Loaf 9 – Seeded Whole Wheat, a failure
Sliced, showing the dense interior.
I tried to make the Seeded Whole Wheat Boule that we made in the bread class – it was one of my favorites, a surprisingly sweet nutty loaf that would make wonderful sandwiches but is also nice alone with butter.
This version came out heavy and chewy. The flavor is nice, but I get very bored gnashing on it to make it swallowable. I’ll have to mark this as a failure, figure out what I did wrong and try again.
The written recipe calls for making it with a food processor, which I don’t have and which the teaching chef abhorred anyway. In class we kneaded by hand, but I decided to use my mixer. The ingredients came together in only a few minutes, but I kept mixing trying to get the dough to form a ‘window’ signalling it was ready. After five or six minutes the dough hook was just slapping the ball around in the bowl, so I took it out and hand kneaded for another five or ten minutes. By the end I had a nice rubber ball that was already over tough. I’m pretty sure that I simply overworked the dough, but it’s possible it was also too dry. It was never possible to make a window with it.
I let it rest overnight in the fridge, and then cut it in two, tried to shape nice boules, and let them rise again. They never really gained any significant increase in size, despite putting them in an 80° oven to help. I baked them anyway to see what would happen, using a hearth style with steam. Internal temp was 185° when I took them out – the crust was a tad overdone.
The final loaves were quite dense and only marginally edible.
Lessons
- TBD – I’ll be keeping track of changes the next time I do this bread.
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- Ingredients.
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- Tortured dough after a night in the fridge.
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- Rubber balls ready for baking.
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- In the oven.
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- Fresh from the oven.
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- Sliced, showing the dense interior.
