Beauvais Bread

Well, shouldn’t I be able to learn from my mistakes? It has happened so many times to me now, that I wanted to bake something spontaneously and did not check whether I have enough flour before starting to mix the ingredients together… One could think, that checking for flour is the first thing you do before starting baking, but not for me… It is actually becoming kind of embarrassing by now, but I guess I am just baking so often that I underestimate how quick a package of flour is actually empty.

I found the recipe for this bread in a Danish baking book on rye bread, a friend had borrowed me and adapted it slightly. It looked very nice, and I liked that they added beer to the dough so I wanted to give it a try. I started off by mixing the wet ingredients, then ran to the supermarket to buy some more flour, until I was finally able to knead it all together and leave it prove over night. As you can see in the picture, it has risen very well, so the texture of the bread is actually the best I have ever achieved on a bread, only the crust could have been even thicker. So next time, I will give it a couple of minutes more on the high temperature just to get that awesome crust. But overall I am very happy with the result and it tasted great 🙂

Ingredients (yields 2 loafs):

385 g plain wheat flour
55 g spelt flour
55 g rye flour
75 g sour dough
6 g instant yeast
25 g honey
280 ml water
70 ml beer (can be replaced by water)
14 g salt

Mix sourdough, yeast, honey, water, beer and salt in a large bowl. Sieve in the flour and knead thoroughly together using a large spoon for about 5 minutes. Cover the bowl with a foil and leave it in the fridge over night (or for the next couple of hours) to prove. Sprinkle the countertop with flour and take the dough out of the bowl.

Cut the dough in two and form the two parts to loaves. Sprinkle the loaves with flour and leave them to prove at room temperature for about 2 hours until they have doubled in size. Preheat the oven to 230°C and leave a baking pan at the bottom of the oven. Put in the loaves in the oven and fill the baking pan at the bottom of the oven with about 200 ml of water. After 10 minutes reduce the heat to 200°C and bake for 20 more minutes. The breads are done, if they sound hollow when you knock on the bottom when you take the breads out of the oven.