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Ancient Grains Porridge Bread

Course: BreadDifficulty: Advanced

Servings

servings

Active Prep time

minutes

Cooking time

minutes

Resting Time

hours

This is a riff on a country sourdough bread. There are countless variations and techniques for making sourdough bread at home. This recipe assumes those basic skills on the part of the baker. Our techniques are for the most part suggestions and loose guidelines. Feel free to mix and match your techniques with ours to get your desired results. The important thing here is the use of multigrain levain and ancient grain porridge.

Using different types of flour in your levain is a great way to coax different flavors into your bread dough. It also allows you to experiment with different fermentation behaviors. For example, rye and spelt flours will ferment much faster than standard wheat. Corn will become sour rather quickly, etc. Our Multigrain Flour is a blend of wheat, spelt, rye, corn, and buckwheat. It brings a lot of variation to the mix, and the levain itself feels much different than a standard wheat liquid levain.

The porridge is the other notable change to the standard country sourdough. It involves cooking whole or cracked grains and then adding them to the final mix. It softens the dough, and is a great way to deliver more whole grain to the finished product without making a loaf dense.

In the end, you’ll have a grain-full loaf that eats like classic country sourdough.

Ingredients

Levain (fed 12 hours before final mix)
200 grams Maine Grains Multigrain Flour Blend
200 grams water
10 grams mature starter
Porridge (cooked and cooled before final mix)
150 grams Maine Grains Organic Ancient Grains Cereal
300 grams water
Final Mix
800 grams Maine Grains Sifted All-Purpose Flour
550 grams water
20 grams salt
300 grams pre-prepared Ancient Grains porridge

Directions

In a small plastic tub, add the water, levain, and sifted wheat flour. Mix together in a shaggy dough. Let it sit to autolyse for 25 minutes.
Sprinkle the salt on top of the dough, and with wet hands work it into the dough until distributed and dissolved.
Begin to work and fold the dough to build its strength. Once it is becoming smoother, pat it into a rectangle and spread half of the porridge on the dough.
Fold the dough over onto itself a few times, and then pat it into a rectangle again. Add the rest of the porridge and repeat the folding process.
Let the dough rest for 30 minutes before performing the next fold. Let it rest for another 30 minutes and fold again.
Allow the dough to bulk ferment, approximately 3 hours, or until you can feel bubbles popping by pinching the dough between your thumb and forefinger.
When ready, divide the dough into 900g pieces, pre-shape as rounds and bench for 20 minutes.
Shape the dough into a boule.
Wet the top surface and dip/roll the dough in ancient grains mix. Place the grain side down in round baskets and cold proof overnight.
When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 465 with a cast iron dutch oven inside. After 45 minutes score the dough and load the dutch oven.
Bake for 25 minutes with the lid on. Then remove the lid and bake for another 20 minutes.

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Ancient Grains Porridge Bread