Now that my daughter is 3 months old and sleeps at night (sometimes at least, so far so good tonight), I have actually found time start experimenting with my new Komo Fidibus Classic grain mill. A month ago, in a spate of arrogance, I decided to prepare a rich slow cooked ancho chile sauce and cook my wife and I a nice plate of chicken enchiladas. My mistake, babies don’t care about enchiladas. They were still good, but eating hastily prepared cold food after hours of prep work was disheartening.

So I waited.

Oh, I also unceremoniously threw out (i.e. composted) my starter culture weeks ago. It seemed like such a small weekly task to remove it from the fridge, feed it, and change to a new jar, but after missing two weeks in a row I knew it was hopeless.

Which gets me to last weekend.  I had a jar of Kamut berries sitting around and I have been meaning to try again at a 100% Kamut loaf. I milled the berries into a very fine granular texture. As a durum wheat, however, Kamut doesn’t mill to a nice floury powder, but more of a meal type texture.  I milled a total of 500 grams, sifting off 20 grams of bran.

I took 50 grams of the Kamut flour, and a dash too much of commercial yeast, and added 60 grams water to create a poolish, which I left on the counter for a couple hours to find overflowing (not a very smart choice of container). I feed the poolish with 20 more grams of flour and 20 grams water and refrigerated it overnight, as I decided to bake the next day instead. Kamut is total water hog and just eats up water, which lead me to add the bit of extra water above the 100% ratio for a typical poolish.

For my bread, I used 100 grams Kamut flour and 80 grams water, 3 grams of commercial yeast, and 3 grams salt (I forget the exact type, but I think it is from somewhere in Utah).

Totals (including the 100 grams of poolish):
Kamut: 150 grams 100%
Water: 130 grams 86% (a little too much, I would have gone with a little less)
Dry Active Yeast: 2 grams   1%
Salt: 3 grams 2%

Autolyse for 15 mins, added salt with a little extra warm water, gave it some nice folds and left to bulk rise for 4 hours. I then gave the dough some additional folds and shaped into a narrow baguette.

I let the loaf proof for an hour (not long enough, but it was getting late), got my oven up to 500 degrees with my steaming pans of water, burning off old residue and setting off the smoke detector in the process of course. Fifteen mins at 475 degrees, followed by another 15 at 450 and I had a decent looking baguette. Buttered and jammed, it tasted quite good. Although after two different Kamut based loafs, I have decided the flavor just isn’t great for straight breads. It is too strong and too “a flavor I just can’t quite translate to words”. Again, as with spelt, people often describe the flavor as nutty, or buttery, either of which I don’t think is right (still trying to come up with a better way to describe the various flavors of different grains).

It really wasn’t practical to hand crank enough flour for cooking and baking on demand with the Sunshine Nugget mill. Especially that time is pretty hard to come by in my house these days, what with a baby hanging out all day. At least this was my rational justification for picking up a KoMo Grain Mill, ordered from Pleasant Hill Grain. (I also had the fortitude to resist buying a vintage Miyata One Thousand that was offered to me for a great price, so I figured I deserved it.)

Between the baby and my day job, however, the KoMo sat there tempting me over a week before I had time to actually put it to productive use. Test batches resulted in a nice soft flour, but I tossed them as part of the breaking in process (per manufacturer’s instructions).  It is a beautiful looking machine.

The Sunshine Nugget will still stay around though. I plan I will keep it latched to counter with the steel burrs to grind seeds and other wet grindable products that can’t go in the KoMo.

The first bread I attempted with my natural yeast starter using the Tartine method was such a failure it almost made me give up and decide to stick to my forte of glorified pencil pushing. Maybe good bread is just beyond my reach. It may still be, but after the first disastrous failure and one brick later, I managed to create an edible loaf of bread.

Brick bread (see right):

Spelt Bread 

After playing around with sprouting spelt berries, I started to develop an affinity for its off-beat wheatiness, which is often described as nutty (although I am not convinced that is the best description) with a moderately sweet flavor. My selection of spelt was store bought bulk Vita-spelt berries, which I stone ground with my Sunshine Nugget. I set the mill to a slightly courser grind than I have in previous batches. I sifted off about 15% bran by weight. The bran was heavy and noticeably larger than bran sifted off in my batches of fresh milled emmer and hard red wheat

Side note on bran.

Bran is tasty stuff, but true whole grain bread is just too heavy for my taste. I tried to use the bran to mixed results (e.g. a bran cracker that will never be spoken of again).

Recipe: 170g spelt flour, 40g leaven (50/50 all-purpose/rye flour mix), and 110g water. Autolyse for 1:30 (longer than normal because I had errands to run), then mixed in a tps. salt with a little extra water and gently folded for a couple minutes and left to rise for 3 1/2 hours. After a decent rise, I cut off one-third the dough to use for flat bread with dinner and folded the remaining dough into loaf shape and refrigerated overnight. The next morning I brought the dough back out onto the counter and let it sit for hours (basically all day). After almost forgetting about the bread (according to my Tartine Book No. 3 spelt has a very long rising time, which I did not know at the time), I folded the dough once again into better mini-loaf shape and pre-heated the over to 400 for baking. Lacking a steam injection oven or a proper cast iron covered pot, my work-around is just a pan of water plus water on the bottom of the oven to create a nice spa like atmosphere.

The end result: Nothing special, but not bad. A nice sourdough tang and not too wheaty. Still too dense with too tight a crumb though.  

I recently decided that it was time to start maintaining a starter to make breads. (Full disclosure: I am not a great bread maker but trying to get better). In the past, I have always just used commercial yeast and didn’t really consider natural leavening. As my wife knows, I don’t like doing anything the easy way, so enough with the little packets of yeast. Overall, there were some ups and downs over the past two weeks, but I think I finally managed to get a healthy and strong culture going.

My flour mixture started as a 50/50 whole wheat/all-purpose blend, which initially took off. See photo to the right two days after starting. However, my wife was not a fan of the smell. She barely tolerates my various messes in the kitchen as is and I got a little worried that this might put her over the edge.

After this easy start, the activity really seemed to die down and the mixture was mostly just like pancake batter. Although the weather had turned colder (my kitchen was at around 65F most of the time), I decided the problem may have been chlorine in the water. I kept a couple tablespoons of the old half-dead starter and boiled some water to get rid of any chlorine.

I created a little system to boil water and keep adding it to this old half-gallon jug that I bought years ago and until now had never found a use for.

Based on some reading online, I also switched to a 50/50 all-purpose / rye flour blend. Not a great idea to change two different variables at the same time, but it worked. The starter really took off after another 2 days, two feeding cycles. The culture seemed strong enough and decided it was time to try to make some actual bread. (For another post).

My culture after 2 weeks (with a couple days of serious neglect here and there). I fed the culture about 3 hours before this photo. The starter had roughly doubled in volume and obtained a fairly gentle sweet smell. My wife hasn’t complained about the smell in days!

My Sunshine Nugget from Nazko Mfg. & Distributing Co. arrived yesterday. I test ground some barley, which came out with a nice texture, but I haven’t had time to really give it a go yet. Tomorrow for sure though, as it may be the last chance for a couple weeks since my kitchen will be undergoing some major changes.