Milk Kefir Bread

To be honest, I have some doubts about milk kefir used as a leavening agent for bread. If you search the net, you will notice that many milk kefir bread recipes include the use of a tiny bit of yeast. At Bakerzwork class, the one recipe I made which used milk kefir did not turn out well. It was heavy and under baked.

Over the weekend, I made a Milk Kefir bread using this recipe I found online. I never got to the stage of baking because after mixing, the dough was very limp. I gave it a lot of time to develop but in the end, the dough had no strength at all and I was certain it would be a failure. So I dumped it.

Yesterday I decided to give Milk Kefir another shot. This time I did something differently. When making the milk kefir starter(or levain), I used very strong bread flour.

I used Waitrose white bread flour which had a 14.9% protein. I usually use Prima Unbleached Bread flour which had a 13.1% protein. I'm not entirely sure about this but I believe a higher protein flour generates more gluten. Based on my first milk kefir failure, there seems to be a lack of gluten in the dough. For my main dough, I still used Prima Unbleached Bread flour.

This is my milk kefir. I did not really pay attention to how long I fermented my milk kefir grains. I do know it was definitely less than 24 hours. When I remembered to harvest it, there was some separation of whey. I was given a tiny teaspoon worth of milk grains at Bakerzwork. At first the grains did not grow at all. I was a bit worried but at last count, I have 2 tablespoon's worth. Unlike water kefir grains, my milk kefir grains multiply rather slowly.

This is my milk kefir starter after sitting on a table overnight. The weird holes you see are the bubbles. This starter is quite active.

I was feeling rather adventurous and decided to put all my money on this recipe I found online.

The amount of dough was enough to make a sandwich loaf (680g) in my pullman tin and the leftover I made a boule. Which was a mistake. I'll explain later.

 My boule after shaping.

My boule before baking.

I baked the sandwich loaf first. I shaped the dough into a batard which surprisingly fit the size of the pullman tin. After a few hours, the dough only rose a bit but I was tired of waiting so I baked it.

The bread turned out quite well. The only mistake I made was after removing the bread from the tin, I returned it to the oven to brown the top, I placed it upside down. Unfortunately, the top was not stable enough and when I removed the bread later, the top had become lop sided.

This was the first slice I ate, still warm and it was delicious. The crust was very nice and I felt a bit guilty I didn't leave it for hubs.

Remember I have a boule. The mistake I made was this. I wanted to bake the boule on my baking stone and to get the baking stone hot enough takes time. Meanwhile my dough was ballooning up. I think it was over proofed.

In the oven, it didn't spring up much but it got wider. I thought it was gonna spill out of the oven because my oven is not very deep.

I didn't try the boule last night because it was late. This morning I had a slice and I have to say, it's not as good as it looks. There's a bit of under baking near the bottom. Demmit! After all that effort to get the baking stone hot enough...

Overall, the taste of my milk kefir bread, both sandwich and boule is not as good as the sourdough bread I made last Friday. At this point, I don't know if I will pursue milk kefir bread. I think I may have bread fatigue.