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I thought I should clear out some old bread photos from the last few months that I never got around to posting, along with some more recent ones as well. All but one were taken this year, most have crumb shots, but some don't. Many of these breads were made with a yeasted preferment of some kind, either a poolish, biga, or Pate Fermentee. My starter had been put to bed for a few weeks, mainly to change things up a bit and to play around on the other side of yeasted leavening for a while. To keep this post from being even longer than it already is I've opted to leave out detailed formulas and procedures, so think of it more as a photo update than what I'd typically post.

 This Margueritte was made for a family dinner late in 2012 when I was still deeply entrenched in baguette mode. Being a first for me, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to shape compared to a baguette and that everyone at the table thought it looked cool. 

In a somewhat random chronological order, below are a few collages of various bakes done since the beginning of the year. 

After weeks of eating nothing but baguettes, my need for something with whole grains and seeds was first and foremost on my mind when this loaf was made. It seems to me it had rye, barley, whole wheat and a 7 grain soaker in it and was made with a Pate Fermentee. I do remember that it didn't last too long, starved as I was for a bread with flavour other than wheat. A very tasty loaf it was. 

Next up is a series of four Semolina loaves that were made with varying degrees of hydration, all of which were made with a yeasted preferment, either poolish or a biga that included a portion of the total semolina in the formula.

By the time this next bread was made I'd taken my starter out of hibernation and revved it up to deliver some tang to the mix. It's a very similar formula to the one above made with Pate Fermentee and the 7 Grain Soaker, but has toasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds included as well. Two slightly different versions of this bread were made and I liked em both!

A Multigrain enriched sandwich loaf made the day before leaving for the UK and EU. A thank you! loaf for the nice lady who dog sits for us when we're away on vacation.

Bruschetta was the inspiration for the loaf below.

 A naturally leavened mix of polenta, AP flour, roasted/grilled corn and Parmigiano, with some roasted garlic paste thrown in for good measure, it sounded like a nice combination of flavours for grilling and topping with fresh tomatoes and herbs. Made just a few weeks ago, this was easily the most difficult loaf to deal with of all the ones in this post. It's impossible for me to say what the true hydration of this loaf was because of the polenta. How much it actually contributed to the final mix I have no idea, but my best estimate for total hydration is somewhere between 80-85%, with wheat and cornmeal at 80 and 20 percent respectively. Much kneading, many, many slap and folds, andat least 4 stretch and folds were needed just to achieve some semblance of development in the dough. Let's just say expectations were not running high when I finally got it in the oven. The result was not what one could call a lofty loaf by any means, but hey, waaay better than I ever expected. Far from being thrilled with it, I was relieved it was at least useable, and in fact it was well suited for grilling. Soft, with a nice chew and mild smoky flavour from the roasted corn, this bread has some definite potential for future mixes. When I sent a photo of the crumb to my friend breadsong she encouraged me to post it, I'm sure because of the holey crumb. At the time I thought I'd wait and do a second bake to see if I could get something closer to what I'd had in mind. After a bit of deliberation I decided to include it in this photo post. It may not be the loaf I wanted at the time but perhaps someone would enjoy taking the basic polenta & flavour idea of the bread and bring it to it's full potential with their own interpretation.

The last bread to show is one made with some organic rye flour I brought back from last months vacation in the Czech Republic.

Since visiting the Czech Republic two years ago I've been trying to reproduce a bread I'd had there that had been served alongside a huge portion of delicious smoked ham from one of the street vendors.

The flavour of that bread was OK, like a typical light deli rye with a hint of caraway, but it was the spongy texture of the crumb that appealed to me the most. I've made several attempts at duplicating it since then but the texture I've wanted has eluded me till now.

 With the inclusion of a rye scald in this latest mix I finally have something I'm very happy with in terms of crumb texture and mouth-feel, with the added bonus of having a much better flavour than the vendor bread because of the 3 stage sour used in this mix. Now that I have the inside of the loaf the way I want it, I'll see if I can't shine up the outside a bit as well. After that it's just a matter of brining and smoking a fresh ham in the Prague style, and a cold Czech Pilsener to wash it all down with. That should tide me over till the next time I can return to that lovely city of spires.

 Although my wife Marie is the one who makes almost all of the desserts and sweet things around our house, sometimes I like to get into the pastry side of things as well, especially when our backyard berries are ready for picking. This year the raspberries arrived first, due to our early warm Spring temperatures here on Vancouver Island. Nothing inspires me more to roll up my sleeves and get busy making pastry, cakes and confections more than raspberries do. The tart below was made with a few of the berries from the first picking.

A few scraps of frozen puff pastry, thawed, stacked and rolled out to a disk then cut to size. Baked blind, then baked briefly again with a flour thickened lemon curd in the center and topped with raspberries dusted with confectioner's sugar. Quick, easy, delicious. 

The next one, a Lemon and Raspberry Charlotte Royale is a bit more involved.

With all the various components and their separate procedures, I wont go through them all here. Briefly, it's made with a sheet of almond spongecake divided in four, spread with seedless raspberry jam on three of the cake pieces then all four stacked one on top of each other. The jam sandwich is divided in half then stacked together to make a total of eight layers. Freeze, then slice off 3/8” strips of the sandwich lengthwise to line a ring mold. 2 disks of biscuit culierre (ladyfinger batter) for the base and middle layer, a lemon curd flavoured mousse stabilized with gelatin to fill, and a raspberry gelee for part of the top decoration. Leave overnight in the fridge to set the mousse, then finished the next day with stabilized whipped cream piped around the edges and garnished with glazed fresh raspberries. The nice thing about making this type of cake is it can be done in stages over 2-3 days, or longer if you like. On the whole the cake is deceptively light and not overly sweet, the lemon mousse helping to balance out the sugar of the berries and jam. A delicious way to use some of the backyard harvest we've been waiting for all these months.

Best of the Summer or Winter to TFL'rs around the world.

Cheers,

Franko

Last Tuesday was one of thous days where I came back early form work and just had the urge to bake bread. For some time now the guys at work are daring me to produces a good dense rich rye bread. Well time was short and I did not had time for those multi-builds long fermentation formulas. So I figure if am not going to follow a meticulous recipe, I might as well go all the way and prepare it all by feel and sight (and with a few not so traditional additions ). I was very pleased with the result, and so does my co-workers that finished it all up! 

Formula: 

1 Cup of 75% hydration - AP flour -Sourdough culture (Just out of the fridge)

1 Cup of lukewarm water

1.5 Cups of Whole Rye flour

0.5 Cups of bread flour

0.25 Cups of beer

1 TSP of Cocoa powder 

1 TSP of active dry Yeast (about 4 grams)

1 TBS of Salt

3 TBS of Vegetable Oil

A handful of Dried Cranberries

Technique:

1.Mix all the ingredients (except the Cranberries) in a stand mixer for 2 minutes, or until a uniform mess is form.

2.Knead the dough for 10 minutes to a medium-high speed.

3.Add the Cranberries and mix for an additional minute.

4.Proof the dough for 30 minuets in a sealed container  - fold.

5.Proof for another 30 minuets - fold.

6.Proof for another 30 minuets - shape to a tight cylinder and place in a narrow loaf pan.

7.Proof for about an hour.

8.Bake in a 230° oven for 15 minutes - with steam. and another 45 minutes on 210° without steam.

Finding American equivalents or substitutes for foreign ingredients can be quite challenging. Whether you move to Europe, or like me, come to the US from Germany, you naively expect common products like flour or milk to be the same.

Sure, my American whole wheat breads turned out just fine, I was happy that they rose so nicely. But when I tried baking everyday German rolls, Weizenbrötchen, with all-purpose flour (wasn't that for all purposes, after all?) I was in for a surprise.

From the outside they were the same, but when I cut the rolls, there was no fluffy, soft inside, but a chewy, lean crumb with irregular holes that looked distinctly like Paris, but not like Hamburg or Kiel.

Baking German breads in Maine was a challenge - not all flours are created equal

I had learned a lesson, all-purpose flour is not like all-purpose flour. Everything is bigger in the US, and so is the protein content of the wheat!

So, a while ago, I came up with an EUROPEAN/AMERICAN FLOUR "TRANSLATION", one of the most popular posts on my blog.

This summer I prepared a favorite dessert, St. Colomba Cream, for the first time in Maine, but I didn't quite know what to use instead of the sahnequark (cream quark) the recipe requires.

Well, it has cream in it, I mused, and so has mascarpone. And that's what I took.

St. Colomba Cream - with mascarpone instead of quark?

But instead of creating a smooth, velvety dessert, I ended up with a dense and uber-rich vanilla cream. With 30% more fat than it should have had, the saintly Irish gooseberry dessert weighed down our stomachs like a stone.

Some European dairy products seem to be just the same as their American namesakes. But are they, really?

If you find an interesting recipe in a German, Austrian or Swiss website or blog, don't think Google translate will be any help: Saure Sahne, Sauerrahm, Schmand: all of them are "sour cream" - but no sour cream!

It's "sour cream" - but is it sour cream? No!

The difference is often the fat content, like with saure sahne and sour cream, though in many cases you can exchange a full fat into low-fat dairy to make a leaner version of a recipe, and vice versa. And some European dairy products are more acidic as their US counterparts, like yogurt or buttermilk.

To find American equivalents for some, and workable substitutes for others, check my: CREAM OR SAHNE - DAIRY CONVERSION

Just finished baking this miche. This dough is a foray into working with high hydration. After kneading, the dough was still a tad bit sticky, but I decided not to do stretch and folds since I was planning on long, cold fermentation. Used low percentage of yeast because of fermentation time, as well.

It's just out of the oven, so I don't have a crumb shot yet. But I figured I would share the initial results and recipe. Worst part of making a miche is waiting hours before cutting into it.

Formula:

250g KA whole wheat 25%

375g KA bread flour 37.5%

375g KA AP flour 37.5%

780g water 78%

25g salt 2.5%

5g SAF Instant yeast 0.5%

Method:

Mix flour and water

30 minute autolyse

Knead for 15-20 minutes (French slap and fold; dough slightly underdeveloped)

Bulk ferment in fridge for 12 hours

Bench rest at room temperature for 45 minutes

Preheat oven to 500F

Shape and proof for 45 minutes

Bake @ 450F on stone with inverted Dutch Oven as cloche for 20 minutes

Remove cloche and continue bake for 35 minutes

It's been a year or more since I've made Jason's Quick Ciabatta recipe, so I made a variation first and followed the next day with his standard recipe.

For the variation, I mixed Jason's standard 95% hydration dough until it started to climb the mixer paddle.  At that time I added enough flour to make a 75% hydrated dough and retarded it overnight in the fridge. The next day, I shaped, proofed and baked the loaves.

Later that day, I made the standard recipe which is always fun for me to make and will be nice for dinner tomorrow with the kids.

FF

Today, I attended my first farmer's market as a vendor.   Yesterday I baked around three times more bread at one time than I had ever done before.   Miraculously it all came out fine with no kitchen disasters.  This morning I finished up the baking and drove a couple towns over to Carlisle.   I had never been to the Carlisle market before.   I had two reasons for picking it.   One, I figured, given that Carlisle is pretty sparsely populated, that the market might be small enough for me to be able to manage.   The second is that unlike Lexington, they were willing to let me start in the middle of the season.   Sure enough, it was a fairly small and low key market.   The neighboring booth was a lemonade stand staffed by a seven year old and his parents.

So I relaxed and got ready to sell bread armored with my hastily purchased $6 sign from Staples.

There were plenty of baked goods, but only a couple other loaves about, and nothing like mine.   The market officially opened at 8 am, but there were only a trickle of customers and few of those interested in bread.    I figured I was going to be bringing a lot of loaves home, or engaging in some pretty furious barter for corn and squash at the end of the market.   

And yet, slowly but surely over the course of the morning my loaves walked away one by one, and in the opposite order that I expected.  

First to disappear were the flaxseed ryes.

Then went the Cherry Almond Whole Wheats.

The baguettes took longer to go, perhaps because they were a bit pale due to my needing the oven for the Challah rolls.   Finally a woman who would have preferred a Cherry Almond decided to take the last baguette home.  

When it was all over, I had only four challah rolls left out of my starting 18 loaves and 19 rolls.

The crowd seemed to divide into two parts (in my mind of course.)   The people who glanced at the bread, and then walked on as if they hadn't seen anything.    The second group would be almost past, when suddenly their eyes would lock on the bread, and they would circle slowly back, and only after a moment or two remembering to look up and say hello.   Of course, I liked those people better.  

One woman bought a roll, took a bite, and informed me it was dry.   I noticed that as she walked away she was still eating it.    Ten minutes later, she came back and said that after a bite or two she realized how good it was.   She just had to reorient herself from puffy.   

I experienced the limits of my kitchen all in one night.    I reached capacity on my scale (5 K) my Assistent Mixer which started chucking up bits of rye dough all over the place as they got too close to the top of the bowl.   My counter space and oven, and so forth.   But I survived, and sold my bread, and I'm ready to do it all over again next week.  Now I just have to figure out what to make.    

Hey all, I made it to double digits.  And can you believe next week is August.  I'll be trading for pumpkins before long.  

So I had a hard time deciding what to make and kinda through this idea together rather fast.  After the Flax Walnut Rye I knew I wanted more Rye.  I got some local Rye from a friend and intended to use it (forgot it at home) so I used my standard house coarse ground Rye.

 Everytime I hear Corn Rye I get excited only to see its not really about the corn and more of a caraway rye (which is also great) but not what my minds eye/nose see and smell when I hear the name.  So this is my first attempt at My Brains Corn Rye.  First things first, there has to be more than just cornmeal on the crust.  I thought about soaking some whole corn but feared it and didn't want to crack it so I went with coarse corn meal (polenta) that would be part of a soaker.  While seeking this I noticed Organic Barley Flour in bulk and wanted to add it in since I knew I'd be using beer, and I thought it would just make for a nice color.  All in all you may say (or I might say) I've put "too many ingredients in the dish"  But the results are wonderful and I think I'll keep it.  Is the barley necessary???? The Beer???? yeah sure they are. 

Corn Bir Rye
74.5 % hydration + soaker
2 loaves @ 865 g

Soaker
 83.3 g      Polenta (coarse corn meal)
 41  g         Dried Onions
125 g       Dark Beer (I used Deschutes Obsidian Stout from Bend, OR)
    4 g Salt
-----

Levain (75% hydration)
66.6 g   White Starter
150 g    Rye Flour
104 g     h20
---------------

4-6 hours warm

Dough
500 g    Bread Flour
83 g      Barley Flour
66.6 g   Rye (whole coarse ground
487.5g   H20  (save about 10% to loosen up levain before adding to autolyse)
9 g         Low Diastatic Malt
15g        Salt
-----------------

Autolyse for 1 hour.
Add remaining water to levain and mix together.  Add to Autolyse. 

Mix on speed 1 to combine (3-5 minutes)  Add salt and continue until incorporated.  Turn to speed 2 med/low and mix until medium devlopment (starts to come away from bowl slightly.

Add Saoker. combine on speed 1 and continue on speed 2 until
well developed.
Bulk Ferment 3 hours fifteen minutes  with 4 s + f's at 30 minutes
Shape into elongated batard roll in cornmeal and place seam up on lightly flour couche.  
Place in retarder (I baked them 5 hours later as the dough seemed lively)

Preheat oven to 500 

Bake steam for 13 minutes, remove steam lower to 475 and continue baking for 20-25 more.  

Off to trade.  Bounty pics to come.  

Happy Baking

Josh

Where does the time go?  In the considerable time since I last managed to get a post together I have mostly been baking one bread over and over.  So here it is: a big ol’ rye.

This bread is all about keeping it simple – nothing fancy here.  It is about 30% whole rye, about 70% hydration (depending on the flours), shaped into one big round.  It is scaled to be just within the capacity of my Bosch Compact mixer and just fit on my baking stone (there have been some close calls with the stone for sure).  The final dough weight is a little over 2 kg.  The only downside to the big loaf is that it takes hours to completely cool!

The process:

Build the starter using 375g whole rye four, 375g water and 45g starter.  Mix it all up and let it ferment 12-16 hours at room temp.  This fermentation time could be shorter I suppose, but I like a tang to my sourdough ryes.

For the dough use all of the starter, 900g bread flour, 500g water and 23g salt.  This gets mixed for 10 minutes on speed 1.  I stop the mixer 3-4 times to scoop the dough out and flip it over so that it all gets worked. 

The dough gets a bulk ferment of 3-4 hours at 75⁰F with a stretch and fold at about the 1 hour mark.  After shaping one big round the final fermentation usually takes another 2-3 hours.

The loaf is baked at 450⁰F with steam for 15 minutes then finished at 420⁰F for 45 minutes.

And that’s it.  This bread freezes very well so I end up with at least a couple weeks’ worth of sandwiches.  I have added a handful of flax meal or nuts on occasion just to liven things up, but I always come back to the basic bread and am never disappointed (Well, except once when I knew my starter was in a funk but baked anyway… the chickens ate very well that week).

Marcus

After the two bakes of milling farro, whole wheat and spelt for whole grain breads that had sprouts, scalds and seeds in and on them where the milled flour was so beautiful to look at and great to work with at 90-100% hydration, we thought we would do something we rarely do…… make a white bread that had nothing in or on it!

My apprentice thinks I am nuts so there is nothing new there but she will need to be watched closely today as I try to finish up this bake without it being DaPumperized or something worse.  Since this wasn’t going to be a whole grain bread we were shooting for 80% hydration.

We have been extracting around 75% from the sieve after milling and then feeding the entire sifted out portion to the starter to make the levain.  Since we were not using the sifted out 25% portion for this bake the levain was fed the  75% white flour left over from the sift.

To say this was white flour is a little deceptive as it was a beautiful tan color with brown specks of bran.  It looked every bit like a rich whole wheat flour you might get from the grocery but with a more rich and deep tan color.  We milled it in the Krup’s coffee grinder as usual so the grind wasn’t as fine as other home mills might produce but the bread doesn’t seem to mind.

Our 80 g of 66% hydration stiff storage starter was down to 50 g after the last two Friday bakes so it was 3 weeks old in the cold.  After this bake we will feed it some of the 25% sifted bran and bits from this bake to get it back up to 80 g.

We did a 3 stage build as usual with our multigrain SD starter.  The first two stages were 3 hours and one hour for the 4th stage when it had risen 25% we refrigerated the levain for 24 hours to increase the sour.  When we took it out of the fridge the next day we allowed it to finish doubling - about 3 hours.

A nice breakfast with 2 slices of this bread and one from April 8th I pulled out of the freezer - just as good as when it went in!

The dough flour was autolysed without salt for 1 hour, less 10g of water, which was used to soften the Pink Himalayan sea salt.  After the autolyse and the levain came together we did 1 minute of slap and folds to mix and let the dough rest for 10 minutes.

 Salad for dinner

We then squished the salt water through the dough with our fingers squeezing the dough.  We had started the 10 minutes of slap and folds at 75% hydration.  We thought this white bread would be like others we have made, but since the flour was fresh, we had to start adding the water.

 The peach crisp looks like the chorizo mac and cheese.

After a minute of slapping and folding we added 12g of water squishing the dough through the fingers and continued to do so every minute until the dough was a little on slack side.  We ended up at 91% hydration and the dough came together and the gluten developed well but it wasn’t at all stiff.

We then did 3 sets of S&F’s on 20 minute intervals to further develop the dough.  After the 3rd set, we let the dough rest and bulk ferment for 1 hour.  We then pre-shaped the dough as a batard, haven’t done one for awhile, and then did the final shape 15 minutes later.  Into our new 75 cent Goodwill basket, which was lined with a cloth and rice flour, it went.

It being summer, we only let it sit on the counter for 15 minutes before going into the 38 F fridge for 16 hours.  The next morning we fired up Big Old Betsy (BOB), since it was cold at 85 F and raining at 7 AM.  Plus, with the batard shape being 15” long it was 1” longer the max for the mini oven.

BOB was preheated to 500 F with 2 of Sylvia’s steaming pans with towels and a 12” CI skillet full of lava rocks, all half full of water, placed on the bottom rack when BOB hit 450F.  After reaching 500 F we let the oven bake away for 20 more minutes until the 2 stones, top and bottom, caught up.

We un-molded the bread with parchment covered peel, slashed it badly with a dull paring knife and onto the bottom stone it went for 15 minutes of steam.  I wanted to turn the oven down to 475 after 2 minutes but my apprentice forgot.  Thankfully BOB runs 25 F low so it baked with steam for 15 minutes.

The steam came out and we turned the oven down to 425 F, convection this time.  After 5 minutes we rotated the bread 180 degrees and in 5 more minutes it tested 205 F.  The bread was removed to the cooling rack after a total of 25 minutes in the oven.

promised my daughter Pho for lunch.- delish! One of our favorites is this chicken, pork an seafood Pho.

The bread did bloom as it spread some and it browned with some small blisters.  The mini would have done a much better job.  The 25 F too high a heat setting for 15 minutes didn’t help much.  We will have wait for the bread to cool to see how the crumb turned out.  I would expect it to be more open than the whole grain version with seeds and scald - you never know since they proofed the same volume.  As it turned out the crumb was slightly more open with some larger holes but nothing like we thought we night get.  It was glossy, soft and moist .  Had it plain, toasted and toasted with butter all were good like a fine whole wheat bread.  It is a good bread but not as good as the whole grain version with seeds, sprouts or scald.

Formula

a second photo for my first blog entry.