Burning the house or baking the bread?

Being in lockdown facilitates my baking drive and thanks to @breadbakers I am now baking more bread instead of cake. This is a huge improvement regarding my sugar consumption. And I thought I share two of my latest bread attempts with you. Both made with wheat and/or spelt as rye is in high demand since corona – read unbuyable 😱

Knitting and breadbaking goes hand in hand :-D

For both breads I used the Plötz Prinzip a method thats works without intense kneading and uses less yeast then many other recipes I have seen. I started with this starter dough:
1 g fresh yeast
240 g spelt flour (660)
140 g cold water

Mixing these ingredients results in a firm starter dough which I put for 12 hours minimum and 1 week max in the fridge. The amount was enough for two breads. One I made with 245 g wheat flour, 355 g water, 1 Tbsp. sugar beet molasses, 12 g salt, 190 g starter dough and 200 oat flakes (after 24 hour ripening the starter dough), for the other I used 475 g wheat (550) flour, 340 g water, 12 g salt, 190 g starter dough (aafter 4 days) and flaxseeds. Both breads got a bit more water as additives like seeds or flakes can make the dough dry and crumbly (@akkippon wrote about this). It seems the best method would be to soak the oats or seed in hot water for some hours before you mix them into the dough. I will try this technique next time.

The oat bread was the first one I baked and as I have no longer my iron pot for baking, I put the bread onto a preheated baking tray and to get a bit of steam I threw in some ice cubes. I hoped for a spectacular cloud of hot steam, but no…. the ice cubes melted slowly and calmly along… yawn…
The bread came out nice but much too soft for my liking. The crust was thin and if I wanted, I could have compressed the bread into a tiny ball – really, really soft bread.

Next bread is the flaxseed one. Clever me instructed my husband, who had to stand up very early today, to preheat the oven. If you read the title you have an idea what happened. I came into the kitchen and was greeted with an intense smell of unidentifiable quality, kind of hot plastic with paper… But as it was early in the morning, my brain did not register what happened and I calmly stretched and rolled my bread. I even made four tiny rolls in hope they would be ready faster (thank you @muscara for the tip) so that we could have them for breakfast.
All prepared, I opened the oven and a cloud of smoke billowed out of it. The parchment paper had started to burn… I was shocked for a moment, no idea how this happened, same paper, same temperature, really no clue. I threw it into the sink and let some air into the kitchen. Thankfully I have enough paper, so I started anew. This time the paper behaved, and the rolls came out tasty and crumbly. Only a bit too small, we were still hungry afterwards 😂😂

I also baked the rest of the dough and the bread was much more to my liking than the first one with oats. The crust was firmer, and the bread tasted a bit like baguette.

Today I have ordered some flour at a wholefood store and they try to get me 1 kg of whole meal rye flour. Cross your fingers that it will work.