Sourdough Pain de Mie with Scalded Flour

Breadtopia Blog Recipes
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I hope you continue to feel better!

I agree with Abe that your bread looks good. It’s 100% whole grain flour, so it will be different from the recipe pics.

It sounds like your dough was on the dryer side, so adding all the milk in at once wasn’t a bad thing, and adding more was the right thing to do, and possibly even more would have been good.

How was the inside of the bread?

This video explains the scalding - staling relationship really well:

You might check out @Benito 's whole wheat breads here for more scalded flour recipes and also a different shaping and baking (uncovered) style.

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I agree with @abe scalding the weaker flour is better than the stronger one but isn’t a mistake if the bake works out. The starches in the flour gelatinze when cooked to 65°C this process causes the starch to hold onto the liquid. This allows us to bake a bread with higher hydration without some of the handling issues of high hydration. At the scalding/yudane/tangzhong temperatures proteins in the flour denature. This prevents those proteins from forming gluten. This is the reason why choosing the weaker flour for the scald is a great idea since you retain the gluten potential of the stronger flour to help your dough rise and retain dough structure. This is the reason in most of my various formulas for Hokkaido milk breads you’ll see the weaker flour in the tangzhong. But if the rest of the flours in the dough are strong enough using the strong flour in the scald will still work.

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Abe,

My sense of failing was related to the need to add an unspecified (I didn’t measure) amount of milk after the 30 minute rest. Then just ‘winging it’ on how to knead this in (I had already cleaned my mixer and was unsure if using a mixer would be too rough…?

Even so I never felt the dough could stretch to a windowpane- it started very, even extremely, stiff and the milk helped. I was kinda lost about what to do after the milk- I could not get a good resting boule shape.

Then my attempt at a rectangle was uneven, hence the top of the loaf looks lumpy.

Then the dough rose to the top edge of the pan but fell away after baking- I am unsure if this is how a Pullman goes- so maybe that was ok.

The bread is delicious with both HWW berries and Spelt berries. So taste won out- as did nutrition with the freshly milled grain. So all in all that makes it a win. Reminds me of a pilot friend who always apologizes for evenly the smallest of jolts on the landing- but I reassure him- my POV is a good landing is the one you hop out from, on to your next adventure.

Thank you for your time in responding. I will try again and use Spelt in the 50g Scald.

Blessings!

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Wow Melissa thanks for that video!

This makes sense to my science oriented brain. A basic understanding of the component starches lends insight to the overall dynamics at work.

The crumb was very soft and the two wheats together combined for a nutty, full bodied flavor- a novel taste for me. I dont quite have the bread vocabulary for a proper description- so I used the vineyard version. Buttered toast from this loaf is addictive.

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Crusty Loaf used it to make a wholesome sandwich and it held its own with his tower of ingredients. He was out and contemplating a quick pick-up meal but instead came home to make a sandwich with your bread! Quite a turnaround for someone who considers drive thru offerings food.

And @Benito, thanks for the information about the scald’s inability to produce gluten. Your explanation enhances my understanding of the benefits and limits of a scald. Understanding these things provides purpose and direction in future experiments. I go off-script a lot because I use only fresh home milled flours.

As a new baker (who is also illness prone) I think I will make one type of scalded loaf per week in addition to other loaves. They are an ‘insurance policy’ that bread will always be available. I think I might try a combination with Kamut next. Any suggestions for the other flour- Einkorn, HWW, HRW. I also have rye, barley and buckwheat but these would not be strong enough- correct?

Melissa and Benny- I used both of your recipes in making Melissa’s Acorn Squash Bread. I went back and forth between them- I was using all wheat berries like Benny, but Melissa’s basic recipe. So they were both helpful and the resulting bread was wonderful.

I need to get my sourdough starter going so I can try Benny’s - I need it to make the levain.

In the video the chemist discusses ambient moisture’s role in staling of bread. This makes complete sense in the climate, at least of Japan. I spent 3mo there in 1991. The island nation is actually part of the same island chain that begins with Kilauea on Hilo, HI and migrates NW.

The islands are SO humid that the populace carry small very soft (and often designer) thin wash cloths with them everywhere for mopping foreheads. In this moist climate breads would then stale even faster- so scalding became a necessity (I am speculating). But provides a useful tool for us as well.

Amazing how experience, knowledge and application leads to ever more insights into our world.

Melissa, in retrospect I surmise I should had added milk immediately, prior to the rest. I appreciate small comments like “the dough will be very sticky’. Baring that I would have had no understanding as to why my dough was not yielding to slap & fold.

I have another question- I’ve experienced a problem with several types of shaping over many recipes - specifically that a dough will not stretch. One confounding experiment with breadsticks that would not form ropes (after BF) either by rubbing between my palms or on a counter- they sprang back into short strips.

I’ve had some success with laminating (which is likely why I used this method without consulting the recipe- I was just thinking- rectangle). But 1/2 the time the center portion in the of laminated dough does not get stretched. Should I compile the dough and begin the lamination again?

Then this dough, even after additional milk- would not lend itself to slap and fold or even shaping with a dough scraper- I usually have luck with that.

I have your gluten forming videos bookmarked and attempt all your techniques but never seem to get the stretch you demonstrate.

Is there a common denominator to this problem?

Thanks to you all!

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Any of the grains you listed would be great in this type of bread, especially if used as the scald flour, they will add a lot of flavour to your bread.

In terms of lamination, the center won’t get stretched out unless you are getting your fingers/hand under the dough towards the center as you stretch. When I first tried lamination years ago I was just stretching the outside edges of the dough. You need to get your fingers towards the center of the dough lifting it off the table and stretch it out.

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I’ve made this twice now and it is delicious. Thank you for answering my question! I’m using my available flour and scaled to the small pullman. Picture was taken after taking it out of the oven. My husband, who makes our lunches, loves the square shape.

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I had the same result: dough almost to the top edge of the Pullman loaf pan, only to deflate during cooking. I used freshly-ground yecora rojo berries and have been reading that freshly ground flour behaves differently than flour ground and allowed to sit for several days/weeks, something about gluten being less developed. So I’ll try grinding the yecora rojo and let it sit for 3 weeks (sealed in the refrigerator), but I’ll also try ordering Breadtopia’s already-ground flour as I really wanted to have the yellow looking loaf that so resembles brioche. (I’m also going to see if one can process, at home, flour to duplicate the partially refined – maybe its a question of doing multiple grinds with intermittent sifting? I am new to home flour grinding.)

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I began milling my own flour this year as well. My purpose in taking this step is to retain all the nutrients lost from grain that is processed or older than a few hours. Oxidation of the nutrients begins immediately upon breaking the bran layer. By 72 hours most nutrients are gone- although this flour still retains the beneficial bran that pre-milled flour might remove.

I would encourage you to keep working with your process. Sometimes you can do everything ‘exactly the same’ but the micro-environment of your kitchen is different (warmer, more humid, etc) and you achieve different results.

I am too new to give bread making pointers- but have studied the nutrition in grain. So I speak to this aspect- and the ‘learn by doing’ (over and again…) approach!

To your health!

Ps- I will attest that this is one tasty loaf. I froze some and recently needed some bread and was amazed at just how tasty this bread is.

I love scalded milk breads. This week I made Honeybutter Oat Bread from The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking to rave reviews.

Although she uses loaf pans, I usually make her recipes artisan style.

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A dough might deflate as it cools because it wasn’t completely done inside. This can even happen if the internal temp was high/in the done range when you took the bread out of the oven. (This is especially a risk with gluten-free bread baking.) The solution is to cook for longer, and aim for a hollow sound when you knock on the bottom of a loaf. That said, the hollow sound is less attainable with these enriched breads vs. artisan style loaves.

Other times, a dough deflates as it bakes because it was over-fermented/proofed. CO2 production maybe ceased before the dough even went into the oven, so the heat isn’t applied soon enough to solidify the bread matrix.

I mill my wheat berries 1x at the finest setting, stones lightly knocking. I don’t think double milling is helpful or needed with most wheat berries; beans and corn are another story.

Some options for softening the bran so it doesn’t interrupt gluten development include:
Sift out the bran, re-mill it.
Sift out the bran, cook it on the stove, and add it back to the dough.
Autolyse the flour for a few hours.

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I have yecora rojo flour, but it is not whole grain. It is a “00” type flour made by Barton Springs Mill. Do you think I would need to adjust the recipe to use it? Thanks.

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You can drop the milk amount by 30-60 grams ← it’s hard to say exactly, so start by holding back 60g and add more slowly.

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I recently read that Kamut has a tougher outer bran layer so milling at maybe a 5-10 first and then at a lower 1-2 is helpful.

I also read that freezing your wheat berries helps keep the flour cool during milling and helps retain nutrients. Is this true, or an old wives tale?

This issue of a full Pullman pan ‘shrinking’ is interesting to me. I have made this loaf many times and had this happen once. I have 2 ovens with many settings including convection bake, true convection and bake. I bought 3 oven thermometers and set about measuring the temps when the oven beeps. One oven was way off, even 10 minutes after the beep- with hot spots, etc. i switched to using this one in the summer because it has better air circulation compared with the one below my bread station that is in a corner.

The one I use now needs 10 extra minutes to be up to temp but all areas of the oven are the same at that time. Convection Bake turned out to be the best (fan on, oven heats from bottom and top as well). I also have Misen Oven Steel that helps hold the heat when you open the door.

So testing your oven is always a good idea. These ovens are 12 years old and the ‘bread oven’ is used far less often. So even if you think you know your oven- these 2 ovens are the exact same model installed at the same time- test it. Ovens change over time.

@Fermentada, the last part of your suggestions reminds me of something I don’t understand. If a recipe calls for wheat germ or cracked wheat is this something I can make with my Professional Mockmill? Aren’t there different levels of cracked wheat (or am I thinking about something else?)? Do you know how to make those?

Thank you for your help!

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@Benito,

I have been using Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book because I’m still using yeast. One of my friend’s & family favorites is the Milk Bread- which is really a scalded milk bread. I take the milk to 170F for several minutes and then add the honey to cool it down.

Laurel states that there are 2 proteins in milk that can retard gluten formation and this is the reason for scalding when the amount of milk in the recipe is large.

But you are talking about denaturing the flour proteins, not the milk proteins. And 65c = 149F so maybe not high enough to denature the milk proteins.

Do you consider the milk proteins at all?

I am enamored with your excel spreadsheet for Milk Breads- that is dedication to craft incarnate!

Could your Hokkaido Milk Bread be converted to yeast? It is not as straightforward a conversion as others I have done- the one where you make 6 dough balls for example.

@Fermentada taught me to split the sourdough starter 50/50 and add those grams to each the liquid and flour and add a small amount of yeast to that. But the recipe above is a bit more complicated than that.

I must also tell you personally of my affection for the name of your bread. I spent the summer of my 17th year on homestay in Fukuoka and Kobe. Every time I think of your bread I hear in my head “Welcome aboard the Shinkansen, the Hokkaido Express bound for Tokyo” and my fond memories of that magical land.

Blessings

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Yes I am aware that some bakers are concerned about the interactions between milk proteins and gluten. I have to say I have not worried about that whatsoever with my milk breads and have made them in various incarnations time and time again. So perhaps it can be an issue, but it isn’t enough of an issue in my formulas. I have never scalded the milk prior to using milk in any of my doughs.

It is easy enough to convert a sourdough recipe to a commercial yeast version. First you have to decide if you want to have a preferment, like a sponge or biga. In this case I typically use a stiff levain so that would be most similar to a biga. Let’s assume you’d like to make this biga, take the weight of the starter/seed as per my spreadsheet, divide that in two and add that number to the water in grams and the flour in grams. A lot of bakers will use up to 0.2% by weight of the total flour in the biga as the weight of the IDY (instant dry yeast), so add that amount of IDY to the water, dissolve the yeast, add the sugar, stir and then finally add the flour and mix well. That can then ferment overnight and should be ready in the morning to use to leaven your dough. Making this biga will create a more complex flavour than skipping the preferment, but you can also just skip the preferment.

So to do this without a preferment, add all the ingredients of the levain to the main dough measurements so your final dough weight will be correct. Then to leaven your dough, dissolve the IDY at about 1.4% by weight of the total flour in the dough, This will move much more quickly than leavening the dough by sourdough and will come together quickly. You can slow it down by using less yeast if you like.
Benny

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I’ve done some small batch testing of the flour quality when double milling frozen durum (also hard like Kamut) compared with single milling room temp durum. The flour texture was the same to my touch detection. I suspect there may be a difference in temp and fineness if you are a bakery milling several kilograms of these berries at a time, but I haven’t tested that. I believe you want your flour to stay under 130F and I haven’t had any trouble with this.

You can mill wheat berries at a not-super-fine setting and sift the flour. What is left in the sieve is wheat germ (a mix of bran and germ). I suggest not the finest setting just so you have a little more wheat germ end product.

Cracked wheat (like milling corn for polenta) will involve some trial and error to get the right coarseness for the particular wheat and your target texture.

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I would love to make this bread. But I don’t have the fancy pans with the lids. All I have are the regular loaf pans and I have 3 of them. I usually bake 3 loaves of bread at a time. I think they’re 9×4×4 or something like that. Is it possible to use these pans and cover with aluminum foil?

I cook all the time and my apartment is tiny, so I have no more storage space for more pans. Some of my own pans and appliances are stored on shelves in the living area!

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My sister and I joke that cooking passion and skill is often inversely related to kitchen size. Not always, of course. People with what I call a stadium kitchen, don’t take offense :pray: I speak only from envy and a love of irony :grin:

Foil might work, especially if you put a baking sheet on top, or just use a weighted baking sheet. That’ll have added containment, whereas foil alone might pop up. To be safe you may want to lightly grease the bottom of the baking sheet or foil that’s going to be touching the dough.

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I made this bread yesterday using Almond milk and white whole wheat flour and bread flour. I put in fridge overnight, took out next morning and let finish rising. Put in bread pan and let rise for 2 hours. It turned out great. Makes great toast, sandwiches, and grilled cheese. So good I will be making again.

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