The Fresh Loaf

News & Information for Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts

Benito's blog

February 2, 2020 - 1:08pm
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Benito

Hamelman’ a Five Grain Sourdough

 

I had another go at this bake, but made a few mistakes right at the start.  Rather than using the recommended 214 g of bread flour and 109 g of water for the final dough, I accidentally use 321 g bread flour and 243 g of water which I reduced to 236 from the total formula column, yikes.  Other changes I made include reducing the soaker water to 150 g.

I’m quite happy with the end product considering the accidental changes I made.  This was the largest loaf of bread I’ve made to date and it kind of overflowed my banneton which is better sized for 750 g loaves.  So taking that into consideration I’m pleased.






January 11, 2020 - 12:07pm
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Benito

Cranberry Walnut Sourdough

I’ve been wanting to do a fruit and nut sourdough for sometime and decided my first bake of the year would be that time.  I’ve made raisin walnut commercially yeasted bread in the past so wanted to do something different, so chose cranberry walnut.  I started out thinking that would be follow Maurizio’s cranberry walnut sourdough recipe, but then got intimadated by his 88% hydration and also wanted to try lamination again.  So I sort os used his beginner sourdough recipe 78% hydration and added 10% dried cranberries and 10% lightly toasted walnuts.  Then I essentially followed Full Proof Baking Kristen’s methods that we used for the open crumb CB.  I thought that this would be a perfect way of introducing the nuts and fruit during lamination and I think it worked out alright.

This was also the first time I used my Proofing Box and I’m glad that I now have one given the cold temperatures of winter in Toronto.  I’m not sure I should be surprised but bulk fermentation went a bit more slowly than I expected.  I hope I judged fermentation well and didn’t greatly underproof the dough.  I guess I will know tomorrow when I cut into the loaf.  One other thing, in my haste to score the dough, I made the incision in too vertical a plane instead of a good angle so the ear isn’t as good as I would have liked.

 




January 4, 2020 - 8:05am
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Benito

Hawaiian Sourdough Pizza




This was last night’s dinner.  I made my usual sourdough pizza dough following the recipe that the PieKing shared with us for the pizza CB.

This pizza had homemade fresh pizza sauce for which I used Peter Reinhart’s recipe from his book Artisan Breads Everyday.  In order to keep the crust crispy and avoid sogginess from the sauce, I first put a layer of prosciutto then the sauce.  This was followed by mozzarella cheese, onions, pineapple, roasted red peppers and once out of the oven a bit more prosciutto.  

This definitely made a tasty pizza so long as you like pineapple which we do.

November 1, 2019 - 3:27pm
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Benito

Sourdough Pain de Mie Maurizio’s Recipe

I baked Maurizio’s sourdough Pain de Mie today.

Based on his recipe and recommendations I made a 700 g dough to fit in my 8.5” x 4.5” loaf pan, however, it came out rather small, I’d say it could easily have been 800 go for that size.

Anyhow, as per his recipe it is all white flour, 12% butter unsalted, 7% honey, 22% milk, 48% water, and 2% salt.

https://www.theperfectloaf.com/pain-de-


See what I mean, it is rather short and squat for sandwich bread.

How much dough do you guys use for this size of pan?  What it underproofed or just not enough dough?

I’ll post photos of the crumb tomorrow once I cut it open.

Benny

October 12, 2019 - 6:19am
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Benito

74% hydration soughdough

I’m feeling more confident now with this sourdough recipe.  I’ve had pretty good success now that I’ve baked it a few times with the hydration lowered to 74% from about 78%.  This is Maurizio’s beginner sourdough recipe which fortunately we love the flavour of.  The only change this time was that I added 0.5% diastatic malt powder to the dough during the autolyse.  I believe it did make the fermentation go faster than usual as the dough appeared nicely fermented after 4 hours at 80ºF and with my starter it usually takes 4.5 to 5 hours before it appears nicely fermented so I think it does what it advertises.  Tonight we’ll cut it and taste it to see how it affects the crumb texture and flavour.  The other change I made during the baking process was that I baked it in my DO at the highest rack that I could still fit it on and place a cookie tray on the rack below to shield it from the direct heat.  Also, I’ve started to pull the bread out of the DO after taking the lid off and then placing the bread with the parchment onto the rack in the oven directly.  I’ve made this change to try to get the bottom crust to be baked more similarly to the sides and top as I’ve often found that the bottom crust to be much thicker than the rest of the crust and I’m hoping that this will help make it less thick.  Again we’ll see if these changes help.  I’ve continued to use slap and folds and coil folds with the dough and I think I’m building pretty good structure this way.







I also tried to score a bit of a pattern on the side of the loaf.  I will need to put a bit of flour on the dough prior to scoring in the future if I want the pattern to actually show, but not a bad outcome for a first try.

Benny

September 28, 2019 - 7:50am
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Benito

Cranberry Apple Bourbon Pie

I loved last weekend’s apple pie and needed to bake another dessert to go with dinner tonight with friends.  I decided to make this Cranberry Apple Bourbon Pie this weekend.  I tried to do a plaid lattice design to also do something different than I have tried before.  As I have been doing, I used Bravetart’s all butter crust again as it has become my favorite.




September 28, 2019 - 7:46am
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Benito

Adjusting my methods for Sourdough loaf

I am still lacking consistency bake to bake.  One reason is that I’m only baking sourdough every 2 weeks on average, but this week got another bake in.  I’ve still been trying Maurizio’s Beginner Sourdough as that was the first one I started with and wanted to gain some confidence baking it.  Two weeks ago I made an error and added way too much water and the dough lacked structure, it tasted fine but it was a bit on the pancake side of things.  This week I decided to hold back 20 g of water during autolyse, so rather than 78% hydration the bread would be 74%.  I estimate that the water I wet my hands with during the three sets of coil folds I did added back another 10 g or so, so perhaps the bread turned out to be 76% hydration?  The bread is about 80% white strong flour, 16% whole Red Fife and 4% whole rye.  I’ve also adjusted down the temperature after baking in the Dutch oven.  For this bake I turned the temperature down to 400ºF after taking the lid off the Dutch oven and then also placed the bread directly on the oven rack instead of back in the Dutch over uncovered.  I have found that the crust has been a bit too thick for my tastes, I would prefer slightly thinner.  We shall see if this change made any difference.




I will post crumb shots later tonight or tomorrow as this bread part of tonight’s dinner with friends.

September 22, 2019 - 7:04am
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Benito

Bravetart Apple Pie

Well a year and a half into my pie baking “career” I’ve finally made my first apple pie.  I know a lot of people love apple pie, but I hate peeling apples and have no space for a dedicated apple peeler in my apartment kitchen.  However, this apple pie turned out so well I might have to make room.

I followed the Bravetart Apple Pie recipe almost exactly and overall it turned out well.  I used once again the all butter crust recipe from Bravetart however, this time I subbed 40 g of the water for 40 g of vodka to see if it would make the pastry a touch more tender.

The mistake I made with the filling was that I didn’t leave it out at room temperature for 3 hours to macerate.  The idea being that the macerating fruit would not only give up some of its sweet juices but also that the fruit would shrink so that when baked one wouldn’t be left with a large air gap between the top crust and the fruit.  Unfortunately I didn’t follow that part of the recipe, instead focused in on the line that red it can be kept in the fridge for up to 8 hours.  So after mixing the apple, sugar and spices in a ziplock bag I immediately put it all in the fridge and planned to get up early enough to bake it the next morning.  So I had more of an air gap than I would have liked to have.

Overall the Bravetart recipe is excellent, despite the large amount of juices apple release (Granny Smith in this case) the pie wasn’t runny at all and the Granny Smith stayed in their sliced form with a pleasing amount of bite left to them.

One new thing I had this time was a baking iron.  With the pie baking on a cookie try and then on the preheated baking iron on the lowest rake, the bottom crust was wonderfully browned and crisp, no soggy bottom anywhere.  Again this was remarkable to me because there was at least a cup of juices after the overnight refrigerated mace ration process.  The baking iron isn’t an amazing tool for baking pies!  

Oh, I think that the extra 40 g of Vodka did make this pasty a bit more tender, but I’ll need to make it again the same way to know for sure.  I was also more careful not to knead this pasty too much when forming it too so that might have made the difference.





September 22, 2019 - 6:44am
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Benito

Beginner’s Sourdough - Another time

I am still working on my skills with sourdough, having had some recent success I thought I see if I can replicate that success.  With this bake I also thought I’d try shaping using a spritz of water on the counter and my hands, unfortunately that didn’t go so well.  I’m not sure why it didn’t work, perhaps I used too much water, that is the most likely cause.  After the shaping didn’t go well with water, I let the blob rest and then reshaped using flour, this went a bit better but not as good as my previous bake.

Same formula as before except 78% not counting any water added during coil folding so probably even higher.






I think that some of the huge spaces in the crumb are from my shaping issues, as the slices of bread further out from the center have a nice crumb structure.  The crumb wasn’t wet or gummy at all and the bread tasted good with a slight sour tang which tasted great with the curry tomato poached cod that I made to go with this.  I do plan to bake this again and next time will reduce the hydration a bit and I’m hoping for better results again.  Sorry about posting this same recipe but I like to document my progress even if it feels like two steps back sometimes.  All good though as it will always be a learning process.  Fortunately we like the flavour and texture of this bread.

Benny

September 7, 2019 - 7:51am
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Benito

Maurizio’s Beginner’s Sourdough - Again

I’m sorry about posting another Beginner’s Sourdough loaf but I wanted to repeat it a few more times to see if I am getting any more consistent results.  I reduced the hydration by 20 gms when mixing to try to account for water added while doing coil folds etc.  I found that the dough was quite stiff despite a several hour autolyze, I think this was the reduced hydration unless I actually reduced by even more than I thought.  The lower hydration made slap and folds very hard.  As more water was used with coil folds the dough gradually seemed to be a bit more of what I was used to when bulk fermenting sourdough.

I’m hoping that I watched fermentation better this time so that this isn’t underfermented as the last one seemed to be.  Shaping went quite well, this is likely in part because of the reduced hydration but also this time I used much less flour, a lot less actually.  




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