Swabian Farm Loaf – “Eingnetztes”

‘Eingnetzes’ is a crusty wheat bread typical for the region of Swabia. The dough is relatively soft and it is left to rise in the mixing bowl. The loaf is baked without a tin so its shape varies from time to time. As its surface is not cut before it is put into the oven it rips open at one side, forming a characteristic 'knobbly bit' (called Knauzen in Swabian). The Knauzen is particularly crusty and is seen by many as the best bit of the bread! The word ‘Eingnetztes’ derives from the German verb ‘benetzen’, which translates as ‘to wet’ or ‘to dampen’. This makes sense, because the bread is lifted onto the baking stone or hot baking sheet with wet hands. It is also brushed with some more water for the last few minutes, which gives the loaf its typical shiny crust. Traditionally, the dough was turned out directly onto the stone oven from a wet bowl or large ladle.

The bread is fairly easy to make but the main issue is getting hold of the right flour. Before I started getting into baking ‘serious’ bread I tended to use only plain wheat flour and in some instances wholemeal wheat flour. In Germany the types of flour sold differ considerable from those available in the UK. The main difference – and most relevant for baking bread – is the availability of many different ‘flour types’ (Typen) in Germany. The lower the type number, the whiter the flour or, in other words, the higher the flour type number the more percentage of the whole grain is left in the flour. Regular UK plain flour corresponds roughly to the German flour Typ 405. For baking bread a higher and more rustic type of flour is usually used. Wheat flour used for baking non-wholemeal bread is usually Typ 1050 and rye flour Typ 1150. These are darker than plain white flour, but not as dark as wholemeal. Occasionally I ask visitors to bring me a few bags of Typen flour from Germany or I bring some back when I have been on a visit to Germany myself. However, I have found that a mix of plain and wholemeal flour available in the UK has given me more than acceptable results. All the breads posted in this blog, for example, were baked with regular plain and wholemeal flours.

If you can get your hands on Typen flour I suggest using a mix of Typ 1050 and wheat wholemeal flour. If not, just follow the recipe below. This makes one large loaf. The pre-dough and sourdough keep the bread fresher for longer and they also improve its flavour a lot. It takes a while to make, but it is certainly worth it!

For the pre-dough:

100 g plain flour

100 g wholemeal wheat flour

10 g fresh yeast

200 ml lukewarm water

For the sourdough:

100 g wholemeal rye flour

100 g lukewarm water

1 tablespoon rye sourdough starter

Other ingredients:

300 g plain flour

300 g wholemeal wheat flour

15 g salt

1 tablespoon honey

300 ml lukewarm water

For the pre-dough: dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water and mix in the flour. Cover the bowl with clingfilm or a lid and leave to rest at room temperature for an hour and then in the fridge overnight or for about 12 hours. For the sourdough: mix all three ingredients, cover and leave to rest in a warm place (28 degrees are ideal – placing the sourdough in a coolbox with a warm hot water bottle works a treat!) overnight or for about 12 hours.

When you are ready to bake mix the pre-dough and sourdough with all the remaining ingredients and knead well for about 10 minutes. The dough is relatively soft (but nothing like as sticky as pure rye sourdough). Cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave to rest for about 30 minutes. When the 30 minutes are up fold the dough in the bowl. It is easiest to do this by moving your hand under the dough, grabbing a bit, pulling it up and folding it over. Do this about 4-5 times moving clockwise (or counter clockwise) around the bowl. Leave to rest again for 30 minutes, then fold again and leave to rest while you preheat the oven.

Preheat the oven to about 240 degrees. If you have a bread baking stone you should heat this up in the oven. If not, place a strong baking sheet in the oven to heat up. When the oven is hot take the ball of dough out of the bowl with very wet hands and place it on a chopping board covered in baking paper. Pull the loaf onto the hot baking stone or baking sheet with the paper and spray some water into the oven. Bake at 240 degrees for about 15 minutes then decrease the temperature gradually to 200 degrees. The bread needs to bake for about one hour. You can pull out the baking paper after 20 minutes so it doesn’t burn.

When the bread is done briefly take it out of the oven and wet it with water (you can use a brush or just your wet hands, if you are hard like me). Put it back into the hot oven for about 2 minutes. This makes the crust nice and shiny. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. This freezes very well.

For fun and a bit of blog networking I am submitting this post to Yeastspotting.

Rustic rye bread - 'Rustikales Roggenmischbrot'

 

Unfortunately, I don’t manage to bake sourdough loaves nearly as often as I would like to. Admittedly, these breads are a labour of love and require some planning. The making and baking process itself is not too bad, but just getting the dough ready requires a few fairly lengthy periods of rest and proofing in between the individual steps. Over the past few months the day job just didn’t allow me to engage in this more time-intensive kind of baking very often. Having said this, though, the effort is absolutely worth it. This weekend I managed to reinvigorate my sourdough starter that was waiting patiently in the fridge and then baked another variation of rye bread with sourdough. This bread is made of three components, as described below: the sourdough, a pre-dough involving a very small amount of fresh yeast, and also a ‘soaker’, making the bread particularly moist. As most of the flour used for the bread is left to absorb liquid (water) overnight, the bread is not in danger of becoming dry, as all the moisture is ‘locked’ in the flour and seeds. The addition of a few spoons of walnut oil, as well as a small amount of coriander and caraway seed spicing, underlines the bread’s rustic flavour and appearance.

For the sourdough (my PREVIOUS POST describes how to make your own sourdough starter)

140 g wholemeal rye flour

140 ml lukewarm water

30 g sourdough starter

Mix these three ingredients in a bowl, cover with cling film, and leave to rest in a warm place (28 – 30 degrees are ideal) overnight or for about 12-15 hours.

For the pre-dough:

100 g wholemeal wheat flour

100 ml lukewarm water

2-3 g of fresh yeast

Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water, mix in the flour, cover with cling film and leave to rest at room temperature (the room does not need to be heated) overnight or for about 12-15 hours.

For the ‘soaker’:

150 g wholemeal rye flour or coarsely milled rye grain

100 g sunflower seeds, or pumpkin seeds, or walnuts (or a mixture), dry-roasted in a pan

230 ml lukewarm water

15 g salt

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl, cover with cling film and leave to rest at room temperature or for 12-15 hours as the pre-dough above.

When all three components are ready to go (the sourdough and the pre-dough should have increased in size and should look bubbly and light) put them all in a bowl. Don't forget to keep a couple of spoons of the sourdough as your starter for the next bread! Then add the following:

250 g plain flour

2 tbsp walnut oil (can be replaced with any other oil)

½ - 1 level teaspoon each of finely ground coriander seeds and caraway seeds (I use a pestle and mortar)

If you have one, leave your food processor to knead the dough for at least 7 minutes. You can also knead the dough by hand (it’s a bit sticky) and a friend told me that he gets his bread maker to knead his sourdough, which also works. Leave to rest for about 20 minutes in a warm place.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and, with wet hands, quickly knead and fold into the desired shape. This dough is fairly sticky, so I usually bake it in a tin, which is easiest. If you are brave, you can leave it to rise in a floured bread proofing basket instead and turn it out onto a baking sheet before baking. 

This is the dough after 60 minutes of rising. It roughly doubled in size.

Leave to rise in a warm place for about 60-90 minutes. Preheat the oven to the highest temperature possible. 250 degrees are ideal. When the bread has visibly increased in size, score the top with a sharp knife or razor blade. Spray some water into the oven (this improves the bread’s crust) and enter the loaf. Bake at the highest temperature for 20 minutes then gradually decrease the temperature to about 190 degrees to finish off. The overall baking time is about 60 minutes. 

When the bread is finished, wrap it in a clean tea towel and leave to cool before eating (if you can, wait until the next day before cutting it). It keeps fresh for at least 5 days and also freezes well.

Making a sourdough starter

 

Making a sourdough starter is easy and cheap, but it takes a bit of time and patience. However, once your sourdough starter is ready it will keep going for years and the lengthy process does not need to be repeated. The starter will survive in the fridge for several weeks in between baking loaves of bread. Only when it goes black or mouldy it should be disposed of. Sourdough gets better with age – the more often you bake with it, the quicker and better your bread will rise. For the first few loaves a bit of yeast can be added (7 – 10 g) in order to support the sourdough’s strength. Bread made just with sourdough can take longer to rise (sometimes up to several hours). I therefore still add a bit of yeast most of the time (or use a pre-dough, as in my rustic rye bread), to safe time.

Below is a description of how I made my own rye flour sourdough starter, which has been alive now for almost a year and its ‘relatives’ are used by several friends to make their own bread. Sourdough can also be made with wheat or other flours, but rye is the most stable and easiest to make:

Day 1: Mix 100g wholemeal rye flour with 100 ml of lukewarm water in a fairly large bowl (more flour and water will be added in subsequent days). Cover the bowl (do not use cling film, but a plate or a loose-fitting lid) and leave in a warm place (25 degrees or higher are ideal) for 24 hours. It can be difficult to find a place in the house that is warm at all times. I rested the sourdough near the boiler when the heating was on. When the heating was off, I wrapped the bowl in a blanket with a hot water bottle filled with warm water, which did the trick! It is important not to let the sourdough get too hot. More than 40 degrees will kill it!

Day 2: add another handful of wholemeal rye flour and enough warm water to get the consistency of a sponge-cake batter. Stir well, cover and leave in a warm place as above for 24 hours.

Day 3: add a further 100 g of rye flour and 100 ml of water. Mix well and put back into a warm place to rest for 24 hours. By this point the sourdough should start smelling ‘sour’ and will be bubbly and light. If it hasn’t done so at this point, just keep going. The smell of sourdough is not always pleasant and can be quite strong, but this is normal. Only if the sourdough is turning black or has gone mouldy something has gone wrong.

Day 4: finally, feed the sourdough with a further 100g rye flour and 100 ml warm water. Mix well, cover and put back into a warm place for another 24 hours.

Now the sourdough is ready to be used for baking bread. Make sure you keep a few spoons full of the sourdough in a small jar in the fridge (before adding any more ingredients) each time you bake. This is your starter for the next bread. 

Rye bread with yoghurt

This was my first attempt at baking a 100% wholegrain rye bread and I am quite happy with the result. Rye dough has a reputation for being difficult to handle as it is so sticky. However, this bread is baked in a tin, which allowed me to circumvent the challenge of shaping a sticky mess into a loaf. Sticky it was, but the baked bread turned out beautifully moist and surprisingly light. This is a variation of a recipe I found on a German internet forum for sourdough enthusiasts, der-sauerteig.com. In addition to a vast collection of tried-and-tested recipes this forum provides the answer even to the most left-field sourdough-related question or problem. Most of the forum is in German, but contributions in English are welcome and there are a few English-speaking users. If you are into baking sourdough bread then this really is an invaluable resource. 

The addition of a ‘soaker’ – wholemeal flour soaked in water before baking – makes this bread particularly moist and it will easily keep fresh for a week. Pure sourdough rye, especially if baked with wholemeal flour, does not rise to the heady heights of wheat and yeast bread and is less spectacular visually. However, this loaf’s flavour demonstrates that there is some truth in this old platitude: looks don’t count for everything.

For the sourdough (I explain how to make your own sourdough starter HERE)

20 g sourdough starter

180 g wholemeal rye flour

190 g warm water

Leave in a warm place (26 degrees are ideal) for 16 hours

For the soaker:

155 g wholemeal rye flour or bruised rye grains

155 g water

12 g salt

Leave to stand at room temperature for at least 4 hours

For the bread dough:

Sourdough from the recipe above

Soaker from above

290 g wholegrain rye flour

10 g honey

160 g natural yoghurt at room temperature

5 g fresh yeast (optional)

Mix all ingredients for the bread dough and knead/mix for about 5 minutes. The dough should be wet and sticky and have the consistency of porridge. Leave the dough to rest for 50 minutes in a warm place then knead/mix again briefly. Pour the dough into a large, greased bread tin (it should not be more than half full) and smooth the top with wet hands. Cover the tin with a cloth and leave to rise in a warm place for up to an hour or until doubled in size. Bake in the preheated oven for about 60 minutes, starting with 240 degrees and slowly decreasing the temperature to about 180. If you like your bread crusty you can bake it without the tin for the last 20 minutes in the oven. Rye bread should mature for about a day before it is cut.

Sourdough loaf with rye and walnuts

I am a fan of traditional British cuisine and I love cooking flavoursome stews, savoury pies and especially these wonderful hot desserts, such as bread and butter pudding and fruit crumbles in all varieties. Every Christmas I treat my family in Germany to a slap up British Christmas dinner and everybody loves it (at least that’s what they say). What I never managed to get used to, though, is British bread. I am talking about those sliced loaves sold in plastic bags in supermarkets all over the country. Of course, some traditional bakeries remain and you can find excellent farmhouse loaves and other speciality breads if you are prepared to look a bit more closely. However, earlier this year I really started missing rustic sourdough bread baked with rye flour, which turned out to be really hard to come by in my East Midlands town. Bread baked with sourdough is the rule rather than the exception in Germany, and bread that includes at least a proportion of rye is also common.  Rye bread is darker than wheat, it tends to be less fluffy and it has a distinctive, aromatic flavour. Because of the specific makeup of its gluten (so I have been told) rye flour needs to be ‘acidified’ in order to be used for baking. This is achieved with sourdough, which probably explains the relatively rare use of rye flour in the UK, where yeast is most commonly used as a raising agent for bread.

Rye bread tends to be associated with savoury toppings, but I think it is as versatile as any other bread. It tastes excellent with butter and jam and especially with a good chocolate spread for breakfast. A real advantage of sourdough bread is that it keeps fresh for a lot longer than bread baked only with yeast. If stored correctly a loaf can be eaten for at least a week without getting hard or losing too much of its flavour.

Making sourdough is a science in itself and I spent a lot of time reading and researching the topic on the internet. Of course I am still not an expert and there is a lot more to learn. Making the first batch of sourdough was quite time intensive, but I have now mastered a small repertoire of sourdough breads that are almost as quick to make as regular wheat and yeast loaves in a bread maker. I ‘grew’ my own sourdough from only organic rye flour and water, which took about five days. But I have seen that readymade sourdough culture can be purchased online, which would considerably accelerate the process (but it would also take away a lot of the fun). Whether you grow your own sourdough culture or buy it online – give it a go! It is definitely worth it! For a description of how to make your own sourdough starter click HERE

Recipe for one large loaf:

To make the sourdough:

2 tbsp sourdough starter

140 g wholegrain rye flour

140 ml lukewarm water

For the bread:

280 g sourdough from the ingredients above (keep 2 tbsp in the fridge as a starter for the next loaf)

350g strong white bread flour (or spelt flour)

210 g wholegrain rye flour

300 ml lukewarm water

10 g salt

5 g fresh yeast (optional)

150 g walnut pieces, dry roasted in a pan

1 tbsp walnut oil

For the sourdough combine the starter with the rye flour and lukewarm water. Leave in a warm place (26 degrees are ideal) for about 12-15 hours. When the sourdough is ready it will be bubbly and at least have doubled in size.

For the bread dough combine the sourdough with all other ingredients and knead for about 10-15 minutes (I use the dough hook of my old Kenwood Chef, but you can also do this by hand). Add a bit more wheat flour or warm water if required so the dough can be handled without being too dry or too sticky. Cover with a cloth and leave to relax for about 15 minutes. Briefly knead the dough again on a surface floured with rye flour. Then place in a greased loaf tin or in a floured banneton (proofing basket) to bake a round and crusty loaf. I bought a banneton for very little money on ebay. But you can also use a round bowl or colander lined with a floured tea towel. The purpose of the banneton is to prevent the dough from spreading so you don’t end up with bread as flat as a pancake. 

Leave in a warm place to rise until doubled in size. Depending on the prowess of your sourdough this can take 1-5 hours (the potency of a sourdough tends to improve with age). If you use a small amount of yeast (purists sneer at this, but I usually add a few morsels so I don’t have to take a day off work and/or actually can get some sleep) about 50-60 minutes are sufficient.

Preheat the oven to about 240 degrees. Before you are ready to bake spray some water into the oven – this will give the bread a good crust. If baking without a tin carefully turn the bread from the banneton or bowl onto a baking sheet covered in baking paper. Bake for about 60 minutes, decreasing the temperature gradually from 240 to about 180 degrees. The bread is ready when the bottom sounds hollow when tapped.

Cover the bread with a clean tea towel. Do not be tempted to cut a slice while it is still warm even if it smells extremely good. It will taste best if left alone overnight. The loaf will keep fresh for up to a week if stored in a bread bin or tin. I have been told that the walnut bread tastes particularly good with a piece of brie. But I also recommend trying it with chocolate spread!