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Hubby went through the weekend loaf in no time and there is no bread in the freezer so I needed to do a mid week bake. I based this bake on Edo Bread’s Small Daily Loaves which is basically a 1:2:3 type of loaf. http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/56031/small-daily-loaves

I don’t have exact amounts for the rye Red Fife mix because my scale was misbehaving and what I thought was equal amounts turned out to be more rye than Red Fife. My fault as I didn’t have the scale on a level surface. Then I had more sifted flour than the planned 200 g so I just threw it all in the loaf and reduced the amount of bread flour. So that explains the weird amounts. 

Makes one loaf. 

267 g of a mix of freshly milled Rye and Red Fife flour, sifted

100 g AP Unbleached flour

83 g Bread flour 

325 g Water 

15 g yogurt 

11 g Salt 

300 g 100% hydration Wholewheat levain

1. Refresh your starter with 1:2:2 feeds over a day or two. I used all Wholewheat flour. 
2. Mill enough rye and Red Fife berries to get 267 g of sifted flour. Feel free to adjust amounts. Save the bran for dusting the banneton. 
3. Add the all purpose and bread flour as well as the water and let autolyse for 40 minutes. 
4. Add the salt, yogurt and levain. Mix well and roll, fold and stretch until the dough starts sticking less to the walls of the bowl and there is some gluten development. 
5. Do 3 sets of folds a half hour apart and go to hourly folds until the dough has bubbles on the sides and the top. Because I was going out for dinner, I put the dough on hold in the fridge for about four hours. When I got back, I did a stretch and fold and put it in a warm spot. I resumed the hourly folds until bulk was done. 
6. This is where I tried something totally different. I wet my hand and slipped it around the dough to release it and dumped the dough into a bare counter. I lightly dusted the top of the dough with flour and then used my scraper to round it out a la Trevor Wilson. Once I got a nice tight shape, I let it rest for 40 minutes. 
7. After 40 minutes, I flipped the dough over onto a barely floured counter and pulled the dough out into a rectangle. I then pulled the two top corners out like Mickey Mouse ears and folded those to the center. I rolled the top towards me pinching the front edge with my thumbs. When I reached the bottom edge of the dough, I sealed the seam with the heel of my hand. The result was a nice batard shape. 
8. The banneton was dusted with both rice/ap flour and reserved bran. The bartard went in seam side down. 
9. Cover the dough and place in the fridge for the night. The dough didn’t rise much if at all by the next morning. 
10. In the morning, heat up the oven with a graniteware roaster to 500F. This is where I should have gone with my first thought and that was to line the toaster with some parchment paper. I didn’t do that. I sprinkled some cornmeal instead. 
11. Bake at 475F for 25 minutes and then remove the lid and bake another 15-20 minutes until the internal temp is at least 205F. 

I got amazing oven spring! 

I got amazing crumb! 

I also got an amazingly stuck loaf!!

🙄

DanAyo"s recent post prompted a response by Trevor Wilson.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/56018/acedic-vs-lactic-flavor

So time to give this a shot, see if I could do a long warm fermentation such as Trevor suggested without the dough degrading and see what effect it has on flavour.

Sunday morning:  Refresh my mother starter (basically a 1:2:3)  which lives in the fridge. 

Sunday evening: Refresh again keeping to this ratio, making a bit more than I required.

Trevor's suggestion was  to make a lower hydration dough eg 65% hydration with the stiff levain being only 10% of the total dough weight.

330 g flour

214 g water

6 g salt

So Monday morning 7 am I weighed out 55 g stiff levain and added 214 g water.  Then added some of the flour to make a thick slurry before adding the salt and the rest of the flour.  I hand kneaded until I was close to window pane.

As I don't have a proofer, I used the microwave to heat a cup of water, then placed the dough container in the microwave with the light on and the door cracked open.  It held the temperature quite happily at about 80 deg F.

1 pm As per instruction, once the dough had doubled at the 6 hour mark, I removed dough and degassed with firm stretch and folds then returned it to the microwave.

3 pm  repeated the degassing and stretch and folds, did a fairly firm preshape, and returned the dough to the microwave for 60 minutes. 

4 pm The dough had puffed up again so degassed again, shaped firmly into a boule and left to proof.  Pre heated oven and DO.

5:30 pm I think dough is ready to bake, but as dough is warm, instead of scoring I snipped a square shape the baked in DO lid on, fan on at 230 deg C for 15 minutes, 15 minutes lid off.

Crumb shot

The flavour was definitely mild, crumb is soft and close but it is not dense.  

I was happy the dough did not degrade and I think I could probably have left the first bulk ferment a bit longer, it had doubled but was no where near tripling.  The second rise was quicker and it did more than double.  Shaping was not difficult and the dough although warm was not sticky.  It was fun to try something different and  I will try again I think.

While all this was going on, I repeated last week's bake of 25% wholewheat loaves comparing the 2 grains.  This bake was better than last week I think.  When I mixed the levain on Sunday evening I added the bran to the mix to help soften it.  

South Island wheat (780 g loaf)

Crumb

North Island wheat (900 g loaf)

Crumb

Not much between them I reckon.  I think too, adding bran to one of the levain builds is really upping the activity. 

This is a rewrite - tried last night but the gremlins got me, and I lost the whole post.....  :( 

Leslie

We have sausages and hamburger burning a hole in our freezer but we needed buns for both. This recipe makes the best buns especially if you make it like Lucy does.

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She starts with Floyd’s recipe that you can find by searching Hokkaido Milk Bread on The Fresh Loaf.  Her changes are few but important.  First, she cuts the recipe in half because we don’t need buns for an army.

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Second where ever you see water or milk in the recipe we substituted Half and Half.  The 2 T of butter was increased to 3 T.  we had to put in quite a bit more AP flour, 25% more (100 g), because the dough was just way, way too liquid.  Floyd said his was too dry using the original water and milk.

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This was the guy that drew this picture 40 years ago in Drawing 2 class as a 2nd semester freshman

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  We changed the process.  We made a 100% hydration poolish with H&H, 75 g of AP flour and pinch of instant yeast and let it percolate on the 85 F degree counter for 4 hours.  We also held back the butter, egg and sugar until the rest of the ingredients were mixed for 10 minutes on KA 4 using the dough hook.

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We want the gluten to be at least partially developed and the flour hydrated well before adding fats and sugars to an enriched dough.  Once the egg, sugar and butter went in we beat the heck out of for another 5 minutes and noticed it was way too wet.

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We added the extra flour and continued beating it for another 10 minutes – 25 minutes total before it pulled a nice windowpane.  Highly enriched breads are the only ones I ever make sure can pull a windowpane.

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Tall, Taller, Tallest  bread

ever!The final changes were that we divided the dough by eye into 3 parts for final proofing in my favorite pan - the tall Oriental Pullman.  Last time we proofed it lid on Pan De Mie style so this time we proofed it lid off to see how much it really would rise and spring.  We did brush it with H&H before going in and coming out of the oven.

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Jalapeno double thick double apple wood smoked bacon. 1 year aged hard Swiss cheese, caramelized onions, crimini and shiitake mushrooms, lettuce and tomato hamburger on an onion bun. 

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When it had cooled we noticed when we took it out of the pan that the part touching the pan was damp.  As luck would have it the oven was still 200 F because of the 2 stones so we out the loaf back in on the rack between the stones to dry it off.  It worked great

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The last change was that we baked the bread for nearly 1 hour at 350 F with steam for the first 30 minutes.  It took longer to bake this bread to 196 F – the perfect temperature for a bread like this one.  It rose sprang and browned beautifully but one has to ask…… what happened to the buns you needed?

This bread is shredably soft, moist sweet and delicious.  It toasts perfectly.  Yummmmm....

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I went to the grocery store today and low and behold they had bakery 8 count, Hot Dog and Onion Hamburger buns on sale for 99 cents each – day old.  Lucy can barely make them for that!  We had hamburgers tonight on onion buns and we have some great sandwich bread that is half Chinese, half Japanese with a little French in there somewhere.

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Can’t wait to see the inside.

My brother asked to add him to my bread list on a bi-weekly basis. Diabetes runs in the family and his doctor has told him to give up white bread in order to stay ahead of the game. So who best to emulate and steal recipes from but our very own Dabrownman! Well, while doing that, I discovered that Lucy is truly an evil creature! A four short legged creature, but evil nonetheless! The things that she puts Dab through in order to produce a loaf is nothing short of torture. No wonder his recipes start on Monday and finish on Friday. I spent a good part of each day this week, dealing with a myriad of different steps and discovering a few things along the way:

1. Dehydrating sprouts takes a lot longer when you have a thick layer of grains. And using the rack that has the plastic liner for fruit leathers isn’t a great idea. I need to get one more piece of window screen to line that particular tray.
2. Unhulled buckwheat is not the best thing for making sprouted flour. When you milled this, it leaves chunks of hulls that are very unsightly and huge! Remilling these chunks didn’t help at all! I finally sifted them out and gave them to the birds. They probably won’t eat them either!
3. Using 12% as the amount of bran that will be extracted from the sprouted flour is too low. I was short 25 g so I need to up the amount of grain I sprout and mill.
4. I hate toasting flax seeds! They start thinking they are Mexican Jumping Beans once the heat hits them and they fly all over the place. Even putting a screen on the frying pan didn’t help much! It makes it hard to ensure that the sunflower and pumpkin seeds that I put in the pan with the flax seeds actually get toasted. 
5. Next time, I need to grind at least half of the flax seeds to get a better dough and for better nutrition.
6. I need to use VWG more. Bread flour in the small 5 lbs bags is expensive and I go through them like there is no tomorrow them I am making 4 batches at once. 
7. I originally dropped the hydration to 78% from Dab’s 85% but the dough felt too stiff so I brought up the hydration to 80% at the first set of folds. Dab had mentioned that this was quite a wet dough so I decided to be more conservative and add if needed. I should have added even more as the dough felt quite heavy in the end.

So here is the recipe:

Makes 3 loaves

Dough:

261 g of sprouted flour from Red Fife, rye, Spelt, Buckwheat (use hulled, not unhulled like I did, it will save you a lot of grief and agravation), Oats, Kamut, Selkirk wheat (hard red spring wheat variety), and Einkorn berries. (I used 62 g of each grain for sprouting. Next time, I think I would increase this to ~65 g. Process for making this flour explained below.)

355 g unbleached flour

330 g bread flour

700 g of water + 25 g

22 g salt

35 g yogurt

352 g 100% hydration levain (builds explained below)

Add-ins:

88 g pumpkin seeds

88 g sunflower seeds

88 g flax seeds

Making the sprouted flour:

1. Weigh out the berries for sprouting and rinse them well under water. Leave to soak about 6-8 hours, drain well, and leave to sprout, rinsing occasionally, until the rootlets are just visible on the end of most of the berries. Don’t let the roots get too long. They should be about 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch. Total time from first washing the grains, soaking and then letting sprouts was 33 hours.
2. Place grains in a dehydrator and dry until they are completely hard when you bite into a seed. If you crack a tooth, they are just right. ;-) The other way to find out if they are dry enough, is to weigh the berries and see if they equal the initial weight. In the past, dehydrating sprouted berries took only 3 hours but because I was making 4 batches and I had a thick layer of grains on each rack, this took about 7 hours.
3. Put the grains through the grain mill and freak out because there are huge chunks of buckwheat seed coat in the flour. Decide if you want them in the dough or not. I chose “NOT”! To me, they looked like crushed insect exoskeletons. Ewww!
4. Sift out the bran with a screen, then sift the bran again through a coarse screen to remove the buckwheat hulls but keep the rest of the bran for the first levain build and for dusting the bannetons. (I did this by first hand sifting the flour through a regular kitchen metal sieve to get the coarsest of the bran. I tried running this coarse bran through the mill on extra fine but the flakes still stayed huge. I even tried buzzing them up in a bullet. No luck! So I gave up on the idea of including these in the dough. The flour from the hand sifting was run through the Komo mill fine sifting attachment to get more bran extraction. Then I put the coarsest screen on the attachment and ran the hand sifted bran through. This got rid of those huge hull flakes but still gave me plenty of bran for the levain and dusting the baskets). 
5. Save 176 g of the sprouted flour for the levain build and reserve the remaining 261 g for the main dough.

Add-ins:

1. Weigh out the needed seeds and toast them in a dry frying pan. Be prepared to have your flax seeds impersonate Mexican Jumping Beans. Your kitchen will need a clean up after this activity!
2. Reserve the seeds.

Levain Builds:

1. A couple of days before making your dough, take 6 g of your starter and feed it 19 g of water and 19 g of bran. Stir every 8 hours or so. You won’t see much activity if any, but have no fear, the little creatures in there are doing their thing and multiplying like crazy. 
2. Just before going to bed the night before, add 176 g of water and the 176 g of sprouted flour that was reserved for the levain. Stir down in the morning and refrigerate if you aren’t ready for it. Let rise again.

Main dough:

1. In the morning, mix all of the flours with the add-ins and the water. Let sit for a couple of hours in a warm place (82F). Add the salt, the yogurt and the levain. Mix well to integrate the salt and the levain. I did 50 folds in the bucket. 
2. Do 4 sets of folds each a half hour apart. Add the 25 g of water with the first set of folds. Let rise until 80-90% (~4.5 hours). Even though the dough had a lot of bubbles, it still felt quite solid. I don’t know if this was due to the add-ins or to the sprouted flour.
3. Carefully remove the dough from its container (try to not deflate it), and divide into 3 equal portions of about 780 grams. Loosely shape into a boule and let rest for 45 minutes. Reshape the balls into boules and tighten the skin by spinning each ball like a top on a bare spot of the counter. 
4. Sprinkle some of the bran into the bannetons and then place the dough seam side down. Cover and place in a cold fridge (37F) for the night. 

Baking:

1. Preheat the oven and the pots to 475F for an hour. Place parchment rounds in the bottom of each pot and carefully place the boules seam side up. Cover and bake for 25 minutes at 450F. Uncover and bake for a further 20 minutes at 425F. Final internal temp should be at least 205F.

The boules felt quite firm when I took them out of the bannetons and I had doubts about good oven spring. This was justified as the first batch of six had minimal oven spring.  So I took out the other half dozen out of the fridge and let them warm up about 45 minutes on the counter before baking. The second batch had very slightly better oven rise and I got a deeper colour on the crust for some reason.  

So not a bad bake for Earth Day as I don’t think you can get more earthy than this unless you go for a 100% whole grain loaf!

This sourdough loaf owes its colour to activated charcoal. I discovered this bread and heaps of information on the use of charcoal on Bake-Street.com and could not resist. My dough did not look dark enough to me. I thought it resembled window putty so I added 1/2 gram extra charcoal. I still thought it was too light but resisted the temptation to add black food colouring. It turned quite dark during baking, so I need not have worried. It is a tasty loaf with a good crust and soft as a cloud inside.

To decorate my loaf I cut a stencil with hearts from baking paper both because I love baking and, while preparing it, the radio played Melanie Gardot singing: Your Heart is as Black as Night. An appropriate title for this post. Don't leave out the black sesame. It really complements the taste of this bread. 

Recipe here:  https://bake-street.com/en/sourdough-charcoal-bread/

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This morning I baked off two sourdough loaves that I mixed and shaped last night (2am). I made a 60% WW dough at 75% hydration and add two types of inclusions at the first fold.

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The first half got some parmesan and Kerrygold Dubliner cheeses mixed in and the other half was studded with rum soaked dates, toasted pecans, and cocoa.

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They both taste great and again, as a newcomer to this whole world, I'd love your input, comments and feedback.

I had a great success in sourdough this week, with the most impossibly light and even crumb.

My previous sourdough, and many photos I've seen of quality sourdough, have a preponderance of large irregular bubbles. This is totally unlike that.

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 Well, as I wait for the oven to preheat I suppose I can post about what I was pulling from the oven at 1:30am.

This all started from me asking in the forum about what I should try next and it was suggested that I give Hokkaido Milk Bread a whirl! Once I saw the Tangzhong method I knew I was going to have to do it. Next was to study and decide on the recipe, but there are so many versions and I couldn't settle on just one, so I adapted one of my own from several different ways. But I couldn't find anything to write on as the juices were flowing hence my decision to start on a toy until I could track down pencil and paper.

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Basically, all I did was make the Tangzhong the night before and then mixed it all up in my KitchenAid and went to town on first proof, folding, second proof, dividing, preshaping, more proofing, rolling, shaping, panning, more proofing, preheating, egg washing, baking, rotating, baking, rotating, baking, cooling, decide I'm too impatient to wait, eat one while it's hot, go to be at 2am, get up at 5:30 am and  play with the two sourdough I left to proof before bed. Ok time to get them in the oven, I hope they come out fine.

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Hi,

I was checking the protein content of King Arthur flours and since White WHole Wheat has 13% and bread flour 12.7% I was wondering if I could swap it in a recipe for yeasted bread?

Has anybody tried that, or has any input in pros and cons of doing it?

Thanks.