Just bread nerdery, nothing to see here.

[msconduct]

Last week bill_schubert was kind enough to post a recipe for bread with bulghur wheat and sesame seeds. Bulghur wheat wasn't an addition I'd ever considered before, so I had to try it out the next day.

It's weird the way making sourdough is so different from other baking. Unless you're a sourbro, measuring everything to the closest ml and droning on about your hydration levels, it's a very vague process that depends a lot on judgment (judgment meaning prodding the dough and throwing in whatever extra you think it needs). While this lack of precision was initially terrifying, I figured that if people have been successfully making bread this way for more than five thousand years, I could probably manage it too, and I've come to love the chilled nature of it. It's also made me wildly hubristic about converting recipes meant for commercial yeast to a sourdough version. So I forged ahead with bill_schubert's commercial-yeast recipe with sunny optimism.



bill_schubert's recipe had some stuff in it like butter, sugar and molasses I left out: I've never found that oils or sugars do much to improve sourdough. (I don't usually make white loaves, but when I do the only ingredients are flour, salt, water and starter. They don't need anything else.) I did have both bulghur wheat and sesame seeds, though, so they went in. I kept the dough on the wetter side to improve the rise: with all that heavy bulghur wheat in it, I wasn't sure how much of a rise I'd get, but overnight the culture heroically heaved the dough right up to the top of the pan, after which I tossed it in a couple of banettons:



And here are the loaves after they came out of the oven. Surprise! They've magically changed shape!



When I turned out the banettons, I found that the wetness may have contributed to the rise, but with the heavy bulghur in it it meant the dough immediately flooped down and outwards on the baking tray. If I'd left it like that, the loaves would only have been an inch high, so I stuffed the dough into tins to give it some support. You can see that I took a bit more care over this with one tin than the other:).

bill_schubert said when he makes this bread it usually has a crumbly texture, so I was dying to slice mine to see what it was like as I've never made a crumbly sourdough. And true to form, it wasn't crumbly at all. Crumbly just doesn't seem to be in sourdough's repertoire.



So that worked out better than I probably deserved. I was happy with the texture given the heaviness of the dough and the fact that it was half wholemeal flour. And mmm, it was tasty! The bulghur wheat made it really moist and slightly nubbly. Thanks for the recipe, bill_schubert!