Bauernbrot - German Farmer's Bread

[annecros]

Darling husband has a fixation for the bread of his childhood, and loving wife that I am I strive to indulge his every whim. The most elusive of these desires has been Baurnbrot - German Farmer's Bread or Peasant Bread. Hey, this should be doable right? I can make the mustard he loves from scratch, I have access to all sorts of German cold cuts, cheeses and sausages that are authentic to his taste, Brochen are relatively easy to produce - but the Baurnbrot I have attempted in the past has never been "right."

So, yesterday at Whole Foods (ugh) I ran across this This Seitenbacher "Mix" for "Original German Farmer's Bread," grabbed it, brought it home and baked it.

OK, home run. Hubby loved it, best bread he's had in 20 years, yadda, yadda. The silly thing retails at Whole Foods for $6.99 and makes about a one pound loaf. A pound of this bread just gets hubby started, especially in the cooler months.

The rub is that this mix is just a package of spelt and rye flours with sea salt, a packet of active dry yeast, and a packet of sourdough starter. I think I can do this cheaper and more efficiently.

I suspect that the secret ingredient (outside of technique, and I pretty much have that down) is that starter. It appears to be a rye flour based starter (by greyish appearance) and I would hope that it is live. Smells wonderful. I noted on the website that they sell the starter in packets, and they mention that many home cooks start their own sourdough with the packets.

I'm thinking that I could probably go buy another "mix" - rob the mix of the starter packet, feed the starter a day or two - and maintain my own. After about a dozen loaves, it should work out to a cost effective average - and I can whip a loaf out at hubby's whim.

Here's where my need for help and lack of baking experience shows. I have never kept a rye flour based starter and don't have a clue. Do you feed it with a rye/wheat flour mix? Would just plain old sourdough starter be just as good, and is it perhaps the spelt/rye mix proportions that does the trick? What are typical spelt/rye proportions?

Thanks in advance for any help. I am willing to spend a few bucks and experiment for a while to get this right. Next Christmas, I'll hopefully be able to send a five pound loaf off to my German Mother in Law and make her cry!

[Kerry Beal]

My rye starter just lives in the fridge. I feed it with rye flour only (and not very often).

It's a recipe from "Secrets of a Jewish Baker" and I seem to recall that onion was the thing that 'started' the starter.

When you are ready to make bread you mix the starter with rye flour, water and ground caraway seed, let it work, then feed again twice. Some of the 3rd stage gets put back in the fridge for the next starter. If your starter is a long time in the fridge it takes a while for activity to start again.

There is a recipe for Bavarian farmer bread in the book - but it uses common flour (aka first clear flour) not spelt. It is lower gluten, less refined than AP or bread flour.

Edited January 18, 2009 by Kerry Beal (log)

[cmflick]

My rye starter just lives in the fridge.  I feed it with rye flour only (and not very often). 

It's a recipe from "Secrets of a Jewish Baker" and I seem to recall that onion was the thing that 'started' the starter.

When you are ready to make bread you mix the starter with rye flour, water and ground caraway seed, let it work, then feed again twice.  Some of the 3rd stage gets put back in the fridge for the next starter.  If your starter is a long time in the fridge it takes a while for activity to start again.

There is a recipe for Bavarian farmer bread in the book - but it uses common flour (aka first clear flour) not spelt.  It is lower gluten, less refined than AP or bread flour.

←

Ditto for me: my rye starter just lives in the refrigerator. When I'm ready to use it, I pull it out and feed it every 12 hours for 2-3 days before I use it. I don't add caraway seed to the starter, but that's an interesting idea. The starter seems to survive well as it has gone over a month quite a few times between uses. I have found that starter seems to keep better and revive faster if it's stored in the refrigerator as a stiff starter, i.e., about 60% hydration. You also don't get that yucky dark alcoholic liquid (which you can just stir back in) that sometimes shows up on the top of more hydrated starters after they have been in the refrigerator for a long time. As for starting my rye starter, I used a white sourdough starter as the seed. After feeding it with rye flour only about every 12 hours for about a week, I had a rye sourdough. Basically, you dilute out all of the white flour by feeding it over and over with rye flour.

Note added: the stiff rye sourdough seems to revive faster if you increase the hydration to about 100% the first time that you feed it out of the refrigerator. After that you can bring it back down to 60% hydration or leave it at 100% depending on what your recipe calls for.

Edited January 18, 2009 by cmflick (log)

[Elle Bee]

...The most elusive of these desires has been Baurnbrot - German Farmer's Bread or Peasant Bread....

←

Anne, I will be watching this thread with great anticipation! I've been craving this very bread myself for about 30 years -- after living for a time in Germany and Austria, where there's a sausage vendor on just about every street corner, ALL serving their wares with the same delicious Bauernbrot.

The only time I've ever found it anywhere in the U.S. was in 1991 in Los Angeles at Eureka!, Wolfgang Puck's short-lived restaurant/brewery. Fabulous charcuterie there, too. Unfortunately the brewery operations were a financial disaster, and the place was forced to liquidate several months later. After all these years, it's still the greatest disappointment of my foodie life that I was never able to eat there a second time. I know, I know, it's just bread and sausage (ah, but SUCH bread and sausage!!!)

Anyway, I love to bake bread, but am too impatient to fiddle over the recipes (although I will fiddle endlessly with recipes for sweets). So please, please, please keep us posted!

Edited to add:

So now that I'm fixated on the possibility of consuming Bauernbrot again in this lifetime, I've just impulsively ordered this cookbook (for a whopping $0.46!!! from an Amazon reseller), in hopes that perhaps Mr. Puck chose the share the thing I loved most from poor Eureka!...

Laurie

Edited January 19, 2009 by Elle Bee (log)

[Just loafing]

Rye starter is the easiest to get going and keep going. I use mine twice a week ... feed it after use, then two or three days later, pull it out of the cooler, feed it the appropriate amount of flour and water depending on how big our bake is, put it in a warming place for 12 hours or so and it's raring to go,

[petite tête de chou]

Jackal10 provided a link to a rye starter in another thread that looked good-

The Times

[judec]

Is bauernbrot supposed to have a large proportion of buckwheat flour? I have this recipe from Bernard Clayton that does.

[annecros]

OOPS! My bad. I read the ingredients on the package for the starter pack, and it listed: Spelt, water.

So, I guess it is a spelt sourdough. That seems easy.

I suppose I could just as easily cut out a portion of my starter and feed it on spelt for a week or so and get the same results, but I went ahead and bought two more packages of the mix. One to rob the packet out of (and eventually bake with the cast off), and the other to bake today for hubby's lunch bag tomorrow. He's fixated. It'll take me a couple of months before he gets tired of it, if he ever does.

I think a tried a recipe at one point that called for buckwheat flour, but it got the big thumbs down and wrinkly nose.

Edit and OOPS again: I reread it, and it does say Sourdough (Whole Grain Rye Flour, water) so I was right the first time. It just had a funny punctuation and line breaks on the ingredient list.

I've got too much going on!

[Elle Bee]

Is bauernbrot supposed to have a large proportion of buckwheat flour? I have this recipe from Bernard Clayton that does.

←

I tried the Clayton recipe several years ago. Not bad bread, but not Bauernbrot (or, at any rate, not what I remembered as Bauernbrot). So sad...

[Stephanie Brim]

I just use my normal white starter for everything, though I'd like to see how the different flours flavor the starters and, by association, the bread made with them. I may break some of my current, active starter off and start feeding one chunk rye and one chunk whole wheat to see what I get.

[annecros]

Well, I'll be darned! The packet of starter that came with the "mix" started right up! Very sour compared to my plain old "vanilla" starter. I know so little about whole grain flours, I don't know if that is a result of the rye flour it has been eating, or the culture. I've been feeding it a week or ten days or so now, so it is well developed and ready to play with, I think.

Doing some recommended reading, and I think I will be giving this a whirl in the next few days. I'm sure I will have questions! The next few days the weather should make bread baking fun, but I need to let my regular starter stretch its legs first.

Whole grains make me nervous! I don't know them as intimately.