Multi-Seed Spelt Sourdough Bread

My bread baking so far has been very limited by my inability to procure different ingredients, but a visit from a friend from the UK and my discovery of a Finnish grocer in Fuengirola has made it possible for me to do a few more variations. Further to this I was down for a week with a muscle injury, but now I'm back to my weekly bread baking now.

I used 1 cup of organic whole spelt flour in today's loaf. The starter was 'whole wheat flour heavy' because I mostly fed it on whole wheat flour for weeks. I also kneaded poppy seeds, white sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and caraway seeds into the dough. The result was a pretty nice looking flavorful bread!

Multi-seed Spelt Sourdough Bread

Ingredients

2 Cups of Sponge (Proofed Starter)
1 Cup Organic Whole Spelt Flour
1 Cup AP Flour + add more flour depending on how wet your dough is
2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
4 Tsps Brown Sugar
2 Teaspoons Coarse Sea Salt

2 Tbsp Caraway Seeds*
2 Tbsp White Sesame Seeds*
2 Tbsp Poppy Seeds*
2 Tbsp Pumpkin Seeds

*Note: I toasted all the seeds with an asterix separately and mixed them. I did not toast the pumpkin seeds. Maybe they should have been toasted too.



Step 1: Mix 1/2 cup AP flour into your sponge to make the yeast happy. Add the sugar and mix it. The very wet dough should be very bubbly and look 'alive'.

Step 2: Mix in all of the spelt flour and then add the olive oil and salt. Keep adding AP flour as you mix it until you've reached the desired consistency. Remember that the wetness of your sponge and flour varies in absorbency, so trust your instincts on when to stop adding more flour. I tend to work with a soft wet dough in the beginning, because I end up sprinkling it with more AP flour as I knead it anyway. Once the dough is thoroughly mixed and is somewhat solid (not a liquidy mess), let it rest for 25 minutes covered with a cloth. At this stage you haven't done any hardcore kneading yet, but have just 'blended' the ingredients.

Step 3: Knead/fold the dough 100 times or so and let it rest for 30 minutes.

Step 4: Repeat Step 3.

Step 5: Repeat Step 3 again.

Step 6: After kneading the dough for 3 rounds, let it rest covered with a cloth until it doubles in size. This may take 2 hours or longer. It depends on how strong your starter, how warm your room is and how humid it is. So, again, trust your eyes. If the dough has doubled in size, it's time for the next step.

Step 7: Punch the dough down and mix in the seed mixture minus 2 Tbsps of it which you will use to decorate your loaf later.

Step 8: Roll the dough into a loaf and set it on a sheet of oven paper dusted with coarse corn meal and cover this with a cloth and let it double in size.

Step 9: When your loaf is nearly double in size, pre-heat the oven to 230 C.

Step 10: Right before your loaf is about to go into the oven, brush the top with water and sprinkle the remaining seeds on top of it.

Step 11: Bake at 230 C for 20 minutes with steam and then for another 25 minutes at 210-220 C. I use a casserole dish filled with boiling water to create steam.

Sources:

Sourdough Baking by S. John Ross

100% Spelt Levain Bread

Multigrain Seeded Bread

Scalloped Lemon Dill Potatoes

Today was an unusually overcast day and the photography session on my kitchen counter did not go well. I guess if the lighting is bad enough, not even Photoshop can salvage it. I was going to show you how lovely this looked before it went into the oven, but I guess we'll just have to be satisfied with the final results.

This is a very simple recipe you can make with an extra boiled potato that you had leftover from yesterday...because you boiled too many of them...or you can boil on afresh if you really want.

Scalloped Lemon Dill Potatoes

Ingredients

1 Big Potato Boiled with its Skin On

Fresh Dill

2 Cloves Garlic

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Lemon Salt (You can make it with fresh lemon rind and salt if you wish)

Black Pepper

Chili

Coarse Spanish Paprika

Step 1: Preheat your oven to 250C. Get your biggest casserole dish and line it with oven paper.

Step 2: Slice the potatoes as thinly as you can and then lay them in one layer in the casserole dish.

Step 3: Sprinkle with lemon salt, black pepper, fresh dill, chili and paprika.

Step 4: Make another layer on top and do the same thing.

Step 5: Drizzle extra virgin olive oil and place 2 garlic cloves on top.

Step 6: Roast in oven for 30 minutes or until the top layer has browned a bit and looks crispy.

This would make a nice side dish for a lot of things but I have to be honest. I just had this with eggs & Kalles on the side. This was my Sunday morning brunch!

Turkish Delights

This week I didn't make my sourdough bread because I'm still suffering from a stiff neck due to some strained muscle from kneading too much dough. I can't turn my neck to the left without feeling pain in a (pulled?) muscle in my neck connected to some muscle in my back/chest - so this really wasn't the best time to try making something I'd never made.

Thing is, the recipe seemed straight forward enough with a little corn flour and a little sugar, etc. I didn't think this little experiment would turn into something that would remind me of what they made Oscar Wilde do in prison!

Anyhow the recipe I used wasn't perfect as it failed to mention some crucial instructions (or omitted something) and if you didn't put the candy batter through a sieve (or so something that was unmentioned), you ended-up with solid lumps of corn starch inside your soft candy. I put some of mine through a makeshift sieve aka a tea strainer - but seriously it was so hard to do I gave-up after I'd done this with less than half of it.

The candy sat in these oil lined small containers with wrap in them overnight and then I cut them and dusted them with a mixture of corn starch & sugar the next day. After I tried some exactly the way they were supposed to be, I tried adding a small amount of green tea powder into the dusting mixture and this turned out to be a very nice thing to do, because it offset the somewhat cloying sweetness. For some reason, when you dust Turkish Delights (flavored with lemon and orange flower water) with green tea powder - the flavor of the green tea really comes alive - more so than if you painted some vanilla cookies with green tea frosting. It wasn't such a bad combination with the lemon and orange flower essence either.



Anyhow I'm not posting the recipe as I believe it was an incomplete recipe that needed some more details. For those of you who would like to try - I suggest you consult a Turkish friend who has a grandmother who still makes these at home!

Addendum: I found this recipe just now. This recipe tells you to boil the mixture until all the lumps are gone, and uses more water. I'm not sure this will work, but it does make sense as your mixture will be much more diluted so you'd be able to boil it more and let all the bits of starch dissolve.

Escapade Philippine à Paris

Recently I was invited to an event in Paris with my dear friend Victor Magsaysay cooking.

The venue was:

La Cuisine Paris
89 Boulevard Saint Michel
75005 Paris

He played with some provincial Filipino recipes and refined them to make some stunning presentations using all these lovely fresh ingredients purchased in the markets of Paris.





The execution was decidedly eastern, with a nice western polish to them.





What can I say? I'm sorry I missed this event because I was still waiting for my residency permit authorization to come in.

Read more about this event and Victor here.

Special thanks to Yusuke Kinaka for allowing me to use his photographs in my blog.

Menu

Inspirée d’authentiques marchés philippins

Entrée

Beruyà ng Arayat
Papaye verte, taro et crevettes croquantes en beignets
vinaigre épicé de noix de coco

Plats

Pinakbet ni Paras
Papillote de légumes exotiques

Pusò ng Saging at Isdâ
Salade de fleurs de bananier rôties et rouget grillé

Bistek Tagalog
Carpaccio de boeuf sauce soja,
oignons confits et calamansi


Tous les plats sont servis avec du riz au jasmin
en papillotes de feuilles de bananier

Dessert

"Dirty Ice Cream" et Confit Dàgani
Glace au lait de Chèvre avec jeunes noix de coco,
kombava et muscovado en confit

Spelt Flour Sourdough Bread

This is my attempt at incorporating spelt flour into my weekly sourdough baking.

I've been looking at incorporating different grains and seeds into my bread because when you have bread around the house all the time, it can get a bit boring to have the same bread week after week. A German friend had suggested using spelt flour and I happened to find 500g of it at a health food shop in Torremolinos so I snapped it up and it was there sitting in my cupboard waiting to be used.

It was a good thing I did some minor research before I embarked on this attempt as it seems spelt flour has different properties from regular wheat flour. Although it has a much higher protein content which is nice, it apparently has weaker gluten which means that you have to modify your bread baking a bit. Apparently you can overknead spelt whereas this isn't easy to do with wheat flour. I suggest you stop kneading the bread when you think the dough feels good rather than sticking to a fixed time or number of folds any recipe stipulates.

As usual I prepared my bread according to S. John Ross's recipe, but I also incorporated some elements from The Fresh Loaf. Shiao-Ping's baking is very precise and I'm sure that if you followed her instructions to a tee, your bread would be stellar, but I just pulled out easy to incorporate elements into my routine because following every detail was a bit too overwhleming for me.

The only modification I made to S. John Ross's recipe was that I let the bread rest and knead/folded it 3 times before I molded it into a loaf for the final proofing. I also wet my hands when I kneaded/folded the somewhat harder dough (due to the spelt?) to keep it from sticking to my hands. I did this alternately with dusting it with a bit of AP flour.

Anyhow, my spelt flour seemed to absorb water more readily than AP flour (even though spelt is supposed to be less absorbent), so I only added 1 cup AP flour and 1 cup spelt flour to the starter to form my dough this time. The type of spelt flour I used was organic and unbleached.

Further to this, I thought I'd try baking this loaf with a preheated oven and used Shiao-Ping's baking temperatures and times. This meant baking the bread with steam for 20 minutes at 230C and then baking it for another 25 minutes at 220-210C. Before the loaf went into the oven, I dusted it with a bit of AP flour.

The result?

The bread had a much thicker, crunchier crust with a lot of flavor.

However, as a result of introducing too many variables, I'm not sure whether it was the repeated kneading/folding, the preheated oven, the spelt flour or a combination of all of these that created this nice thick pleasantly crunchy crust.

Maybe someone can enlighten me.

Note: I feed my starter sometimes with whole wheat flour and sometimes with AP flour. Sometimes it's half and half. Because I fed my starter with 100% whole wheat flour last week, the starter itself was already pretty thick and dark when I started.