Dixongexpat's blog

So last weekend I made two loaves, one for us and one for the daughter. The daughter's looked better, but smallish. Ours was way too heavy on the whole wheat, came out short and dense, but all still tasty.

This holiday weekend's batch is a hopefully more balanced bread/ww flour blend. The dough rose very much overnight!

Started like this:

Ended up like this this morning:

Going in the oven in about 2.5 hours. The usual sourdough with cherries/nuts, whole wheat version.

Any pics at this stage would look just like last week's batch, so I'll hold off until it comes out of the oven. Using whole wheat because my wife is officially retiring on her next birthday, and I realized I have about 10 weeks to use up a LOT of whole wheat flour before we leave town and head for Mexico. Wish me luck!...

[UPDATE: late edit, catching up on photos since changing online image sources :) ]

Because ... that's what we have in the fridge. Dried cherries. :)

I started the levain last night, but it spent the night and most of today in the fridge in-between build stages. I'm not sure if this will be good or bad for it, guess we'll see...?

May or may not get the dough ready tonight. I would like to, just so I can bake in the morning. The last loaf is running low!

This weekend's baking project comes to you courtesy of pantry leftovers!

So I asked the wife what dried fruit we had on hand. We have cherries in the fridge and raisins in the pantry. The raisins sport a 'best sold by' date of Oct. last year, so I thought it might be best to use those up. Nearby I spied some walnuts. Then I Googled for a recipe and came across this lovely...

Country Sourdough with Walnuts + Raisins

Looks great! The recipe calls for 150g of starter, so I will use daBrownMan's NMNF Starter chart to build up a levain. The closest line on his chart is 160g, so I will either adjust the levain down to 150g or adjust the flour and water in the recipe down by 5g each. Easy peasy.

Did the first levain build, set a timer. Somewhere around 7pm I will mix the dough and give it a few hours on the counter, followed by overnight in the fridge, for tomorrow, we bake.

It started out innocently enough. There I was, looking at my starter, and I thought, "Hey, I know. I'll just go ahead and reboot the starter into a straight NMNF batch, really dilute the last of the whole wheat out of it, get it up to 95%+ rye. That's what I'll do." And so I did. Pulled 8 grams out, washed out the jar, put the 8 grams back in and added flour and water, set the timer.

Then I took the leftovers and added it to the leftovers in the fridge. It was a lot. And then I thought, "Hey, since I'm on the NMNF plan now, I won't be creating any new leftovers. Maybe I should go ahead and just use all of this up in something!"

And that's how it began.

So I looked at the usual suspects - pancakes, waffles, etc. But I didn't really need 30 pancakes. So I kept looking and ran across an interesting recipe. 100% Whole Wheat Sourdough. This picture really caught my eye...

soudough+bread+2.JPG

Doesn't that just look yummy? And what an interesting shape and scoring! OK, I'm in.

So I put the recipe into a spreadsheet and convert everything to grams. As it turns out, it's a pretty hydrated recipe. Over-hydrated until you get to the last step, which is basically "just keep adding flour until it stops sticking." Sounds like a plan. Also sounds very familiar. *ahem*

It called for a cup of starter, approximately 250g. I have 500g. But I wanted to use it all up at once, so I adjusted the recipe in my spreadsheet. And that would have fixed everything just right, but evidently I have a problem following recipes, even my own adjusted recipes in a spreadsheet. And when I got down to the liquids part, I looked at the wrong column and added the full amount of soy milk and water. *doh!* Fortunately I discovered this before I got to the end, so I knew I would need to adjust the flour back to original levels as well. Actually, above the original levels by 125g. So I did all that and mixed it and...........still too wet.

So I added flour 30g at a time, over and over, until finally I had a nice big pile of dough that I could handle. Holy crap, that's a huge blob! After the first rise I punched it down and added some blueberries in as I folded it. It is now doing its final rise in my dutch oven. It's pushing the boundaries of my parchment paper. This should be interesting!

Pics in a bit...

Just decided I would use this space to help document my various starter and bread experiments.

Starter: Have gone from spelt (not sure why I tried that) to whole wheat, now shifting to rye. As soon as the size of the existing batch is down a bit I will shift to the NMNF method to keep it going.

Bread: Slight shift here from must-be-done-all-right-now to spreading things out a bit. Basically, I am starting to plan ahead better. Start levain, then mix and rise overnight, fold, shape and proof and bake in the morning. 

Recipes: Whole wheat and plain sourdough is fine, but need to add more seeds and other ingredients.

Now to decide on this weekend's bread!