9 posts tagged “pumpernickel”

It's really interesting to me that people all over the world are reading my posts about my endeavors to make a good loaf of pumpernickel (which I can see on my StatCounter). I would love to know if a link to my pumpernickel tags is posted on some baking site or something...? And I'd also love to know if you're finding my posts helpful or not...? Is there something I can add?

Please feel free to comment below, or to send me a message!

:-)

Better pumpernickel

I really think I've got it now! This is most definitely true pumpernickel... I just need to tweak a couple things the next time.

As some of you may recall, I've been trying for, oh, about a year now to make a real loaf of pumpernickel - not what passes for it in the store, but the kind that is sweet/sour, moist, and cooks for hours till the Maillard Reaction turns it black. Back in May, I made some that was pretty close, but the recipe still called for some yeast and some molasses, whereas the traditional pumpernickel I'd gotten from Germany had only rye meal, sourdough, and malted barley. And I knew from my research that the traditional pumpernickel is cooked in a steamy oven for many many hours to allow the reaction to take place. But the couple times I tried that, I got a result that was way too hard to cut into.

With all the general bread-baking experience I've been gaining over the past number of months, I decided I would just try a complete experiment - no recipe, just some learned methods, and a little innovation. Herewith, the one that worked:

I've liked the grain textures I've been getting since May, which is due to scalding the grains first, so that's the first step I took yesterday: I took 1/2 cup of the organic hard winter wheat I have a bag of, and ran it through the coffee grinder to crack most of the grains. Then I mixed that with 1 cup of organic rye meal (still working on the 25-pound sack I bought last Fall), and poured 1-1/2 cup of boiling water over that mixture. I had gotten my sourdough starter out of the fridge the night before (this is the same rye starter I created last Fall - I'm very proud of keeping it going this long - I use it for pancakes and miscellaneous things when I'm not experimenting with pumpernickel, and try to feed it at least every few weeks - I keep it in the fridge between-times). So the starter had come to room temp by Saturday morning, so in a bowl I mixed 2/3 cup of starter, 1/3 cup of lukewarm filtered water, and 1/3 cup rye meal. Then as always to replenish the starter, I added an equal replacement (1/3 cup water & 1/3 cup rye meal) back to the jar. Then I put the bowl of soaking grains, the bowl of sourdough for the bread, and the sourdough jar all into a "turned-off" oven. By that I mean I turn the gas on till the flame starts, and then I turn it off. It makes a nice warm cozy place to ferment or raise bread-y items. Then I went shopping :-) ... so it all sat in the oven for 5 hours. I'm pretty sure the time is fairly flexible - here I'm just trying to allow the grains to become soft, and also to get the sourdough to restart its bubbling. I use glass bowls for all these steps, so I can see "inside" when air pockets are forming during the ferment.

Now came a brand new step. I didn't want to add molasses as a sweetener, and darn it the German pumpernickel package said malted barley, and we do have a mini-brewery in our basement after all... so I got 1/3 cup of Al's English 2-row malted barley, and tried to figure out how to extract the sweet bits. It comes still in the husk, so I put it in a Ziploc bag and ran over it with a rolling pin to break the husks. That was marginally successful, but they didn't all break, and the ones that did were just broken, not de-husked. It would take forever to manually husk the grains, so after a few attempts at separating the sweet inner kernel from the chaff, I realized that the malted barley grain would dissolve in water, so I ran the grains through the coffee grinder so they were all broken, and then poured about 1/3 cup of warm water over the broken grains and let it sit for 1/2 hour or so. Then I stirred it around well, and pressed it through a sieve, which gave me a sweet white-ish water, which I figured would do as a sort of barley malt extract. [I think next time I want to work more on getting only the malted barley into my mixture.] So I added that to the soaked grains in the large glass bowl, and mixed in the smaller bowl of sourdough mixture which had started to bubble, and then put the whole thing back in the turned-off oven (after re-lighting it briefly) to ferment. Here I wanted it to become spongy, so I waited 3 hours.

Then to mix it into dough, I added 3 cups of rye meal, 1 cup at a time [I think maybe next time I'll add a little more]. I mixed it till it was what I would call a very thick coarse batter, not really a dough in the way that bread should usually look. I formed it into a ball (it ended up to be about 6" diameter), flattened it just slightly, and wrapped it tightly and completely in a sheet of heavy foil which I had oiled lightly. I had decided to try the idea I'd had last November about cooking it in the crockpot, so I put an inverted bowl in the bottom of the crockpot, and added about 1/2 cup of water (not enough to cover the bowl), and then laid my foil-dough ball on top of the bowl, and turned the crockpot on low. My 27-year-old crockpot only has 2 settings - its Low setting is about 200F, which is just right. Then I let it steam for 18 hours - that is, till lunchtime today.

Pumpernickel close-up

When I took it out and cut it open, this is what I had:

Yeah, it only took 6 months and I-don't-know-how-many trials, but I finally got 2 loaves of what I would call pumpernickel. AND they stayed moist and edible for several weeks in the fridge! I ended up using basically a recipe in "Naturally Great Foods", a Rodale Press cookbook I've had for over 20 years.

I did do some tweaking of the recipe (can't help it), and plan to do some more before I feel I have a recipe to write down and use over again, but it's definitely the best so far...

Just look at the yummy grains in the close-up!

I'm getting there...

On Monday evening I decided to try my idea from Part 5, so I set the starter out at bedtime. Tuesday morning I mixed up a 1kg batch of dough using Samartha's recipe again, and put the covered bowl in the dehydrator to rest for 12 hours or so.

Tuesday evening at 7:30 I took out the dough. It didn't look like the volume had increased, but it had become very moist and sticky, basically no hard rye grains remained. It also smelled and tasted good (grainy & sour). So then, following a method in my Oetker cookbook for a whole grain wheat/rye bread, I formed 2 loaves (so to speak; it was extremely sticky dough), and placed them uncovered on a floured baking stone. I put this on the bottom shelf of the oven, with a pan of water on the top shelf (my own idea), and baked 1/2 hour at 225 degrees. Sort of. As I was describing to Al how I would be cutting back the temp to 180 shortly, I realized I'd forgotten to translate the temperature from Celsius! Good grief! Luckily it had baked in a too-cool oven, not the other way around. So I turned the temp up to 450F, where it was supposed to have been from the start, and left it go another 15 minutes (not sure if that's equivalent, but I figured it might be close). Then I turned it down to 350F (per instructions) for 1-1/4 hours.

Here's the end result, showing a whole loaf and a cross-section:

Pumpernickel2

The outer crust is pretty hard, and the bottom 1/4" or so is burnt (probably due to using the bottom shelf as instructed), and it didn't bake long enough to turn deep brown / black... BUT it's definitely edible, and is nice and moist inside, with great chewy grain texture and sourdough taste. It goes very nicely with the English Bitter currently in the beer fridge. Also, the starter seems to be doing very well (also made some pancakes with it Saturday for the kids), so I'm pleased that I was able to create a rye sourdough starter from scratch.

Still not quite to pumpernickel yet, though. I need to find a way to bake it long enough for the Maillard Reaction to take place, without drying out and burning. My next idea (once these loaves are eaten) is to try doing it in the crockpot somehow...

[Though Roz suggests that if I can't get this to work, I could try making whiskey with that 27 pounds of rye :-b ...]

Pumpernickel1

First of all, :~(

It smells so good, just the right combination of sweet roasted grain aroma, but it's so darn hard I can't even saw into it with my Cutco knives. I was able to chip a little off the end to taste, and I think the look of the grain and the basic taste are both right, but it definitely tasted burnt. Somehow, wrapped in foil and in a steamy oven, it still apparently burnt to a crisp over 24 hours. I've read several places that traditional pumpernickel bake times are at least 16 hours, but maybe 24 hours was just too long (though it seemed to have worked for Samartha).

Al encourages me to try again; he had some beer and mead flops at the beginning too (some batches that couldn't be drunk even when drunk, so to speak), but he keeps tweaking and trying new things till they're wonderful [I still think he needs to submit some of his batches to some sort of competitions - the raisin-clove mead, now almost 6 years old, being my favorite].

Maybe I'll try the baking method shown in my Oetker book for some other whole grain breads: They sit for about 13 hours, and then bake for around 2 hours, though they don't turn black like pumpernickel, so they're apparently not going through the Maillard reaction thing (see Part I). So if I want to try that, I guess I would need to mix up the dough early in the morning before I leave for work, leave it rest all day, and bake it at night. Too late for that today, so I'll shoot for tomorrow, meaning I'll need to get my starter out tonight...

[Of course, I suppose part of the problem could also be that my starter's a dud, which I'm still not quite clear on how to know. If this next attempt also yields something uncuttable, I'll assume this is the case, and try starting the whole process over from the beginning. Tenacity, that's the key.]

I've had a rather up-and-down week with my starter...

After all those lovely bubbles in the previous post, when I checked on the starter Tuesday morning I found it had overflowed the jar during the night (which is a mason jar with a screwed-on lid, so, not easy to overflow), but it had collapsed back down, so I thought that was probably what it should be doing (my various instructions do talk about it rising and collapsing during the creation process). So, OK.

I wasn't able to feed it again till about 7:30 pm Tuesday night (giving a tour at work), but I fed it 1/16 liter warm water + 50g rye meal, per the Oetker book. It looked OK, sort of spongy. Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos during the rest of the process...

The starter looked OK Wed AM, with small bubbles. When I got home around 5pm, it had some liquid on top (which after some internet research I find referred to as "hooch"). Not so sure of its status at this point, as it didn't seem to have risen again, but I fed it again anyway: 1/16 liter warm water + 50g rye meal.

Thursday AM there was more hooch on the surface again, so I began to despair, but decided to let it stay in the dehydrator till I got home. Thursday was the final day according to the Oetker book, so I stirred the starter (if that's what it had indeed become), and put it in the fridge to deal with on Friday.

Friday evening I did some more research online, and found a site that describes the characteristics of a healthy starter, and how to revive one that isn't healthy. The site seemed to say that "early" hooch was a bad sign, but on the other hand, it said if you stir the starter and there are small bubbles on the back of the spoon, it's healthy. I did have the small bubbles, and I wasn't sure whether the hooch was "early", and I wasn't sure if the smell was OK (never having used sourdough starters in the past). So I tried "proofing" the starter according to instructions on this starter.doctor site (linked above). At least I think I was understanding it to say that I could follow these instructions to determine the status of my starter. At 7:30p I mixed 1T of my starter with 100g each of white flour and warm water, and set in the dehydrator at 80 degrees for 12 hours. Saturday morning the test jar looked... OK, some bubbles, but not risen, but it smelled OK I guessed.

Well, enough fooling around. Al said, just like with his beer brewing, sometimes you just have to go for it when you can't seem to get a definitive set of instructions. So I decided to go for a pumpernickel this weekend! I'm using the recipe on Samartha's site, so that meant planning for a 3-hour ferment and 24-hour bake, along with baking stuff for the church bake sale being held Sunday morning (I should have taken a photo of the end result of that 8 hours of kitchen time... Indonesian spice pound cake, autumn leaf molasses cookies, apple-raisin-oatmeal cookies, cinnamon biscotti ... mmmm). So I set my jar of starter out next to the crock pot to warm up Saturday morning. According to one of my bread books, it needs to come to room temp before either using or feeding (weekly).

At 6:15pm Saturday, having finished all my other baking, I measured out 120g of starter into a glass mixing bowl. I understand from my reading that the starter must always be replenished by the same volume of equal parts flour & water, so I fed it with 60g rye flour (I think maybe I'll alternate flour & meal) and 60g warm water, then set the jar in the dehydrator for the same length of time as the pumpernickel dough will ferment. So, back to the dough, according to Samartha's recipe for 1.2 kg of dough (sounded about right for 2 loaves to me), I mixed into the 120g starter: 640g of the rye meal, 430g warm water, and 7g (approx) of sea salt. Theoretically that's all that should be in pumpernickel. I kneaded it by hand for 5 minutes, and it had a lovely grainy consistency, very sensuous, if that can be a characteristic of dough :-)    I set the bowl in front of the wood stove for the next 3 hours, in which time it seemed to have risen somewhat, though I didn't expect it to very much. Just before 10:00pm I formed the dough into 2 sort of cylindrical loaves, and rolled each one in heavy-duty foil, sealed at the ends, put them onto a baking stone, and put in a 250 degree oven with a large casserole dish full of water. Samartha used loaf pans and sealed the tops tightly with foil, right next to the dough, but my Oetker book describes a (different) bread which is baked for a long period in a foil wrap, and the original pumpernickel Nadia had sent me was in a foil wrap as well, so I decided to try that.

So now, there's been a great smell in the house all day today, but I can't see how it's going. I'd love to know when (or if) it turned black, but I have to wait another 2 hours to take it out of the oven, and then both Samartha's instructions and the Oetker book (for other similar long-baking breads) say DO NOT cut it open for another 12 hours, as the process is still completing. It's a good thing I'm a patient person...

But it really does smell right, so I'm hopeful!!!

Day 2 of the sourdough starter creation process:

Sourdough starter 32h

Here's the starter after 32 hours at 75 degrees F. Look at the lovely bubbles! It does smell a little nasty, as Samartha said it would, but actually not too much different from the smell we often have around here when Al's brewing a new batch of beer.

Following my Oetker's cookbook recipe, this evening I added 1/8 liter of filtered water which I had set in the dehydrator all day (to come to a nice warm temperature), + 50g of coarse freshly ground rye meal. And of course the bubbles all got stirred down at the same time.

Another feeding tomorrow . . .

PS: Any suggestion/advice from an experienced baker is certainly welcome!

I'm so excited I'm practically jumping up and down! (OK, maybe I actually did jump a little...)

I stopped in to Frankferd Farms Thursday at lunch to see if they had some rye meal (something between flour & cracked). They didn't, but said if I was willing to buy 25 lbs of it they could mill it however I wanted it. I agreed, and by the time I got home there was a message on my machine that it was done already! Although it turned out to be 27 lbs; the woman on the machine said she guessed it's not an exact science when they start grinding. But it was still only $16, so I call that a bargain. I picked it up Friday after a meeting, so now I think I'm ready to go!

Rye Meal

Rye Meal detail

The rye is gorgeous ... I feel really down-to-earth, beginning to create my rye sourdough starter with freshly milled rye right from the farm.

So now today I'm venturing to create my rye sourdough starter from scratch. I've decided to use a combination of the instructions from Samartha's site and my Dr Oetker's cookbook. Nothing like experimenting on the first attempt! (pretty much my normal MO when it comes to baking)

Samartha said to mix 1/4C water & 1/2C whole grain rye flour in a 1-quart glass jar. My German cookbook said (in German) to mix 200g finely milled rye with 1/4 liter lukewarm water in a large earthenware bowl. So to compromise, I mixed 1/8 liter lukewarm water with 100g organic rye flour I had from a previous trip to Frankferd. The German recipe calls for moving from fine rye flour to begin, up to the coarser meal for tomorrow's feeding, whereas Samartha calls for rye flour throughout, I suspect because he didn't have access to the coarser grind, but I think I really want a more whole-grain finished product. I cut the German quantity in half because I don't want to tie up a large bowl this long, so I'm using a quart-size mason jar. Hopefully it won't overflow... The German recipe calls for 2-3 T of buttermilk also, but Samartha's recipe doesn't require any additional ingredients, so I'm going to try that.

Rye Sourdough starter 1

They both say to set the covered mixture in a 75-85 degree location, so Al rigged up a shelf in the food dehydrator that should do the trick (see photo). I'll check it with the thermometer periodically for the first several hours to get the temp adjusted to at least 75. The German recipe says to leave it for at least 24 hours, and then feed it with the coarse rye meal and more water, and again after 4 days. Samartha says to add a little more flour & water after bubbles begin to form (12 hours), and again at 24 hours. I think I'll follow the German recipe at this point, but it might depend how it looks.

More later . . .

What started this quest?

Wow, we'd forgotten how good real German pumpernickel was till Nadia sent us a cylindrical package of it from Germany last week!

As we were marvelling at the sweet/sour flavor & moistness in so dense a bread (when most of our whole grain breads turn out like hockey pucks if we don't add gluten & an egg), I noted how short the ingredient list was: only rye meal, water, salt, and barley extract. So of course I had to look it up. How can you bake a bread like that?

Turns out, real pumpernickel is not so much a bread as it is a fermented, steamed grain pudding-like substance. The most authentic recipes call for a rye sourdough, and baking in a steam oven for 12-16 hours. The dark black color comes from something called the Maillard Reaction which occurs during the lengthy "baking" process, not from any ingredients such as molasses or cocoa which are usually called for in Americanized "pumpernickel bread" recipes. Sounds like something I must attempt!

One of the keys seems to be to get rye ground to something between whole rye and rye flour -- the rye "meal". I'll have to check with Frankferd Farms on that one -- I should be able to get it organic there too, in addition to being freshly ground.

The other key will be the sourdough. Since I don't have a starter, nor do I know anyone with a rye sourdough going, I'll have to try to make one myself (a first attempt at that). My Dr Oetker's "Backen Kostlich wie noch nie" cookbook shows how to create a rye sourdough from scratch using freshly ground rye meal and buttermilk, so that should be a good method. I imagine though that I'll need to find real cultured buttermilk like one would probably get in Germany, as opposed to the powdered mix I usually substitute in recipes. But first, again, the fresh rye meal. And the biggest trick I'm sure will be doing the steps at the proper times, and not forgetting to babysit it (something I'm afraid I know I'm not good at).

Also, I need to find a definitive pumpernickel recipe. I found one at a website called Samartha, but it seems a little experimental and not necessarily a finished procedure. On the other hand, he also has a recipe for rye starter from scratch which does not involve buttermilk. My Oetker's cookbook has a recipe for a whole grain rye-wheat bread, which looks similar, uses the rye sourdough, and involves about 13 hours, so I think I might start with that. Thing is, it also calls for something called Backferment, which I can't find either at Baldinger's (our local "Food from all Nations" store), nor at GDH, which is where I get my German coffee fix. So I have a plea out to Karsten to ask his mother about it. It apparently comes in either powdered or granulated form, and is some sort of enzyme derived from honey.

So we'll see how this goes ...