So, in my last post many weeks ago I mentioned that I wanted to make this bread. It's finally happened in this second to last weekend of school. This is it, sort of put together myself with a few checks against Hamelman and Leder's olive bread formulas to check proportions.

I used 8ozs of a spicy olive mix from Whole Foods that had both green and black olives of different shapes and sizes; I also crumbled up a fair amount of blue cheese into it in the final folding before shaping, though I forget what kinds I used. It was really good in the end, and the cheese was bubbling up pretty intensely towards the end. Good work food.

PS: My girlfriend thinks olives and blue cheeses are gross, so I guess it's good that I waited until after she went to study abroad to make this! She might have had something to say to me if I actually asked her to eat it.....she might be reading this right now.....hi honey.....its not so bad if you can't smell it right? ....right?

Just a heads up for anyone reading this, this blog entry is going to be an outlet for some volatile emotions directed at my most recent baking experience. Continue at your own risk.

I just got off work. I don't always have a great time at work, and tonight was like that. the past few weeks in general have been stressful because of school. In terms of bread, I find myself trying to make fermenting and proofing fit in during classes until i can come back, or retarding over night, you get the idea. I did that today by refreshing my sourdough last night, making the dough this morning and letting it partially ferment during my class on genetics. I then refrigerated it, unshaped, while I went to work for 5 hours to continue to ferment slowly. Coming back, i pulled it out, shaped it roughly into a round, and let it proof in an oiled bowl (during which time i shelled a bunch of peanuts to make peanut butter...a mindless, monotonous task that proved very mentally relaxing). Then, it came time to bake.

And its all downhill from here.

Tried to turn out the dough from the bowl, but it wasn't coming out despite oiling. Tried to get it out a few different ways until finally with an unsatisfied slurp, it peeled out of the bowl and landed off center on the peel. An edge was barely hanging off. Not so bad, but the process was a little frustrating since it's worked before. I had floured the top (now the bottom) of the dough in the bowl, and also the peel. I figured some of the peel's flour would come off during maneuvering, hence the dough flouring. Opened the oven, preheated stone was ready.....and the dough stuck to the peel.

fasdlkfj;asg:';/.@$#&(*(faldks

ugh. so the door is open, heat is escaping from the oven like a convict on a prison break. Jiggle the peel, dough doesn't move. I go and grab my bench scraper, and start just scraping it off the peel. The dough is wet and at this point has lost considerable shape. by the time it's off the peel, i notice that it's not even fully on the stone; two edges are hanging off just enough to be upsetting, so i try to scrape those back on. It's ugly, my shaping is unnoticeable, and my slashes are disfigured...the icing on the cake is that i burned the back of my hand on the oven heating coils by accidentally brushing against them while trying to scrap the dough off the peel.

I'm afraid to look at the oven. What a jerk. 

Anyways, the bread might be tasty. This is my second lesson in patient bread making. the last time i baked, it was rushed, forced, and not paid attention to, and it turned out dense, gummy and very lackluster. though the taste was good, it was disheartening.

UPDATE: The bread is similar to an amorphous goo monster of doom. there's absolutely no shape. it has oozed partially off the stone and is being supported by the oven rack and the glass door.

This makes me not want to bake again for a long time. ugh. And I had plans for some adventurous spicy olive and blue cheese bread this weekend....maybe i'll be over this by then.

Really, the problem was centered aroudn the fact that i couldn't get the dough out of the bowl easily. If I could have gotten that, everything else would have gone smoothly.

A final touch on all of this is that a housemate of mine just came down to tell me that somebody had an "accident" in one of our bathrooms and didn't clean it up.

Murphy and his laws: 1

Me: 0

Game Over 

This is my second time working with a significant amount of rye, my first being a 100% rye: Vollkornbrot. That was really fun since i had no idea what to expect, it wasn't too difficult, and the people i made it for (immigrated from Germany) said it was wonderful. This time however, I scaled it back and went for a 40% Rye with Caraway Seeds. 

As I promised, here's a picture of the one stollen that has survived the initial onslaught. This one, unlike its predecessor, remained mostly intact while it baked.

Three Breads. One Day.

Loaf 1: ~5lb Sourdough High Extraction Miche Type loaf

Loaf 2: Garlic Explosion (Garlixplosion?) W/ Cheese

Loaf 3: Spinach and Feta Cheese with Caramelized Onions.

They were all around 65-70% hydration doughs, all with a small amount of sourdough culture thrown in as a preferment/leavening. The miche was leavened solely by the sourdough, I added some active dry yeast to the other two.

PICTURES!!!

Inspired by the Chocolate Cherry bread from Zingerman's Bakery down the street, and spurred on by a fellow FreshLoafer's (JMonkey) post on the matter, I've finally made it my own!

Semolina (Durum) Bread - From Hammelman's Bread, only without the sugar for the "flying" sponge.

I would have used my sourdough except it's whole wheat-ish and i didn't want to mix that with the creamy yellow semolina.

So today i started a double batch variant of a multigrain hearth bread in the PR delayed fermentation/epoxy style. I decided to add 12ozs of cooked brown rice, quinoa, and amaranth grains for extra protein; i've also found that the quinoa sometimes gives a pleasant little *pop* if you happen to catch a grain between your teeth while eating the bread. It's "retarding" now; meaning I got lazy, and didn't want to bake it tonight so i left the bowl in the cold basement to do its thing.

I just pulled my Quinoa Struan out of the oven a little while ago, and I'm rather pleased with the results.