Cooking Cheap

I broke down and bought a kitchen scale. I found one at Freddies (Fred Meyer’s) for just a few dollars more than Amazon+shipping. I even bought a real pizza stone. I’ve never baked by weight so this is going to be interesting. Not content to vary just one thing, I’m going to try a rye bread and use the stand mixer. With help from this online calculator I have something in a bowl for the first rise.

The electronic scale is easy to use. I can only guess at my hydration % for the starter though because I didn’t take the days it takes to measure it properly. Here’s what I mixed together: 250g of starter (thats a lot of starter, a cup and half or so), 350g dark rye (almost my entire bag, something like three cups), 100g of whole wheat bread flour, 150g (or a bit more) of white bread flour and 325g of water and 2 tsp of kosher salt. It’s a very wet dough, as advertised. It’s like a very thick cake batter.

I have no idea what I’m doing. I have a few clues but I’m really flying blind and breaking my all my rules with this bread. The proportions are reasonable but you can’t do that recipe without a stand mixer and a boat load of faith. Supposedly, rye doesn’t have any gluten to speak of, and it’s harder for the yeasties to find it out in whole wheat flour and they eat rye fast. It’s going to be a lot of bread so I might let one do a final rise in a loaf pan and one would be rustic (freeform) to see if it can support itself. But that would a decision to make on Sunday.

— Baking Day —

When I took the dough out of the fridge I see it was over proofed. There’s nothing I could to fix that. That much starter as a percentage for the whole could do that. Once I got it out of the bowl it reduced to something like my normal 2 mini-loaves. One I free formed the other I put in a loaf pan. There was a lot of spreading not much rise. I noticed the free form loaf was tearing at the surface, another sign of over proofed dough. I set up the it the oven when I saw that. My standard preheat to 500, bake at 450. Hardly any oven rise on either loaf. Taste was pretty OK. Texture and crumb was better than I thought it would be. The crust parts were very nice.

I made a nice burger with half of the free form loaf and some fried onion and bacon. It certainly works well as a meat holder. The loaf in the pan is headed for bread crumbs or croutons or I’ll figure out how to make those rye chips you find in snack mixes, that would make a tasty snack.

I think I need to add something to these heavier doughs. Sugar or spices or seeds. Anyway, I learned something from the experiment. Lots of things. Not worth the effort to take pictures.. Like I said above, It’s all new again.