Bierbrot

And here comes the last June homework as a mellowbaker: Beer bread with roasted barley. I was a bit skeptical at the beginning but I must that I’ll bake this bread again. I find it very good with cheese.

But let’s start from the beginning.

First the recipe for one loaf of about 1 kg:
Poolish:

flour	180 g
Water	180 g
Yeast	.36 g

Final dough

flour	300 g
Whole-wheat flour	120 g
Water	24 g
Beer	182 g
Salt	12 g
Roasted barley	30 g
Poolish	360 g

I prepared the poolish in the morning and baked the bread late in the night around 11 p.m.
After 12 hours I mixed all the ingredients with the poolish, let it ferment for 2 hours, folded it once. Preshaped as an oval, shaped as a batard and let it proof in a banneton. Then I scored it, and baked it.

Here are some pictures

The dough	Folding the dough
Scored bread	Beer bread
Crumb not really amazing, but reasonable.	The beer I used

I found the dough very easy to handle, at 68 % hydration I expected something a little bit more loose, but the dough was absolutely easy to handle. This is probably due to the 20 % of whole wheat which absorbs a lot of water.  Scoring the dough was very easy and for the first time I made two decent scores…well, at least for me. The importance of  a proper scoring is sometimes underestimated.

There has been a long debate on how to properly malt and roast the barley at mellowbakers.com. I tried to sprout some barley, a (vegetarian) friend of mine gave me some suggestion, but in the end I decided that since I know almost nothing about barley I would just roast it without any attempt to malt.  So I put some husked barley in the oven at 180 °C for 6 minutes, as Hamelman suggests, and then I ground it very finely. The final result is a powder with a light color (see pictures). This roasted barley gives a very nice flavour and aftertaste to the bread.

Roasted barley

Ground roasted barley

The beer. I live in Munich and Bavaria is the land of Weizenbier…but I used a Lager . The effect of beer on the flavour is really important,  in my case it added a nice bitterness.

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