David Esq.'s blog

Following Chad Robertson's recipe, in Tartine, I made a fantastic walnut bread last night.  It is super delicious plain this morning. Not sure if I would make sandwiches on it or not but I suppose I will find out soon.  I used 200 grams of white whole wheat and 800 grams of all purpose.  I burned a bunch of the walnuts (or at least I think they were too dark) so these loaves don't have the full 3 cups but as you can see there are plenty of nuts in the crumb.

As an exercise I created a spreadsheet for Diagram 3, Part II "Rustic Sourdough with Three Flours, a Cracked Wheat Soaker and a Yeasted Preferment.

I have no idea if it will be of any use to anybody, but here is the google doc link if you are interested.

Diagram 3

The only difference is that I used grams instead of kg, though that is easily changed if people find that annoying.

I wanted to create a second tab that would calculate  the bakers% based on inputted  weights, and which would yield the same bakers% as in the the original formula (using their calculated weights) but for some reason that alluded me (no doubt due to rounding) I was  unable to do this. The yeast kept giving me .003 instead of.002 no matter what I did.

Being new to the world of bread making, I don't like to keep my starter neglected in the fridge for more than a week, and I do like to see it fed and doubling in size so I can predictably bake a loaf as the need arises.

Like many people who maintain a sourdough starter, I occasionally have more starter than I have time or need for baking bread. 

I have made a lot of waffles in my day and the light and crisp waffle has usually eluded me.  But, coincidentally, when turning my excess starter into Belgian waffles, I wind up with really really great waffles.  They are always crisp. They are always light. They are always delicious. Forgive the lack of measurements, but please take heart, that the recipe is very forgiving.

I feed my 100% hydration starter enough flour and water to get my starter to double. Generally, this means I have nearly 4 cups of starter to cook with (reserving some starter that I again feed and place in the fridge....but it would be more efficient to feed the starter initially, separate some of it and put that in the fridge while the rest of it doubles up).

Pour the starter into a mixing bowl, add an egg or two, and add a 2-3 tablespoon fulls of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of honey, stir it all up. Then sprinkle some baking soda on top, stir that in lightly.  Heat up the waffle iron and you are good to go. I let the waffles sit out on a cooling rack while I eat what I eat, and once they are cooled off I place in freezer bags and put them in the freezer.  They toast up quite nicely.

If you love pancakes and happen to have a Blendtec blender... try the pioneer pancake recipe.  They are really quite delicious and you can't really make a simpler pancake.  I don't know if this would work in a regular blender or not.

You can see the recipe on my blog. I modified it slightly to replace the canola oil with olive oil. I am sure it comes out great with any kind of milk, but with whole milk I can verify they taste great and very light.

The only reason I would question how well this would work in a regular blender is I don't know how a regular blender would handle the dry wheat berries added to milk and then blended.  I love not having to use actual flour, as it makes it very easy to prepare and clean up.

The above breads were made with the same recipe. As I have written before, I was looking for a good sandwich loaf.  The trouble with the round bread is that it is a pain to cut into sandwich size pieces.  The trouble with baking a "white bread" that I have had is that it is so soft that it is a pain to cut into slices without the bread crumbling.

The basic country loaf, when baked in a bread pan, yields a loaf that is both chewy and, as a result, super easy to cut without tearing the bread.  In addition to being easy to cut (and you can cut it fairly thin because it holds together so well), the slices make great sandwiches.

I believe that the pan loaf used about 1/2 the dough or approximately 1000 grams.  I did not weigh it, I just shaped it into a ball and then rolled into a log.  That was not how I planned to do it. I planned to shape it into a baton and put it in the pan, but habit took over and I did it as if I were going to bake it in the combo cooker before I remembered I did not want two round loafs.

I need to take better notes of things like baking times and internal temperatures. I believe the rectangular loaf was taken out before it was as hot as the round loaf, but the thermometer came out dry and the crust was dark enough.  However, the bread is more dense and not as hollow sounding as the round loaf.

So I was making some bread for the holidays and I decided to try using scissors to make my cuts since I had little success using a knife. I am still contemplating buying a razor.  But this is what I got with my shears...nothing fancy. The top left was basically an octagon or circle cut. He top right was intended to be a square and the bottom was a simple snip in the center and a second perpendicular snip in the middle.  

So, now that I am nearly a novice bread maker and able to make a loaf of bread almost from memory,* I decided it is time to stretch my wings and see if I can make the bread in my Lodge loaf pan.

Keeping in mind that my goal was a loaf of delicious bread that I could slice more easily for sandwiches and that I had the idea only after the final rise and therefore needed to get a round risen dough into a rectangular pan (which I let sit on stove while first loaf baked), I did not fail out of the gate. Surprising, since I winged  baking times and used a turkey roaster lid on top of a griddle to create my dutch oven.

The loaf had phenomenal oven spring, and browned fairly nicely. I think I could have made a nice loaf with half the dough. The bread is perfect for sandwiches. It cuts pretty easily, is just chewy enough and, of course, delicious.

*This morning I was going to start two round loaves for the holidays.  Before doing so, I made wafiles with my starter. And after putting away dishes, I realizes that I had used my leaven and not my starter. So, now I know that leaven with an egg, 2 tbsp of olive oil, and a tbsp of grade B maple syrup (and a bit of baking soda in warm water stirred into the batter) makes a great Belgian waffle!  The batter is super thick, does not fill the griddle when open but spreads into a full waffle once the griddle is flipped, and it comes out great and crisp. Three waffles. 

So, this time I again dumped the entire leaven into the water (it floated nicely), but then remembered I was only supposed to use 200 grams of it, so I scooped out enough to leave 200 grams in, and followed the recipe to a "T", sort of.

First, despite what others have said, the author definitely contemplates "turning" the dough more than 4 times (i.e., every 30 minutes the first two hours), and so I turned at the end of the third hour for a total of 5 turns.

Second, I forgot the score the loaf again. This time, I realized it less than a minute after I put the bread in the oven.  So I took the pans out, removed the top and then slashed away using my chef's knife.  Not very elegant, I admit. The cuts were not deep at all and I do not know if they accomplished anything, but I was not unhappy with how the bread shaped up, and definitely not unhappy with how it tasted. 

While I have yet to hear my bread sing, this loaf sounded hollow when tapped, and the crust was crisp rather than overly chewy. It still has a chew, but it also had a light crunch.

Like bakers before me, I am flummoxed by cutting a round loaf.  I tried the herringbone cutting technique but this just yields two surfaces exposed to the air, and it is impossible to stand it up "on end" so that the cut end is not exposed to the air.  So this time around I am just slicing it normally (I stand the loaf up on edge because it is easier to cut down with the knife cutting through less bread).  Made a very tasty peanut butter sandwich with it.  I did not do an overnight rise after shaping the loaf (although the second half DID rise overnight in the fridge, it is being used for pizza tonight) and it came out with less sour flavor, but still a hint of the sour.  Overall, I am very pleased with the taste, crumb, and look.

Following the KAF sourdough pretzel recipe, combined with the two minute baking soda bath recommended in their regular soft flour pretzel recipe, in order to get the golden brown finish.

They came out nice -- although I baked them at a higher temperature since the oven was already at 450 for my Tartine loaf that I had baked.  I lowered the temperature but did not wait for the temperature to lower before putting the pretzels in the oven.

The baking bug bit me about six weeks ago.  Started with banana bread, baked two loaves of yeasted bread in my lodge cast iron loaf pans, moved on to making pizzas and then tried my hand at sourdough -- ciabatta, english muffins and english muffin bread and even a "basis sourdough loaf" that I read about in a Jane Harrison's "An EasyGuide to Sourdough" which contains weird volume measurements: 2 cups of flour, 1.5 cups starter, 3/4 tsp of sale.   No added water in the recipe but always needed to add water in order to form a dough.

I read a lot about the no-knead breads and wound up buying Tartine.  I read the directions for the basic loaf about 7 times before making it, but there is no substitute for experience.

First, after making the leaven, I forgot that I only needed 200grams of it, and used the entire amount made.  I am sure I am not the first person to do this, as the recipe is, shall I say, a bit wordy and could use with some bold print here and there.  

After I mixed the dough and hunted around for a place to pour it, I kept wondering how the heck it could be put in a small container Let me tell you, it was a LOT of dough with the extra 200 grams of leaven!  But I would be damned if I was going to throw away all of that flour, so once I figured out what I did, I just shrugged and carried on.  The dough was very heavy, but it was not sticky at all, at least by the time the first turn was there.

I have to say the recipe is not well written.  Or at least, i did not find it so.  He says the bulk rise should be for 3-4 hours and that he turns the dough ever 30 minutes for the first two hours. Well, that leaves 1-2 hours with no directions. Do I turn, do I not turn?  He mentions that by hour three the dough should feel pillowy when turning but doesn't say how often one is turning by this point.

In any case, I figured if peasants can do it, I don't have to do everything exactly the way anybody else does it and hopefully it would come out passable.

I found the pictures to be very well done but very poorly situated.  It would have been a lot better, in my opinion if the walls of text were separated by the appropriate pictures instead of random pictures interrupting the text.  I may be too harsh here and maybe they are in exactly the right place, but I feel like I would benefit immensely by photocopying the chapter, pictures and all, and rearranging the photos to merge into the text better.

Anyhow, after shaping (pretty much did it wrong, didn't cut flip and fold, but instead, cut flipped and shaped into a ball/disc) i put the dough into the mixing bowl, lined with a tea towel/bar mop sprinkled with the 50/50 rice/wheat flour (I made the rice flour in my blender), let it rise at room temperature 70 degrees or so, and then dumped one loaf into the skittle -- forgot to score it, took the dutch oven out of the oven, covered the skittle and baked for the appropriate time, removed and continued the bake.

No, bread did not explode.  I used the other portion of the dough to make a pizza crust.  What I found AMAZING was the elasticity of this dough.  It stretched into an enormous pie immediately and without any effort.

Anyway, the pictures show the final product, and they tasted quite good. The bread was cut the following day and the pizza finished off the following day.  I need a peel, as what I did was really dangerous and I won't do it again that way in the future...

Loaf uncut:

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Bread sliced:

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Pizza dough pre-baked:

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