arts) and I remember being awed both by his teaching and by his baking. Needless to say, when I discovered he would be doing both at the Grain Gathering, I made a beeline for his workshop (although I unfortunately had to leave smack in the middle to attend a talk on natural leavening). The linearity of Time is indeed the scourge of the human condition, isn't it?

I love to watch professionals score their proofed loaves. It always reminds me of dancing. The movement starts before the lame (or blade) even touches the dough. As Richard explains in his book, "Ideally, the motion is continuous, with the moving blade cutting neatly through the dough and continuing on its trajectory." Another baker I know phrased it differently but the idea is the same: "The lame has to hit the ground running!"

 

The bread was 40% whole wheat. As you can see from the images below, it turned out beautifully even though it started over-proofing a bit out in the warm air: if you let your dough over-ferment, the yeast uses up all the sugar and there will be no caramelization. So the proofing baskets had to be carried back all the way through the orchards to the retarder in the lab and brought back out again when the oven reached the right temperature. Fermentation does go more quickly with whole grain (the bread was 40% whole wheat), a wet dough (hydration was at 82-85%) and warmer temperatures.

Richard uses a garden mister to steam his oven. Someone asked how much steam to use. The answer: "You know there is enough steam when you can no longer keep your hand inside the oven to add more!" It is important to bake in a humid environment because the bread expands more, the score marks open more fully and you get a really good color with shine. If you bake at home and don't have a wood-fired oven, Richard recommends using a cast-iron combo cooker or to bake on a hearth stone or a sheet pan with a large metal bowl inverted over your loaf for the first twenty minutes.

 

For those of us who can't get to his classes, Richard mentioned he had a video out on Craftsy, Hand-made Sourdough - From starter to baked loaf. I haven't seen it yet.

From the British Museum: how to make 2,000-year-old bread...

Video by the British Museum

For the recipe, click here. 

I love the string technique... 

In the video, the baker says he's using buckwheat flour as the Romans did in those days but the list of ingredients in the posted recipe calls for equal amounts of spelt and whole wheat flour. Note that the bread is shaped right after mixing and that there is only one fermentation. Not a very long one at that, most likely because of the very large amount of starter and the use of wholegrain flours. No mention of steam to promote oven spring, probably because the bread found during the excavations looks quite flat. If you make the recipe at home, remember that the posted baking temperature (200°) is expressed in Celsius: it translates into 392°F. 

The recipe lists gluten as an ingredient, which I find slightly odd. I can't imagine the Romans being in a position to supplement weak flour with gluten flour although, according to this article (scroll down to the paragraph titled Grains in Rome), they did favor high-gluten wheat. So maybe the added gluten is today's baker's way to approximate the wheat variety used in the original recipe.

For more info on ancient Rome's access to grain, you may want to read Grain Supply to the city of Rome on Wikipedia. 

Too bad the British Museum doesn't provide a crumb shot. I would have loved to see one. My guess is that the bread turned out rather dense. 

What makes my head spin is the idea that a bread could stay in an oven for close to 2000 years... 

Maintaining a white starter and preparing for a bake

If there is a secret to Diane Andiel's gorgeous breads, it is that her wheat starter is extraordinarily vivacious. If it were a person, it would be a soprano! It erupts into singing bubbles any time she walks by, you know that slight "crushing paper"sound a starter makes when it is happy? You have to see it (and hear it) to believe it. I asked her how she maintained it and being a woman of few words (but action galore), she wrote back what follows:

I keep the starter on a twelve- hour schedule for at least three days leading up to a bake. Morning and night it is refreshed so that it will do what I need it to do. When I am not baking for a few days, I will feed it once a day or refrigerate it for three or four days without feeding.
I keep it on my kitchen counter and do not worry about the temperature of the room. In winter at night the kitchen is very cool and in the hot summer I must be more observant because it will move much faster and may require an extra feeding.
The ratio we used in the class to build the levain was 
100 % flour
120 % water
20 % liquid starter
This levain had twelve hours to ferment before being added to the final dough.

No pampering, no frills! Tough love rules! I find that very interesting especially if you consider the extent of the tender loving care breadsong bestows on her own starters. And yet, both get wonderful results. From my own experience as a baker, I would say that starters are a bit like kids. They like a routine and they like limits. I once had a starter that I normally fed once a day. Having read somewhere that starters are happier and more energetic when fed twice a day, I put it on a morning and evening schedule and guess what? It was never the same after...
But since the starter I am now using is Diane's (she gave me some to take home), rest assured I shall stick to the two-meals-a-day schedule: I want it a soprano too!

Related posts:

• Baking with natural starters: a bread workshop in Victoria, BC
• Maintening a rye starter and preparing for a bake

Barley Bread

For as long as I can remember, I have been a barley girl. Of course it helped that in France when I was a kid,  a sucre d'orge (literally candy made with barley sugar) was a treat. Tubular and fashionably skinny, always tightly wrapped, most often in cellophane but occasionally in shiny silver paper which gave no clue to the flavor inside, known for having soothed many of life's minor woes and pains for generations of children, it held a mysterious appeal. By contrast, the plump sucette (lollipop), always clad in revealing colors and coiffed with a bouffant paper twist, seemed resolutely modern. Probably thanks to its down-to-earth chubbiness, it was often a kid's first choice at the boulangerie-confiserie (bakery-candy store) but not mine.
Since I spent a large part of my childhood reading and re-reading the books which had belonged to my dad and my uncle in their youth (they had won them at school for being top students), I kept solid footing in an enchanted other world (of which the black and white illustrations offered tantalizing glimpses) and, in my own, I looked for and cherished surviving signs of a vanishing past. Sucres d'orge (thus called because barley water -soon to be replaced by glucose- was the original sweetener) were therefore my favorites and I spent many a drizzly or blustery Sunday afternoon with my nose in one of the characteristic red books and a sucre d'orge in my pocket (my parents were not liberal with candy but since I never had a sweet tooth,  looking at it afforded me more pleasure than eating it and a single one went a long way).

Many years and a move across the ocean later, I discovered that orge (barley) could actually appear on the table in a soup or a barlotto (a risotto made with barley instead of rice) or simply as a grain and when I did, I fell in love all over again.  So when a Baking With Barley class was offered last year at Kneading Conference West, I knew I wanted to attend.
The class was taught jointly by Leslie Mackie (owner of Macrina Bakery in Seattle) and Andrew Ross, a cereal chemist at Oregon State University (OSU). Leslie has been experimenting with barley from the time she first started Macrina:  she liked using locally grown grain and, at the time, that meant mostly barley. She now puts it in monkey bread (for an added touch of sweetness), in Francese bread and in Pugliese bread (an exceptionally tasty miche for which she was in the process of developing a formula).
As for Andrew - who is not only a scientist but also a passionate baker - he has developed formulas for various barley breads within the framework of the barley project: he brought barley baguettes and barley miches to the class and demonstrated barley pitas and bretzels. I was hooked (especially when I discovered that my local mill made a beautiful whole grain barley flour).
I was hoping to be able to go and observe Andrew at work at OSU in Corvalis and to do a full Meet the Baker post on him afterwards. But it didn't work out according to plan. He was unexpectedly swamped with work when we showed up at the agreed-upon date last month and there was no way he could fit baking into his schedule on that particular day. As for us, we were traveling through Corvalis on our way back home from the coast and we couldn't possibly come back later in the week. He very kindly showed me his beautiful lab/bakery and answered the questions I had prepared but I made it quick as I knew he had to go back to work.  I would still love to see him bake and also to hear more about the relationship between the University and the local farmer though but it will have to wait. Maybe the stars will align better on another visit to Oregon!
Meanwhile Andrew gave me a few useful infos and pointers on baking with barley:

• The preferred barley is a hulless variety, also called naked barley (the hull falls off when the grain is harvested): it has the best nutritional profile
• Barley contains a soluble fiber called beta-glucan which has been shown to slow glucose absorption and is thought to help lower blood cholesterol
• People with celiac disease or high sensitivity to gluten should not eat barley: it contains protases which are very close to gluten
• A 100% barley starter yields a very acidic bread. Not pleasant
• The higher the percentage of barley in relation to wheat, the less extensible the dough
• For a better crumb, it is best to use barley flour in conjunction with high-gluten flour
• Using a stiff starter also helps compensate for the lesser amount of gluten in the dough
• To keep the dough from sticking, use more water or flour than you normally would 
• Increase dough hydration by 5 to 10% if making a 50% barley-50% wheat bread
• If using a high tpercentage of barley, it is best to underproof a little
• A good rule of thumb for flavor, nutrition and extensibility is to use a total of 20 to 30% of barley in the  dough
• Barley flat breads and tortillas are much easier to make than raised breads.

For this barley bread, I used the Whey Sourdough recipe from Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's How to Make Bread, a book I already blogged about here and here. At Emmanuel's suggestion (when we talked on the phone back in April after I found an error in one of the recipes), I substituted half Greek yogurt and half milk for the whey (which I didn't have) and, mindful of Andrew's recommendation, I replaced 20% of the white flour by whole grain barley flour (hulless variety).  The resulting bread was delicate and flavorful with a slightly fermented taste (very different from regular sourdough) which I find utterly seductive. Not a memory-trigger like the old-fashioned sucre d'orge but definitely a keeper and maybe a memory-maker for the kids and grand-kids in our life! What could be sweeter than that?

Ingredients:

• 160 g white sourdough starter
• 150 g milk (I used 2% milkfat)
• 150 g plain Greek yogurt (mine was 0% fat but regular fullfat Greek yogurt would work fine)
• 200 g all-purpose unbleached flour (Hadjiandreou uses bread flour with a higher gluten percentage but I had none on hand. I might have gotten a more open crumb if I had used that)
• 120 g  all-purpose unbleached flour (again he uses bread flour)
• 100 g barley flour
• 10 g salt (Hadjiandreou uses 8 g)

Method: (adapted from the book)

1. In a large mixing bowl, mix starter, yogurt and milk with a wooden spoon until well combined
2. Add 200 g of all-purpose flour and mix well. Cover and let ferment overnight in a cool place (it should show tiny bubbles 12 hours later when ready)
3. In a smaller bowl, mix 120 g of all-purpose flour, the barley flour and the salt
4. Add to fermented mix and mix by hand until it comes together
5. Cover and let stand for 10 minutes
6. After 10 minutes, stretch and fold the dough inside the bowl by going twice around the bowl with four stretches and foldings at each 90° turn (8 stretches/foldings in all)
7. Let rest 10 minutes again, covered. Repeat twice
8. Complete a fourth stretch and fold cycle and let the dough rest one hour, covered
9. Ligthly flour a work surgace and put the dough on it
10. Shape into a smooth, rounded disc
11. Dust a proofing basket with flour and lay the dough inside
12. Let it rise until double the size (which will take between 3 and 6 hours)
13. When ready, transfer dough to a non-preheated Dutch oven (using a large piece of parchment paper as a sling to carry the dough) and replace the lid on the Dutch oven
14. Bake in non-preheated oven set at 475°F/246°C for 35 minutes
15. Remove Dutch oven from oven and bread from Dutch oven (exercising caution as both will be very hot)
16. Replace bread in oven, turn oven temperature down to 435°F/224°C and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the boule is golden and makes a satisfying hollow sound when thumped on the bottom
17. Enjoy!

The Barley Bread can also be baked the usual way in a hot oven. I just find the unheated Dutch oven/oven method works wonders with boules and it saves having to preheat the oven for an extended length of time.

The Barley Bread is going to Susan for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Diane Andiel's Norwich Sourdough

Related post: Meet the Baker: Diane Andiel

Diane borrowed her recipe from The Fresh Loaf and I won't point you to any specific post in the thread because she doesn't recall whose recipe she is using (the original one was posted in 2007 on Wild Yeast).

Ingredients (for 6 loaves):

• 1800 g organic all-purpose flour
• 240 g organic dark rye flour
• 1200 g water
• 720 g levain (100% hydration)
• 46 g salt

Method

1. Build the levain 12 hours before mixing and let ferment at room temperature
2. Mix in flours, water and levain
3. Autolyse for 20 minutes
4. Mix 3 minutes in first speed (adding water as necessary)
5. Mix 3 minutes in second speed
6. Ferment at cool room temperature for 12 hours (Note: Diane doesn't give the dough any folds because she goes straight off to work after mixing on Friday mornings but she said the dough would probably benefit from a fold and she recommends that it be done if at all possible)
7. Scale at 680 g
8. Set to proof on parchment-paper lined sheet pans and slide into  large clear plastic bags making sure they tent over the dough and do not touch it
9. Proof for 12 hours at cool room temperature
10. Slash and bake for 35 minutes in a convection oven set at 430°F
11. Cool on a rack.

Since Diane doesn't have a blog, I am sending the Norwich Sourdough to Yeastpotting in her name.

Blood of the Dragon: Healthy New Year Orange Cake

My brothers and I grew up eating a marvelous orange cake which I sadly probably won't make again even though I have the recipe and it couldn't be easier to make or more delicious: 150 g butter + 150 g flour + 150 g sugar + 2 whole eggs + 1 orange (juice and zest) + 1/2 packet of baking powder. Mix everything (except juice). Bake. When cake is done, drench with juice. Revel!
Over the years, I have made it over and over and it always met with the same unmitigated success. I even made it once ages ago for friends who were coming for tea one snowy Sunday afternoon and I burned my wrist when taking it out of the oven and it fell to the floor face down! There was no time to bake another one, so I took a spatula and rescued as much as I could of the part that wasn't in contact with the floor. Of course it was all broken but I pressed it into a charlotte mold and since it was still warm, it took the shape of the mold very nicely. When it had cooled enough, I unmolded it and drizzled warmed up apricot preserves over it. It was beautiful and even better than the original. My guests asked for the recipe which I provided - skipping the floor part - and all was well.
I had forgotten all about it until our youngest son's fourth grade teacher enrolled her whole class in a New York State writing program and the kids were asked to write about specific incidents in their childhood. So he wrote about the cake being scraped off the floor minutes before our guests arrived and his writing was so good and so funny that his piece was chosen to be read aloud in assembly! I was mortified but that wasn't the worst of it.
The worst came what he wrote about a very bumpy flight from Athens to Paris when he was 5 years old. He explained that he had been seating next to me and that the whole plane had been jolted when we were hit by lightning (true), that we had made an unplanned landing in Lyon to check for damages (they were minor) and that we continued to Paris under the cloud cover and that everybody got sick (true again); that we landed in Paris so fast that we were on the ground barely one minute or two before we took off again at warp speed and everyone was deadly pale and afraid and the flight attendants were running down the aisle with a strained look on their faces (still true) and that I turned towards him and shook his hand and said: "A..., it was nice meeting you" (the hand shaking and stiff upper lip discourse all figments of his imagination, needless to say). That too was read in assembly!!! I was never happier to see a kid graduate to middle school so that I become anonymous again...

Well, to come back to the cake, I can't make it anymore for health reasons but that doesn't mean we don't yearn for it every winter when huge baskets of oranges arrive at the grocery store... Last week it was blood oranges. 

Blood oranges! When I was growing up in France, blood oranges were very sour. They truly had a bite, so much so that I actually didn't care very much for them. They came from Spain and I don't think they had as much sun as the ones we get here which come from California and are sweet and fragrant.
Blood oranges (don't you love the name?) are rich in vitamin C, of course, but also in anthocyanin which is a powerful antioxydant. That gave me an idea. In honor of the Chinese New Year, I would bake a health-friendly orange cake (after all striving to keep my loved ones healthy throughout the year is certainly a priority) and call it Blood of the Dragon (as you can see, my youngest son doesn't have a monopoly on imagination!).

Now I won't lie and tell you the result is as airy and lovely as the original all-butter orange cake. You wouldn't believe me anyway. The texture reminds me more of a pudding than a cake proper but it is very tasty and refreshing. Orange and ginger combine to give it a nice kick (next time I might even add a bit of fresh ginger) and, in the health department, you can't beat the ingredients: nutrient-rich white whole wheat, natural starter (which makes it easier for the body to assimilate the nutrients present in the grain),  ginger (a powerful antioxydant in its own right), fresh oranges, cultured buttermilk, olive oil, etc...  So here is to a wondrous and healthy New Year!

Ingredients (for a 9-inch cake pan):

For the starter

• 180 g mature levain (starter)
• 180 g white whole wheat pastry flour
• 180 g cultured buttermilk
• 25 g ginger syrup

For the batter

• 80 g extra-virgin olive oil
• juice and zest of 2 blood oranges
• 100 g unsweetened applesauce
• 50 g bits of crystallized ginger
• pinch of salt
• note: the oranges I used were very sweet and with the crystallized ginger and the bit of syrup in the starter, I didn't need more sugar. You should taste the batter prior to baking (one of the advantages of baking without eggs is that you can actually have a taste) and determine whether or not sugar should be added

For the finished cake

• blood oranges
• confectioner's sugar

Method:

1. Starter is prepared at least 4 hours before baking: mix all ingredients with wooden spoon, cover tightly and let rise at warm room temparature
2. When the starter has doubled, add other ingredients, mix with wooden spoon and pour in oil-sprayed pan. Bake for 40 minutes in pre-heated 350°F/177°C oven
3. When done (a cake tester comes out clean), turn off the oven and leave the cake inside for another 5 to 10 minutes with oven door ajar. Cool on a rack
4. Dust with confectioner's sugar
5. Serve with freshly sliced blood oranges. Alternatively drench with blood orange juice  before serving.

Blood of the Dragon Orange Cake is going to Susan's for this week's issue of Yeastspotting...

Nice and Naughty: Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums

...or will it be naughty and nice? Your call!

For the brioche recipe, look no further than Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. If you don't own it and your local library can't get it for you, you could go browse the book on the amazon.com website, look inside and search for brioche. If you are lucky enough (I was the first time I tried), it will let you browse pages 151-152 where you'll find the olive oil brioche recipe. Alternatively if you speak Spanish or don't mind using Google Translate, you can check out Madrid Tiene Miega, the blog where I got the idea of making this dessert bread to accompany the wickedest, meanest, craziest plums I have ever had the pleasure of serving.

Tartine's olive oil brioche has a delicate and complex taste. I was a bit hesitant to use our regular extra-virgin olive oil as I thought it might be a bit too fruity but Chad says to use a strong-flavored oil, so I went for it and found that it played a wonderfully supportive role to the poolish and the levain. You don't actually taste it (at least I couldn't) but you definitely taste more than slowly fermented grain. A truly intriguing combination. The original recipe calls for orange-blossom water, which may not be easy to find if you don't have access to a Mid-Eastern market. If that's the case, steeping a few crushed cardamom pods or whole saffron threads in the warm milk for a few minutes is a good substitute. Both go well with the taste of the brioche provided you err on the side of caution with the amount of spice and you make sure to strain the milk before using it in the dough. Skipping the extra flavor is also an option.

I had no luck finding orange-blossom water, so I used green cardamom pods (3 g total which I crushed in a mortar with a pestle). I halved the original amounts given in the book for all the ingredients (which I now regret as it would have been just as easy to make the whole batch and freeze half), especially as the dough is a pain to work with. It is super wet and looks like pancake batter for the longest time. I must tell you as well that I ended up adding about 120 g of flour to make it finally come together. I also switched the mixer to high speed - instead of medium - for the final couple of minutes. That may explain why I got a tighter crumb than I had been shooting for.

Halved, the recipe yielded one big brioche and about 20 small ones (scaled at 50 g raw). In half-a-dozen of those (the ones which were to accompany another dessert), I hid two or three of the exquisite chocolate-covered cherries my friend Kim, a talented baker if I ever saw one, had sent me from Wisconsin (thank you, Kimmy!). I love the tangy taste of cherries both with cardamom and with saffron although I don't know how well it would fare with orange-blossom water. The crumb looks a bit dry on the picture below and it was: since I had forgotten to take a crumb shot, I had to photograph the last surviving brioche. It was 5 days old...

I just gave you nice. Ready for naughty? Read on!

Back in France when I was growing up, dried plums were these dark oblong unidentified objects which were so hard that you had to soak and simmer them before you could eat them. Once cooked, they tasted watery and you had to watch out for the pit or you'd crack your teeth. I never liked them then but they were supposedly good for us, so in the winter they appeared regularly as a dessert on our dinner table. Some years later, we had fleshier ones which we pitted, stuffed with almond paste and rolled in crystallized sugar. They were a special Christmas treat and definitely a step up!

But now, oh now, I have stumbled upon a completely different beast, one that will probably remain forever my ultimate winter after-dinner treat: dried plums slow-soaked in vodka... It definitely takes a while for them to bloom into their magnificent taste and texture, so even though it might be tempting to make them for the holidays this year, if I were you, I would just make them now and then wait until the end of January to enjoy them. They will be an excellent antidote to the winter doldrums and, provided you are not tailgating it and having to drive home but watching the game on your couch with nowhere else to go, you might even make them the star of your Super Bowl party if there are no teenagers around (although as long as you tell them it's prunes, they probably won't go near the stuff anyway).

The fruit sold in some parts of the country as California prunes and in others as California dried plums (isn't it interesting that some states are more prune-tolerant than others?) has almost nothing in common with what I knew as a child. It is fleshy to the point of quasi-roundness and it has been pitted. It is quite tasty on its own if you actually like dried plums, which I do.

Now every summer, back when I lived in France as a grown-up, I used to make "framboises à l'eau-de-vie" (raspberries in brandy, literally acqua vitae) with a special spirit they sell over there just for macerating fruit. Since raspberries were delicious and plentiful this summer in the Pacific Northwest, I decided to preserve some in brandy for the winter. I couldn't find a suitable brandy at the local liquor store however, so I used vodka (100-proof). It does pack a wallop. A less potent version would do just as well, I suspect.

The vodka-marinated raspberries retained their plump shape and even some of their color and they looked pretty but the taste wasn't what I was looking for. Of course the reason could be that I really don't like vodka, never did and probably never will and they tasted like vodka flavored with children's cough syrup (probably because I misguidedly decided to flavor the vodka with a few hyssop leaves). In any case, not a success...

I was contemplating the berries and wondering what to do with the leftover vodka (I had bought a large bottle) when I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Since I always keep dried plums in the house, why not try and see if they would work? After the raspberry fiasco, I had little hope. Still, ever the optimist, I took a small jar (one which had contained jam or jelly in another life) and packed it tight with the fruit, then filled it with vodka (not the raspberry-infused vodka but fresh vodka) to the brim, screwed the lid back, put it away and forgot about it for six weeks.

When we opened the jar, the vodka was gone! It had mostly been soaked up by the fruit and whatever was left had turned into a syrupy boozy liqueur which tasted fantastic. I have since made two big jars of the plums, one which I am keeping at low temperature (in the garage actually) and the other one at room temp, just to see if it makes a difference (I'll let you know if you are interested but I won't find out for another four weeks). I have also added some vodka to the new jars at the two-week mark as I found the plums had been at the sauce again and the top ones were no longer covered. But one thing you need to know is that each time you add vodka you are thinning out the liquor which means you will have to wait longer until you can fully savor the plums. In other words you have to choose between having more or having sooner. As I said, it's your call...

The Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums will be going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Blender Bread

I never thought I would make bread in a blender. Yet that's exactly what I did yesterday and I can explain why in two words: extensor tenosynovitis (ET). Unless you are a physician or have had ET yourself, chances are you don't know what I am talking about. Until day before yesterday I didn't either and believe me, I wish I never learned. It is diabolically painful (and this, from someone who is known for having an abnormally high threshold for pain).

ET is a repetitive stress injury and I got it from watching Grey's Anatomy on my handheld device. Which is why I should sue both ABC and the manufacturers of the device. Although maybe not ABC if they let me pick my doctor from the show...

See, what happened was that I was trying to get ready for Season 8 (which just started) by watching all seven previous seasons (which I had never seen before). That's 148 episodes and by episode 140, I guess my left hand grew tired of holding the thing up so that I could better see MerDer drill holes in people's skulls. It gave up without prior notice, leaving me unable to tie my shoe laces, cut veggies, feed my levains (which had to be forcibly dehydrated, poor babies), mix bread and, worse, hold my youngest (one-month old) granddaughter in my arms.

However since:

• I own one of the powerful blenders you can see demonstrated at big warehouse stores
• I got a grain attachment for it (for these seeds or beans which might damage my regular mill)
• This grain attachment came with a booklet of recipes
• Two of these recipes looked interesting: one for sourdough bread, one for hearty multi-grain yeasted bread
• I had levain galore (as usual)

I decided to combine these recipes by just replacing the yeast by liquid starter.

The blender was going to do the work, so I didn't have to worry about anything, right? Well, almost true. But let me tell you, I still found it exhausting to make bread that way. Too many ingredients. Weighing 5 g of this and 7 g of that countless times to get just one loaf in a 8.5 x 4.5 pan! Call me lazy but I don't think it's worth it.

The original multi-grain loaf recipe makes no mention of salt (did they just forget it or is it deliberate?) and eschewes bulk fermentation. The dough goes straight from the blender to the oiled pan. It is supposed to rise in 30 minutes, go into a 350°F oven for 30 to 35 minutes and voilà, bread done.

Well, it didn't quite happen that way. The blender did a good job of milling the minute quantities of millet, buckwheat, flax seeds, wheat, spelt, rye, barley, sunflower seeds, etc. It did mix the dough reasonably well (but I had never had a dough come out at 87°F before and that, even though I used really cold water). I added salt (which is listed as optional in the sourdough recipe). I did upend the blender over the pan to let the dough drop gently into it. But I waited almost 5 hours for it to rise enough to go into the oven (and it had been in a warm place all that time). In all fairness I must say the recipe for the sourdough bread indicates that it might take anywhere between 30 minutes and 8 hours, depending upon the temperature of the room.

The result is as can be seen above. Not pretty but better than just edible. Will I make it again? No. Will we eat it? Yes. At least I will. It actually tastes very healthful. I am hoping it's good for extensor tenosynovitis.