Ovenbird's blog

This week was the first week of the new summer market in Dryden. Along with a few friends in the Bread Club, we prepared several types of bread for sale. We had a dozen each of Italian Semolina bread, Caraway Rye, and a couple types of Multigrain Sourdough. We also made a couple dozen brioche with different fillings which went pretty fast so I'll have to make more of those next time.

Italian Semolina

The Italian Semolina is from Hamelman's recipe for Durum bread. It uses both a biga and a wild yeast levain. For this I used my new Italian mother culture that my aunt gave me when we went to visit her in the hills of northern Italy last month. I prepared a total of 8kg of dough for about 12 loaves at 650g each. This bread is one of my favorite everyday breads with a thin crisp crust and lovely golden crumb. 

Caraway Rye

The caraway rye was also from Hamelman's recipe for Deli Rye. This is a great bread for sandwiches or toast. It is made with 15% pre-fermented rye flour so it develops a nice sour flavor that is great with the aromatic caraway, especially when the rise is retarded overnight in the fridge. I slashed these loaves a bit to early so they flattened out more than I wanted but they still tasted great. I made about 8kg of this as well for a dozen loaves at 650g.

Seeded Sourdough

I also made 2 types of multigrain sourdough. The one pictured above is Hamelman's Sourdough Seed Bread. This dough is leavened with only wild yeast. I wanted to make pan loaves for this but I didn't have room in the fridge for my large pullman pans so I reversed the time for the bulk and final fermentation. Bulk fermentation was ~8hrs, then it went in the fridge for a while before dividing into 1500g loaves and a final 2hr rise. The flavor was great and the texture was good but I thought the loaves seemed a bit short. I either need to load the pans more or (more likely) give it more time to rise in the pan before baking.

Spent Grain Sourdough

The other sourdough I made (above) was my own creation. It was a recipe I came up with to use the spent starter that comes from feeding my mother cultures throughout the week(s). Basically I had about 1 kg of spent starter (a mix of rye and wheat) in the fridge that I didn't want to go to waste. Going along with the theme of no waste, I also incorporated ~20% spent grain that I got from a local micro-brewery. This results in a pretty slack dough that doesn't gain much height when baking, but has a nice flavor & texture. They weren't the most eye catching loaves so I was worried that it wouldn't be very popular at the market, but after giving out a few free samples this was actually the first type to sell out! I made 6 loaves with the following recipe:

Brioche

I made 2 types of Brioche dough. One is from Hamelman's book and the other is from Reinharts "Crust & Crumb". The Reinhart version has a higher percentage of butter (~80%!) compared to 50% in the other. Both are delicious but I wanted to see which would work better for my production schedule. I filled the Hamelman Brioche with fruit filling (raspberry and apricot) and shaped them into cornetti. The richer Reinhart dough was rolled flat and filled with nutella or cream cheese filling, then folded over. Both were delicious, but I think the Hamelman version rose slightly better this time. The others were kind of flat underneath the filling. I have made the Reinhart recipe in the past with better results, but making all this bread with limited tools constrains the proofing schedule and I think that didn't agree with the richer dough as well. Next time I think I will just stick with the Hamelman recipe and maybe try some different shapes so I don't confuse what filling is where when I am selling them.

So I was pretty happy with the first week at the new market stand. Traffic was low because of rainy weather, but I sold the majority and had a few loaves left to give to friends & family. Hopefully the weather will be better next time.

I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to post what I've baked for a while, so this post is going to lump everything I've done for the past couple weeks in one - mainly for my own reference. In this issue:

Colomba di Pasqua
Black Rye w Raisins & Walnuts
Buttermilk Bread
no-Knead Focaccia
Genoese Focaccia
Normandy Apple Bread

Week 1:

The campus market started the week after Easter so I had made some more Colomba di Pasqua ("Easter Dove"), and an interesting black rye with raisins and walnuts for the first market.

Colomba di Pasqua:

This recipe came from KAF. It isn't really in my nature to follow recipes to the letter so in addition to the recommended ingredients I also made a batch with sourdough starter instead of the biga with commercial yeast. For my natural leavened version I just used 50g of mature starter in place of the yeast for the biga.Then added a portion of commercial yeast as instructed in the final mix.

Both versions made nice dough and rose well (sourdough on the left & yeast on the right below). My shaping could have been more skillful but making birds out of bread is asking a lot. The weather was cold and damp when I was making these and they needed substantially more time to rise than the recipe suggested (by several hours). I made a total of 4 small (~500g) and 2 large (1000g) loaves & this used all of the candied orange peel that I made from 4 large oranges.

I was quite happy with how both types came out. The yeasted version had a little bit better texture, but the sourdough version probably could get there too if I had given it more time to rise (you can see it is the less bubbly one in the 1st image). The flavor was very nice for both, but most agreed that the sourdough version was slightly better.

As you can see the texture is quite nice. I only have a picture from the sourdough version but they were pretty similar. Someday I hope to achieve a super fluffy Italian holiday bread (perhaps this one next?), but until then I'm pretty happy with this and everyone seemed to really like it.

Black Rye with Raisins & Walnuts:

This one was by request but I'm glad I did it because it was an interesting bread to make and it tasted great. The dough was based on the "Black Bread" recipe in Hamelman's Bread (which I am diligently working my way through). I used an altus that I had made earlier (rather than the old bread soaker in the recipe), and added 5oz (~16%) each of raisins & walnuts, as well as 3oz (~8%) molasses, and an additional 7oz of coffee (to compensate for my drier version of the old bread soaker).

The dough was overproofed because I was not paying close attention to the timing in the recipe, due to my experience with the previous Easter bread. It was salvageable though and I baked it anyway. The result was a bit dense, but still very good & with a rich black color that I was very happy with. Next time I will pay better attention to the dough as it rises.

Buttermilk Bread:

This is another one from Hamelman's book. I wasn't to excited about it really, since it seems kinda plain. I used Saco cultured buttermilk powder, rather than real buttermilk - which I'm sure would improve the bread. It makes a nice soft crumbed sandwich bread that has a slight pleasant sweetness and toasts well.

I was excited to use my new extra large pullman pan to bake it in though! I was looking for a way to efficiently bake as many loaves as possible at one time with limited oven capacity and I got a good deal on some 16" strap pans. After a 2h bulk fermentation, I shaped all 3lbs of dough from this recipe into a single long loaf, rolled it in flaked barley, and left it to rise in the pan until it was nearly at the top (~1h). Baked at "450F" for about an hour and the result was lovely.

 Week 2:

Focaccia - 2 types:

At the first market I had a request for this Focaccia, so I made a few trays for this week's market. The dough is a basic no-knead deal and after 24h of doing its thing I had a bubbling vat of goodness. With a little work I turned it into a manageable mass that I divided into thirds.

I let those rest for an hour or so at ~70F, before shaping to the oiled sheet pans. Despite plenty of rest it kept pulling back and resisted shaping. I had to give it another rest before I could get it to fill the pan. I did use a 50-50 mix of bread flour and AP flour, so that may explain the extra strength. I added the toppings and after another hour or so baked at "450F" for 30m.

I had also been meaning to try the Genoese Focaccia from Viva Focaccia that my Father & Uncle both had been urging me to try. So, I figured I'd use this opportunity to compare the 2 types. For this dough I also used a 50-50 mix of bread flour and AP flour. I mixed and handled as instructed and the result was a beautiful silky smooth dough. This was divided 3 ways and given the same recommended rise time before topping.

The no-knead version was ok, but I thought it was too thick and bready. The Genoese version was amazing, with a light airy texture that held the olive oil and toppings well without feeling greasy. The no-knead version (topped with olives in the photos) appeared to have risen better in the tray, but that was really just because each portion was 850g as compared to 550g for the Viva-Focaccia recipe. Next time I might make it a bit thicker, but I will definitely make the Genoese focaccia again.

Normandy Apple Bread:

This week's selection from my favorite recipe book. I followed the recipe as written but I didn't have enough apples for all of the dough so I did a portion of with raisins and walnuts instead. It took pretty much a whole bag of apples (peeled, diced & dried) for a 3lb batch of dough. I wanted to make a lot of this one though,  to fill my new pans and have plenty for the market (nice weather was in the forecast)!

I made 4 free form loaves from the apple version & put the raisin walnut version into 16" loaf pans (with enough left for 3 small boules). The results were very good. A nice light open crumb with a thin crisp crust. The cider gives a subtle but noticeable sweetness and the dried apples were little bursts of intense sweetness scattered throughout. This would make a great selection for a fall harvest event!

Ok, that's all for now. Many thanks to anyone who bothered to read this far.

Hello All. First post here of TFL. I had been blogging about my bread for a while with blogspot but I seem to be spending more and more time on this website lately so I thought I'd move my blog over here as well. I've learned a lot from the postings on this site. It is such a great resource for bakers, so hopefully I will get some constructive feedback on my baking by posting here.

Over the past several months I have been trying to work through all of the recipes in Hamelman's Bread Book. There is so much in there that I figured baking my way through it would give me a solid foundation in baking all types of bread. While I am only part way through the book I have already identified and revisited some of my favorites. One of these is the recipe for Toast Bread.

I am actually quite surprised at how much I like this bread, since at first glance it looks like a fairly plain white loaf. The flavor is much more than would be expected though, and it truly makes exceptional toast.

For this bake, I tried to follow the recipe as written except for one thing. The book calls for both bread flour and high gluten flour. Since I don't have any flour that is higher gluten than my bread flour, for the high protein portion I mixed bread flour with some vital wheat gluten in a 3:1 ratio. This seems to work fairly well, but may be a bit more gluten than intended as the dough can get very strong especially if folded too much or left in the fridge overnight. I didn’t notice this last time, but this time it was very stiff after a night in the fridge and was actually kinda tough to cut through with my dough scraper when I was scaling the loaves.

The loaves were scaled to 1000g and baked in loaf pans. I only have one 9” Pullman pan so only one was baked with a lid on it. I put a pan of water in the bottom of the oven and sprayed the oven generously to make steam. After 15 minutes I took the lid off of the Pullman pan. Next time use less dough or take the lid off sooner as it was really hard to get off after the dough had expanded so much. II finished baking for another 25 minutes until the crust was a rich golden color.

The finished product came out very nice despite the tightness of the dough and the flavor is just as good as the first time I made it. My only complaint is that there is a doughy spot at the bottom of the one loaf I have cut through. This had happened a couple times since baking in my new oven. I’m not sure why though as the loaves seem fully cooked otherwise. I’ll have to work on this.