I baked a couple of things this weekend.  The first was the Sourdough Carrot Cake recipe from King Arthur that someone (TXFarmer?) posted about a couple of months back.

I halved the recipe and baked them as cupcakes rather than a cake.  It is quite good and a useful way of disposing of ripe starter.

I thought I also baked a walnut levain today, but judging by the timestamp* this is a loaf that I'll bake 205 years from now.

It looks like it'll be good.  I'm looking forward to trying it someday!

* I suspect the fact that my 8 year old son has been borrowing my camera to make stop action movies with Lego figures recently has something to do with the timestamp getting changed.  

In my quest to make better bread I have gathered information from almost any resource.  Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice has become a go-to book when I want to bake.  One day I was perusing random websites and I happened upon a blog called "Pinch My Salt".  This blog included a number of amateur bakers making each recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice in order.  I thought this might be a cheaper alternative to making beer considering I do not currently have the funds.

Yesterday afternoon I mixed together the cornmeal and water and let it sit out overnight.  The bowl on the bottom of the picture is about 2 cups of flour, the cornmeal mixture, and yeast.  The other two bowls are pizza dough and a poolish.

I let the soaker/sponge sit out for a couple hours until it was gurgling CO2 at me.  I mixed the sponge with the remaining 2.5 cups flour, 1.5 tsp salt, 1oz shortening and 4oz of molasses .  When I stirred everything together it still seemed too wet, so I mixed in some more flour during the kneading.  the dough was lightly oiled in a bowl and set to ferment for a few hours.  I removed the dough, knocked it down, and formed a couple boules.

I didn't want to make sandwich loaves because I really like free form loaves and the shape of boules.  The final proofing lasted for about an hour before taking them to be scored and baked.  The loaves scored nicely but I lack a peel, as a result I accidently deflated some of the loaf during transfer to the oven.  Thankfully I had a decent amount of oven spring.  

The loaves turned out fine, I can only imagine how they would have looked if I hadn't deflated them, I guess it's time to look into making a peel.  I look forward to the next stage in the BBA challenge and as always look for improvement.

Cheers and Happy Baking

-Matthew

Foodies (myself included) can be really annoying.  Especially the obsession with details of the provenance of ingredients.  I don’t need to know what species of leaves are in the mulch that fed the grass that fed the lamb that I eat.

One foodie principle that I endorse, though, is the locavore concept, the idea that it is beneficial to use local ingredients and to celebrate local cuisine.  Well, we don’t grow wheat here in the Bay Area, but my bake today is decidedly local to the Bay Area.  

The recipe for this miche was developed at San Francisco Baking Institute in South San Francisco; the flours are produced to the specifications of, and distributed by, Central Milling Company in Petaluma; and the whole shebang was put together right here, just a mile from the Golden Gate, by a middling local baker in a worse-than-middling local oven.

The SFBI miche formula has been much touted in the last few weeks, and can be found in Brother David’s recent blog post (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21644/miche-hit).  Many of you have baked this formula, and have been pleased with it.   I followed the formula, except I used 50% Central Milling Organic Type 85 flour and 50% Central Milling Organic Artisan Baker’s Craft flour (a white flour, enriched with malt, that I’ve been happily using for a range of breads).  I used Bob’s Red Mill Wheat Germ (ok, that’s from way up in Oregon).

The dough behaved nicely in mixing.  I found it very slack and sticky, like a high-hydration baguette dough.  Indeed, it was pretty difficult to form the boule as my floured hands kept sticking to the dough.  I either succeeded or failed to properly form a tight boule; I gave up trying at a certain point, and plopped it in a genuine SFBI linen-lined proofing basket.

After 15 hours in the fridge, and 90 minutes on the kitchen counter, the dough ball was very nicely risen, and the poke test indicated proper proofing.

The loaf sprung up nicely in the steamed portion of the bake.  I baked at 450 F for 65 minutes total, and the internal temperature got to 210 F.  The crust is near burnt in places.  My oven is considerably hotter at its top and this loaf was close to the top (no room to use a lower shelf).   Next time I’ll try a slightly lower temperature.  Still, not a bad looking bread, and nicely crackled.

The crumb texture and flavor are awesome—very tender and airy, and complex, sour and toasty-wheaty taste.  I can’t say I notice the wheat germ, compared to the last miche I made using 100% Type 85 flour.  The flavor of the crust is just a tad past “bold”, verging on burnt.  But, this is a really yummy bread.

So this was the last of a three-bake weekend, producing also a nice Cranberry-Walnut bread and some tasty “Bearguettes”, all described in my previous blog post (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21860/when-cat’s-away-mouse-bakes…-lot)

Happy Baking, all!

Glenn

This might just say it all. I made a very small amount of Peter Reinharts Rich Man's Brioche, actually only a third of the recipe. It still called for 1 1/2 sticks of butter in it, by weight is was almost the same amount as it called for flour! The recipe said this was the hardest to make of the three formula's. I took that as a challenge. Here's the end result, the "Money Shots".

From Brioche

It really has an incredible crumb on it, soft and tender, literally you can see the gluten feathering out as you pull one apart. The trouble is that it is almost dripping in butter. I was brought up on using real butter on my breads, so I can't believe I am going to say this. I ate one of these and it almost made me sick there was so much butter in it. It has been a couple hours since I ate it, and my body is still saying, "I am so glad you froze those things!" Really, with my love for breads and using real butter on them, you would think these would taste awesome to me. Even putting sugar free strawberry jam on them didn't help the situation, so I hope that my husband likes them or I might have to feed them to the chickens or something. Here is how I made them, although I really don't recommend them and won't be making them again.

Everything all measured out and ready to be made into Brioche.

My sponge was really small in that huge 6 quart bowl.

Added the other liquid ingredients. At this point I realized that such a small amount was not going to be easy to make in

my mixer.

Flour is mixed in and getting ready to start putting the butter in.

My ball of dough after mixing with the paddle. It had difficulty producing gluten, because it was small and sticky with butter. I actually did some stretch and folds on it for about an hour, trying to get it developed more.

Flattened out and ready for fridge, sorry for the blurry pictures. My cell phone was used for these and it sometimes is hard to tell if the picture is good or not.

Shaped and ready for proofing. They rose about twice this size in two hours, and then I cooked them and they really shot up.

There have been some inspiring and mouthwatering nutty breads posted lately, so how could I resist.  I had to have some.  It's been a long time, and I forgot how good a few walnuts in a loaf of bread could be. 

The bread is a basic sourdough, mostly bolted wheat, a bit of  whole white wheat, and a small amount of WW from my starter.  Hydration was around 75%.  To this I added a handful of walnuts and a spoonful of honey.  Precision was not the priority this particular day, clearly.  I don't usually use sweetner in my sourdoughs so I lowered the oven temp to compensate for the honey, but the crust still went a little dark, darker than the photos make it look.  No complaints about the flavor, though!  I made a batch of cranberry sauce to go with it and now everything is right with the world... until the bread runs out anyway!

Marcus