codruta's blog

I made a pizza last week, that turned out very good.  I addapted the recipe from hamelman's BREAD. I made a stiff levain instead of biga, and omit the oil. I used canned tomatoes made by me last summer, fresh mozzarella, dried oregano, and fresh basil added in the end. I put the stone at the lowest level in my gas oven, and the pizza was done in 7-8 minutes. It's the best I can do at home. The crust was absolutely delicious!!!

more pictures and complete recipe can be found at my romanian blog Apa.Faina.Sare. (english translator available, funny translation, though)

I took cranbo suggestion and made this loaf with my new starter, using flo's 1.2.3. method. This is how my bread turned out. I'd say it's very pretty. It is more sour than my regular breads, but I eat a slice a few hours after baking it, so I guess the aroma wasn't fully settled. Tomorrow I'l be able to feel the real flavor, I hope.

I had a new starter that I never used, some oat flour that needed to be used asap. For this loaf I used 150g 100% starter, 300g water, 100g whole wheat flour (organic) 80g oat flour, and 270g bread flour, 10g salt. It was 71% hydration, but easier to handle than I would imagine. I did two S/F during 50 minutes (for a 2h 30 min bulk fermentation) then shape, then one hour at room temperature and 8 hours in the fridge. I took it out of the fridge one hour before baking it. The dough had 900g, and the loaf 760g. I'd never guessed that so much water evaporates during baking..?!

I'll post the complete recipe soon at my blog Apa.Faina.Sare.

Codruta

I made a new starter few days ago, just to taake photos of the process.

I started with 100g (tap) water, 50g AP flour and 50g rye flour, let it sit 24 hours at room temperature. It almost tripled it's volume.

The next day I switched to a 12 hours feedeing schedule, keeping 75g culture, adding 75g water, 50g AP flour and 25g rye flour. Here are some pictures taken in day 2, 3, 4

after day 4, I feed it only with APflour and water, and in day 5 it looked like that:

The smell changed during these days, from sour, sprouted grains, yogurt, sweet and sour, yeast.

This is how it developed in 5 days:

I'm happy with the result, but I don’t know what to do with it now, cause I don’t want to keep two starters, I want to give it away, but I’m from Romania and I don’t know if there is a safe way to “mail” it.  It's a shame to throw it away in the garbage...

I'll bake a bread with it to see if it has a different taste than my old starter, I'm very curious.

For a complete post and pictures, you ca visit my romanian blog Apa.Faina.Sare. (whitch means Water. Flour.Salt.)

And if any of you have any idea what to do with it... I'm all ears.

codruta

This bread is problably a classic, everybody seems to love it. And how comes one not to? I usually try to bake and eat more whole wheat breads, but this bread is hard to resist to. I followed the recipe "by the book", with 10 hours retard in the fridge, baking them directly from the fridge, and I suspect both breads were just a little bit underproofed. Probably an hour at room temperature would have been a better thing to do. I didn't manage to score the boule as it should have been done (I'm not good with boules, in fact this is my best boule so far, usually I ended up with a round flat mass of dough), but both loafs were a pure delight to eat. I've never seen a loaf (in my home) to disappear so quickly, and the name that I gave to this bread, translated from romanian, is "The bread with taste of home"

for the boule shaping, I tried to follow teresa's instructions from this video.

here are some pictures.

for more pictures and recipe (in romanian, with (funny) english tranlation available on the sidebar) go to Apa.Faina.Sare.

cheers, Codruta

I was in a search for the perfect hamburger bun for a long time. When I say "perfect", I mean perfect for my personal taste. I've tried Peter Reinhart recipe from BBA, I've tried different recipes form diferrent sites, I've tried Tangzhong method, all with wonderful results... but not perfect. Recently, I took hamelman's ingredients from page 258 (soft butter rolls) and Susan's pate-fermentee method link here , followed by these modifications: I've decreased the quantity of yeast, taking as refference the quantity given by susan, and I adapted for my quantity of flour, I've used milk instead of water, and remove the dry milk from the ingredients list and I did not used steam when baking. The buns came almost close to perfection. Next step is to use sourdough instead of old dough, but I'm not sure about how to substitute one to another (the old dough can be replaced using the same quantity and hydration by sourdough?? -can it be that simple??)

More pictures and complete recipe (written in romanian, but translator available on the sidebar, although, the automatic translation it's kind of funny) can be found here Apa.Faina.Sare

Codruta

I don't know why I've waited so long to make this bread, after buying hamelman's book. I've done it before, from intructions giving on this blog, which were very helpful, btw. For grains, I used a mix of fennel seeds, flaxseeds, spelt berries and oat bran. I retarded the dough overnight, omitted the yeast as instructed, and I baked it directly from the fridge. For the final fermentation, the instructions weren't very clear to me... in case I opted for retarding the dough overnight, it still gets an hour of fermentation on room temperature, or after shaping goes directly in the fridge??

Final fermentation. Approximately 1 hour at 76 degrees. [The dough can be retarded for several hours or overnight, which case the bulk fermentation should be 2 hrs with 1 fold, and the yeast left out of the mix.]

Not knowing what to do, I let it stand 45 minutes at room temperature (78F), but I still don't know if that was good, or this step shoud have been skipped. Maybe someone can clarify this.

Also, I don't know if baking directly from the fridge was the right decision, I wonder if it would have risen more if I let it stand 1 hour at room temperature before baking?

Anyway, I'm extremely pleased with the result, the taste is absolutly amazing.

More pictures and the addapted recipe (recipe in romanian, translator on the sidebar) can be found here, at my new blog  Apa.Faina.Sare

by George, I think I've got it!

I find it difficult to follow a recipe whitout making a few small modification, even though I don't intend to in the beginning. This time i've increased the whole-wheat and rye flour quantity given in the formula (by ~10%), decreased the amount of bread flour, which in consequence made me increase the quantity of water.  I'm pleased with the result, even if the couronne didn't expand as much as I would of wanted (I suspect it was a bit underproofed, and maybe a little underbaked??). I tried to slice the loaf after 3 hours, but it was still a bit warm in the middle, so I gave up and decided to wait until tomorrow. The crust is thick, and it shattered in pieces under the knife when I cut it.

I don't know about others, but since I bought hamelman book, my breads improved a lot. (I started baking bread about 2 years ago, having my starter since then, and I purchase hamelman's "bread" a month ago)

Recipe in romanian can be found here, translation available on the sidebar:

http://codrudepaine.ro/