Floydm's blog

After my previous sourdough loaf that I baked in a pot came out so pretty, I went out and picked up another cheap enamel pot so I could use this technique with two loaves at a time.  

This technique works well for me and is unlikely to damage the oven in the apartment we are renting.

My loaves this time were around 73% hydration, a little wetter than last time. My formula was:

starter:

• 20g starter
• 100g water
• 100g rye flour

final dough:

• 900g bread flour
• 100g whole wheat flour
• 710g water
• 20g salt
• all of the starter

I stretched and folded twice about an hour apart, then took advantage of the cool weather we were having to ferment the dough slowly outside for another three hours.  I brought the dough inside, divided and shaped it, and then gave it just over an hour for the final rise.

Baked in the covered pots at 465 for 15 minutes, then reduced the temperature to 435.  I removed the lids at the 30 minute mark, baked them another 20 minutes before turning the oven off, and then removed them from the oven 10 minutes later (1 hour in the oven total).

The flavour was better on these than the previous loaf, and the crumb was more uneven too. I'm very pleased with this one.

My sourdough loaf came out really nice today.

I used a firmer starter than I usually do. I believe it was 30 grams starter, 50 grams water, 50 grams rye flour that I left out overnight.  In the AM I added 500 grams bread flour, 370 grams water, and 10 grams salt.  Folded 3-4 times over 3-4 hours, shaped it, baked it in a pot for 45 minutes.

We'll be slicing it shortly.

As Breadsong already posted about, this past weekend the Bakery Congress 2013, the largest annual baking industry event in Western Canada, was held in Vancouver, BC.  As tradeshows go it was cheap and I was looking for an excuse for a bike ride on a beautiful sunny day, so I pedaled over to the PNE to take a look.  

The minute you walked in the door you could smell that this wasn't just any tradeshow.

Breads and sweets everywhere!

I chatted with Ross from Nunweiler's Flour Mill quite a bit and picked up a couple of bags of their organic flour, including their Red Fife Flour. I'm looking forward to giving it a try!

Lest we forget we are in Canada: hockey-themed giveaways.

Ah, the slicers. Do those every bring back memories...

Need a mixer, anyone?

This picture I took for Song of the Baker, who is always telling me about how great the flour from Anita's Organic Mill in Chilliwack is. I will get out there to check out their store, one of these days.

Baking presentations were running throughout the day.  Here Craig Ponsford, former BBGA chairman and part of the Gold Medal winning Team USA at Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie, and Tracey Muzzolini, from Saskatoon and who has also competed in the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie with Team Canada, prepare to present on making whole wheat baguettes.

Scoring the loaves.

Craig asks "How many of you are getting asked by your customers about gluten free?"  He then went on to talk a bit about the benefits of "whole-milled" whole wheat flours as opposed to whole grain flours that are actually reconstituted from white flour.   

Back on the floor, you can see that there were a lot of vendors and attendees here. Vendors were selling ingredients, machines, packaging, ...

Errr.... probes too.  I think this was to measure the volume of the loaves?  A bit over the top, IMO, but if you bake tens of thousands of loaves a day that kind of precision matters, I suppose.

I had an enjoyable time and was able to snack on enough samples of sweets that I was thankful for the long bike ride home to work off some of it!

I guess I woke up feeling a bit combative this morning... more on that another time. The long and short of it is I put together a bit of TFL merchandise. A t-shirt...

an apron...

   And a bumpersticker.

Dorota, on the other hand, was of a more peaceable temperment.

These should show up in the Zazzle.com storefront in the next 24 hours.  

I've actually never ordered from Zazzle but they have a good reputation.  I ordered a few stickers, so we'll see what they look like in a little bit.

There is also some TFL gear for sale over on Cafe Press. I just ordered myself a TFL t-shirt, which I've been meaning to do since we first set that up and never got around to.  Again, I'll let folks know how the quality of the shirt and the printing is.

I want to do another shirt/sticker with "CARBIVORE" on it.  If anyone else has good ideas for a bread-themed shirt that they'd actually wear, let me know!

I only recently discovered that one thing that doesn't appear to be available in Canada is Hawaiian Sweet Bread.  At least on the West Coast in the US, King's Hawaiian bread is easy to find at most any grocery store.  It's something I grew up with and that I associate with being a kid and snacking on in the car.  We certainly fed it to our kids a number of times on road trips.

I've tried making Hawaiian sweet bread a couple of times in the past.  While the flavour was right, I've never been able to get close on texture. 

The other day it dawned on me that the Hokkaido Milk Bread with Tangzhong was quite similar to Hawaiian Sweet Bread, both in flavour and texture.  With a few tweaks to that recipe, I got as close to Hawaiian Sweet Bread as I've ever come in the past.

Hawaiian Sweet Bread

 

makes 3 loaves

Tangzhong

2/3 cup pineapple juice

1/3 cup water

1/3 cup all purpose flour

Final dough

800g (around 5 C) all purpose flour

1/2 C sugar

50g (1/2 C) milk powder

1/2 C half and half

3/4 C milk

2 eggs

4 T butter

4 t instant yeast

1 t salt

1 t vanilla extract (optional)

1 t lemon extract or some lemon zest (optional)

1 t orange extract or some orange zest (optional)

all of the tangzhong

1 more egg, beaten, for the eggwash

 The tangzhong I made the same as the previous time: 1 cup of liquid (milk or water or juice) to 1/3 cup flour, or a 5 to 1 liquid to solid ratio (so 250g liquid to 50g flour) and mix it together in a pan.  Heat the pan while stirring constantly.  Initially it will remain a liquid, but as you approach 65C it will undergo a change and thicken to an almost pudding like consistency.  Here is a video I made of it undergoing that change.

Let the tangzhong cool for at least a half an hour, then combine it and the rest of the ingredients.  Mix it very well, for 10-15 minutes with a standmixer.  Cover and let rise until doubled in size, approximately an hour.

Divide the dough into three even pieces.  Place them in greased pans, cover loosely, and let them rise for 45 minutes to an hour until they are approaching twice their original size.  Glaze them with eggwash before putting them in the oven.

Bake at 350 for approximately 45 minutes.  If you can, cover the loaves with a pan or foil for the first ten minutes to trap some of the steam in with the loaf and to keep them from browning too quickly.  I acually used a large metal mixing bowl which I inverted over each loaf when placing them in the oven.

I like the way the loaves puckered as they cooled (compare this photo with the top most photo), just like King's Hawaiian Sweet Bread. This is definitely the closest I've gotten to making Hawaiian Sweet Bread at home.

I haven't baked with my starter in a couple of weeks, so Wednesday evening I fed my starter some rye flour and water.  Thursday mid-day I made my dough (1kg bread flour, 20g salt, 730g water, "a bunch" of starter).  It has turned cool again in Vancouver though and my dough was moving slowly, so I bulk retarded it overnight until Friday morning.

Our fridge is really cold so there was very little action overnight.  I removed the dough from the fridge Friday morning and stretched and folded every couple of hours so the dough would warm evenly.  By late-afternoon the bulk dough was starting to move and getting close to double in size, so I shaped the dough into boules.  I was hoping to bake it later that evening, but it was moving slow enough that I decided to cover it and refrigerate it overnight again.

Saturday morning I removed the loaves from the fridge around 7am.  Again, very little action overnight and even a bit of ice on the outside of one of the loaves.  By 11 or so they looked ready to bake, so I tossed them in the oven, covering them with an inverted aluminum pan for the first 10 minutes or so.

As you can see, I accidentally squished the edge of one of the loaves with the aluminum pan, but the breads came our really good, really sour, as one would expect from such long, slow fermentation.  Lots of blisters, too, which I like.  They went really well with cheese, wine, and pasta e fagioli.

Things are finally starting to settle down a bit.  I baked today the first time since kicking off the site move, another batch of the Hokkaido Milk Bread with Tangzhong.

Man is it good and easy to make.  The only difficulty is it is so sticky that I spend half the mixing time scraping the dough off the hook and back into the bowl.  This is the first bread in a long time that has me seriously contemplating a mixer upgrade at some point. 

I'm continuing to fix things and chip away at the wishlist, as well as just generally be active on the site and "eat my own dogfood."  Now that we're geting settled into this new environment, it is much easier for me to make changes. Well... not all changes, but many things that I didn't have easy access to I do now.  So things should keep getting better.

FYI for tracker junkies: you may have seen (or will see soon) a bunch of updates to old content.  That was me. First I was editing them by just switching input format because I was trying to fix the issue with some posts blanking out, which I have now fixed.  I'm now editing some older posts to attach one of the images already in the post to the new "Image" field at the top.  Having that image lets me do all kinds of cool tricks like auto-generate thumbnail images for posts in search results or in list, which I'll start to do once more posts have images attached like that.  I am not editing folks's content in any way.

-Floyd

If you look down and to the right... way down and to the right in the rail, you'll see there are some new email subscription options.

As I mentioned previously, neither of the existing subscription or notification modules I had been using were fully up-to-date and stable enough to run here, so I've been tinkering with a few different options.  So far, this is the best I've come up with.  

It looks pretty neat and pretty powerful, though you'll notice it doesn't appear to do much in the way of a "digest email" (summary of everything that has happened in the last xx number of hours or days).  The trend is kind of away from those and toward a lot of little messages, which also maps to the way a lot of people use the internet these days: rather than sit down, dial up, and be online for a couple of hours in the evening, more and more people are on always or throughout the day, checking their email on the work computer and/or on their phones.

I'll still look for a digest option, but for the time being if you want to give this a shot, do.  Be warned that though the software appears to be pretty stable, the set up here ... well I can't even call it beta since I just installed it and signed up to a few things.  It is unlikely but there is a chance that something could go akilter and if you sign up right now you might wake up tomorrow morning with 200 messages in your inbox!  I doubt it, but I can't say I've tried it out for more than an hour or two and can predict how it'll work.

If you do try it, let me know what you think.  I'll make it easier to find and let folks know when it has been road tested a bit.

-Floyd

I'm happy to wake up and see quite a bit of activity on the site this morning.  

I have lots of clean up to do from the migration.  Issues that I know I need to fix or look into:

• Get email subscriptions and notifications working again.
• get strikethrough working again
• Filter blogs out of recent comments box
• Filter advanced topic comments out of the top comment box
• Add the advanced topics/off topics box to the homepage
• Look into line spacing issues w/ lists
• Style blockquotes
• Add viewed link color
• Profile styling: fix/remove italics.
• Get spellchecking back in action
• Look into reported IE9/Windows 7 display issues
• Get backups running again, so we don't lose this!

I'm sure there will be more as the day goes on.  I'll update this list accordingly.

-F

This evening I'll be upgrading TFL to a new version of the software it runs on and migrating the site to a new, much more powerful server.  

If all goes well, most community members will not notice much of a difference except that some of the fonts and colors have changed a bit and they may have to log back in when they hit the site the next time.

I am going to start the migration tonight at 7pm PDT (10pm EDT / 2am UTC).  Any new content posted on this, the old site, after that time will not be migrated to the new server.   If you are in the middle of a hot conversation and want to keep carrying on after that time, feel free, just be aware that your comments will need to be reposted on the new site.

The same is true of new accounts.  Any account created on this server after 6pm this evening will not make it to the new site.

Hopefully if all goes well, if you close your browser this evening and come back tomorrow morning (or after 9 or 10pm PDT this evening), you'll be on the new site and server.  I'm sure some things will break or at least operate differently, but hopefully they'll be small.

Should anything go so awry that you can't even access or log into the site, you can direct message me on Twitter @cornycornguy or email me at floydm [at] thefreshloaf.com (though if anything goes *really* wrong, this email address might be down too).   

-Floyd