[Mike Nolan]

I had some left over pie dough from my apple pies, so I blind baked it and I'm making a small sour cream raisin pie today, with Italian meringue.

[Mike Nolan]

There are easy bread recipes and harder ones, I always recommend new bakers start out with a few simple ones, like the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty bread or the Austrian Malt bread. You can substitute in 1/2 cup of rye flour in either of those to get a light rye without really affecting the recipe.

Over the years I've been inching up the amount of rye flour to bread flour I use in the marbled rye recipe, I've gone as high as 50-50 but I think 40/60 is a little easier to work with.

Here's what the marbled rye looks like when you cut it:

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[Mike Nolan]

That's true of a lot of the recipes in Ginsberg's book, high rye content breads have a tendency to be a bit gummy right after baking due to a lot of amylase activity, since there isn't a gluten network supporting the bread. The extra resting time gives the interior starches time to gel up more and the moisture levels even out a bit. Some of the recipes are not supposed to be cut into for two days.

I think this bread is pretty good if you like a fairly sour rye, and I suspect it will be even better in a day or two if it dries out a little more.

[Mike Nolan]

I often use barley malt syrup in bagels, it gives them a light tan color rather than white, but I think it adds a nice flavor.

[Mike Nolan]

Report on Frisian Rye Bread (The Rye Baker, pps 184-186):

I forgot to take a picture of the whole loaf before cutting a slice, but it was made in a 9x5 loaf pan and is about 3 3/4 inches high. The recipe made one loaf that weighed about 1100 grams. It can be sliced fairly thin, a slice is between 40 and 50 grams.

The top is quite dark compared to the interior, so I've provided a shot showing the exterior and both the interior and top:

When it first came out of the oven there were distinct notes of molasses in the bread, though there's no molasses in the recipe, but that faded somewhat overnight.

I did tinker with the recipe a bit, because I have nearly 1200 grams of sour rye starter that was discarded during feedings. So rather than build the first level sponge using fresh rye flour inoculated with a little of the rye sour, I took about 360 grams of the discards and added water to match the amount of flour and water in the formula. It was a little slow to rise (having just come out of the refrigerator), so I added a little more rye sour the next morning and let it sit until the following morning, by which time it was sufficiently active. The second stage sponge seemed to perform as the recipe suggested it should, and the dough was like a very thick batter after 8 minutes of kneading, which was also how I expected it to be.

This recipe starts out in a cold oven, with the temperature turned down 20 minutes after the oven is at the initial temperature setting, so it doesn't use steam. The loaf cooled for 24 hours before it was sliced, per the instructions.

The interior is more moist than I thought it would be, even though the interior temperature was over 205 degrees when I took it out. It might have benefited from another 10-20 minutes in the oven.

There's a very assertive sour flavor to it, which doesn't really go away when the bread is toasted. How much my tinkering with the recipe, using over 360 grams of 'discarded' rye sour, is unclear, I may have to make this recipe a second time at some point.

Toasting it doesn't appreciably change the flavor, but a buttered slice of it (untoasted) paired very well with baked pork-n-beans. I tried spreading some of the cheese dip on a slice, it went well, too.

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[Mike Nolan]

We're having assorted snacks (with cheese dip), reheated pizza, rye bread and baked pork-n-beans.

[Mike Nolan]

There was a discussion on the BBGA forum the other day that touched on Montreal bagels. We had them in Ottawa and they were great.

It appears they're made without salt, so they're softer than New York style bagels, and they're supposed to be baked in a wood fired oven so they have a smoky flavor.

Failing a drug test due to poppy seeds may be an urban legend enhanced by the Seinfeld episode, but it is interesting that some drug tests do ask that question. I had lunch once in the Soup Kitchen International in NYC that later became famous as a result of Seinfeld. Good soup.

[Mike Nolan]

I thought about doing some kind of groundhog-themed quiz today, but couldn't come with one. Maybe next year I'll ask the same question I did this year. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

According to the web, all Caputo flours are unbleached, and any European flour is unbrominated. I don't think I have a local source for it, but I don't use a lot of cake flour anyway.

Personally, I think I can taste coffee in both bread and chocolate. It's a cheat anyway, that's NOT how Eastern European black breads are colored! They do it the old-fashioned way by slow baking the bread so the Maillard reaction happens on the inside. Adding molasses or barley syrup will also darken breads, and there are some rye bread recipes that call for them.

What bagel recipe did you use? I've been using the one in Reinhart's Artisan book (ABED) because it makes a smaller amount of dough. Bagel dough should be really smooth, Peter calls it satiny. I scale it, rolling it into balls, then let it rest for a few minutes before shaping it. I use the poke a hole in the middle method to shape bagels for two reasons. One is I have fairly big hands. The other is we prefer 3 ounce bagels to the 4.5 ounce ones you get at the deli, and that's just not enough dough to do the wrap around the hand method.

Most recipes tell you to make sure the bagels pass the float test before boiling them, but most of the time by the time I've finished shaping a pan of bagels the first few pass the float test already. I give them a minute or two to rest while I set up the toppings. I boil them for 30-40 seconds per side.

My favorite topping is cheese, I use a four cheese blend of shredded cheese that I get at Sams. My wife likes poppy seeds, with or without sesame seeds, on BOTH sides. (BTW, I've heard that if you eat too many things with poppy seeds on them, it can cause you to fail some drug screening tests for opiates.)

I still haven't tried making sodium carbonate by baking sodium bicarbonate, that's supposed to raise the pH of your poaching liquid from about 8.3 to over 11, and it is safer to use than lye. I usually throw a little honey or barley malt syrup in the poaching liquid along with the baking soda.

We have a number of Middle Eastern ethnic grocery stores and even more Asian ones and one Russian one that I've not been impressed with. I don't recall seeing any flours there.

[Mike Nolan]

If you search for 'Reinhart marbled rye recipe', it looks like there are at least two sites having a version of his recipe, though not quite identical to the one in my edition of BBA, which calls for shortening rather than oil.

To get the two shades of dough I use corn syrup in the light one and light molasses in the dark one, and I also add some powdered caramel color that I got from King Arthur.

I divide both recipes into 6 parts and flatten them into rectangles, then make 3 stacks of light/dark/light/dark. Which one I put on the outside varies, I can never decide which I like better on the outside.

I press the stacks even flatter then roll each stack up into a loaf shape, producing 3 loaves with the marbled spiral when you cut it. I bake them free form, but you can also bake them in a loaf pan, in which case you might want to make just 2 loaves.

[Mike Nolan]

Stanley Ginsberg's book The Rye Baker talks quite a bit about the differences between baking with wheat flour and with rye flour, getting into the underlying chemical changes, and why a sour rye starter is helpful when making high rye percentage (all the way up to 100%) breads. I've already read that chapter twice and I'm sure I'll read it a few more times.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's a picture of the bottom of one of the apple pies I baked in a Norpro non-stick pie pan and then transferred to a glass pie pan for cutting.

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[Mike Nolan]

If you have Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, the marbled rye bread recipe in it isn't a really strong rye (30/70 blend of rye/white flour, though I currently do 40/60 using a coarse pumpernickel flour) but I've never had it go gummy on me.

[Mike Nolan]

It is so hard to find rye flour in the stores that I wouldn't be surprised to learn few people make rye bread at home any more. It's also one of the areas where packaged breads are usually decent, certainly better than the cheap white breads.

I was looking through the 74 recipes I haven't made yet, trying to decide one or two to try next; some of them will require finding a few ingredients I don't normally have on hand, like plum jam.

[Mike Nolan]

The pies came out great, they're already loose in the Norpro pans, I'll transfer them to other pie pans for cutting (one of them is going to Omaha for a baby shower) once they've cooled a bit. Since going to pastry school I've been using the convection cycle in my oven for pies, I did these for 25 minutes at 385F convection, then dropped the temp to 340F non-convection for another 20 minutes. I'll see if I can get a shot of the bottom of one of them to show how it looks.

Waiting until tomorrow afternoon to cut into the Frisian black bread is going to be a long wait, it smells very interesting. I get strong notes of molasses, though there's no molasses in it. Just a little honey.

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