Paulchens FoodBlog?!

World Bread Day is hosted yet again by gorgeous Zorra of Kochtopf. Thank You Zorra for hosting this wonderful event!

Our fellow Bead Baking Babe Elizabeth found a wonderful bread with rye and pears some time ago and was even so kind to translate it to English.

So for this year’s World Bread Day I decided to use this recipe I had bookmarked back then. Despite my handicapped hand I must say it worked very well tho my dough was not sloppy at all like Elizabeth stated in her post. It only got a little sticky when I added the pears….

Oh and I altered the recipe a bit by adding mixed nuts to the dough because I thought they would go wonderful with the sweetness of the pears and the slightly nuty flavour of rye anyway. Besides my family loves bread with nuts and I planned to take it with my on our visit back home this Saturday.

Speaking of Saturday I have to apologizes that this post is so late, but my hand simply hurt too much to finish this post yesterday evening to be in time for the posting date due… I am sorry and I do hope Zorra will accept my coming late too.

Since the recipe makes two loaves I decided to make one only with nuts and one with nuts and pears:

This one is with a mix of nuts (walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, …)

This one is with pears and nuts

Now for the recipe and my adaptions:

20 gm fresh yeast
350 ml lukewarm water
25 gm honey
400 gm spelt flour
100 gm rye flour
12gm seasalt
40 gm unsalted butter
200 gm mixed nuts (diced roughly)
200 gm diced pears

• Put the yeast and water into the mixing bowl and whisk well.
• Stir in honey.
• Add the flours and seasalt and stir well with a wooden spoon to incorporate all the flour.
  Knead this relatively slack dough for 10 minutes or so.
• Flatten the dough and smear some of the butter on top. Fold the dough in half and smear some more butter. Fold it in half again and smear on the rest of the butter. Knead the butter in. ( I did this with my Kitchen Aid again)
• Now I added the mixed nuts and kneaded the dough another 2 minutes until I had the feeling that the nuts were incorporated well.

• The original recipe is a “one day bread” but since it was already 23:00 PM f on Friday night at this time I decided to make it an “overnight bread” instead and plopped the dough into my proofing bowl and put it in the fridge to have a nice healthy sleep for some hours before being awaken in the hot oven the next morning.

• The next morning I divided the dough into two loaves, shaped the first one and shoved it into the preheated oven after about 30 minutes waiting time (till the oven had reached the needed 375F). Sprayed it liberally with water and put a bowl with some cold water into the oven too, to help provide steam)

The second loaf was undergoing different treatment:

• I now kneaded in the pears (again with my Kitchen Aid since kneading with one hand only is nothing I can recommend, believe me) and tried to shape a nice loaf. Due to the addition of the ripe pears the dough became a little more stick than the other lave was… Due to the spelt flour it went rather flat during waiting time too. Next time I think I will bake this version in a pan to help support shape.

• After about 50 minutes the first loaf was done and I put in the second to bake while the first one was cooling on the rack on my balcony. Unfortunately by the time I took out the second one we had to leave to head towards my family’s so I had to wrap the breads into a kitchen towel and take them with me still hot. Therefore the bottom of the “nut only version sank a little bit :( but it was still delicious!!

Resumee:
I like this bread very much. Both versions! I had the nut only version for dinner last night and it was perfect! The crumb is very light and fluffy. The pear version was eaten with butter and jam this morning and was delicious too. I love how the pear flavour pops up in the mouth every now and then. Little sweet pear-y explosions… :)

You should really give it a try whether you do a “same day version” or an “overnight one” with our without nuts but definitely with pears!!

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This bread is getting yeastspotted by Susan’s Yeastspotting!