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I have found that I rarely use my Ankarsrum (crème color) mixer. It is overkill for what I need. I have used it maybe 5 times since I purchased it a year ago. I am also selling a Le Creuset Dutch Oven (blue with stainless steel knob). I bought this with the intention of cooking sourdough in it, but it was so expensive that I didn’t want to risk crazing so I bought a cheaper Cuisinart Dutch oven for that instead. I’ve only used the Le Creuset on the stove top. I’m asking $420 for the mixer (it has all of the original parts including the batter bowl, cookie paddles, whips, steel dough bowl, roller, and dough hook). And 250 for the Dutch oven (400 asking price for the mixer and 230 for the oven, additional 20 added for shipping). I will post pictures as soon as I figure out how to do so. The Ankarsrum is in like new condition, will be happy to FaceTime or record a video of it in action. The Le Creuset is also in pristine condition except for a slight discoloration near the bottom of the interior (small 3 inch long by half inch tall), it’s almost unnoticeable. Again, will post pictures as soon as I can. The enamel is not cracked or damaged in any way. It was hand washed every time and dried immediately. I have receipts from Pleasant Hill Grain and Williams Sonoma to show that I am the original owner, date of purchase, and that they were purchased brand new. Don’t hesitate to ask for any deatails I might have forgotten to add here. Thanks! 

;The current consensus is that, when using a mixer, bassinage should be added in a trickle so that the dough stays cohesive and doesn't spread out and "squelch".

So I started adding it with a squeezy dropper bottle. This worked well but was a bit tedious, especially when there was a lot to add.

Then I thought "what I need is a little peristaltic pump". So here it is: a 12 volt pump that will run on 6 - 12v with a 1*3 tube. It came with a 2*4 tube, but that was a bit fast so I changed the tube - pretty easy to do.

It's just at the prototype stage at the moment, but results are promising.

Flowrate is 9 - 27ml/min.

My test dough used a stiff (45% hydration) levain, so I needed quite a bit of bassinage - 100ml.

And this was the resulting bread:

Crumb was a bit open, even by my standards!

Lance

Hi everyone - I recently made this bread, which I believe I first read about on this forum:

https://breadtopia.com/toasted-buckwheat-porridge-sourdough-bread/

Wanted to share my experience and see if anyone has any tips. First, I am a pretty experience sourdough baker at this point, but have mostly stuck to traditional country-style loaves, like Tartine, FWSY, etc. For the last year, I've almost exclusively been making the Country Blonde and Field Blend #2 from FWSY, and have it down pretty good. The "craziest" I've gotten is adding cranberries and nuts to my loaves, and sometimes sesame seeds, and I wanted to try something different - so went for this buckwheat porridge loaf.

Overall, I guess it was sort of a success, in that it tasted great and had a wonderful crust - but it was a bit more dense than I would have liked. This was also my first time baking a sourdough in a loaf pan, but I did that more because of some issues I ran into. Here's some points from my bake, and some questions. Curious to hear what people say about these.

- The recipe just called for adding 80g of starter. I wasn't sure if that meant a recently fed starter, a levain or what. So I ended up preparing a levain in the morning, using the same ratios as FWSY Country Blonde (4:4:1:1, white flour:water:ww flour:starter) . I prepped the levain at around 9am, and mixed my dough around 5pm - it seemed pretty active then - but maybe not as much as if I would have added a starter directly in, maybe fed the night before?

- After 2 hours of folding, the dough wasn't as active as I expected. Especially after folding in the soaked buckwheat. Also, the dough became extremely wet after adding the buckwheat - even though I had drained it as thoroughly as I could.

- The recipe said the dough should double - I waited until around 11:30pm (72 deg kitchen) and it didn't seem to change that much. I had to go to bed by then, so I turned it out, did a pre-shape, and let it rest 30 min. The dough was so wet it was almost completely unshapeable.  My main question here is, I wonder if this is b/c of the moisture from the buckwheat, or maybe it was actually overproofed by then?

- I did the best I could for shaping, but didn't want to risk having it completely stick to a proofing basket, so I just oiled up a loaf pan and put it in there for the night in the fridge.

- Next morning, took loaf out of fridge. Didn't look any different than the night before. Does this mean anything?

- I baked it up, and ended up with what you see below. I ended up putting the whole loaf pan into my dutch oven to try to get some steam for the first half of the bake - not sure how much this did.

Like I said, it tasted great, and texture was good too - but a bit dense. One aspect I really loved about this bread, was that the buckwheat around the outside got really crunchy when baked, giving it a sort of nutty-crunchy texture which I loved.I want to make this again, not sure what to do differently next time. Any tips would be much appreciated!

20220212_111642-rz.jpg

20220212_153117-rz.jpg

So this morning I was mixing in levain with an Italian flour - https://granoro.it/le-linee-granoro/farine-e-preparati/ - the light green bag "per pizza" - soft wheat - type 0 - W250 - 10.7% protein.

Have had similar happen before with Italian flours in my kitchen where they have turned to "soup", however, this morning I kept my wits about me and watched closely what happened, and would love some insight from the experts here about what is going on.

In the mixer, on slow speed, on the dough hook, I was combining a dough with a yeast water levain made with the same flour. The main dough had also had about 1 hour of autolyse time, so both doughs were already well developed. Both doughs were not over-hydrated  - the autolysed dough was at 55% hydration and the levain at 65% hydration. The levain did have the same flour, but the flour mix was 78% granola and 22% hard red wholemeal that is fairly fine. I was just trying to combine in the levain really. Ran the mixer for about 4 minutes and all was well, the dough was pretty tight but to my eyes it didn't look like much had happened - it was clinging to the hook for all of those 4 minutes, the sides of the bowl were clean, and the doughs may (or may not!) have been mixed together by this mixing action.

Then I thought I'd add a small amount of water, a very small amount of water mind you, just to help the dough mix and to assist with eventually adding the salt grains. So, I added about 4g, the dough did the 'whoomp whoomp' sound, fell off the dough hook, swirled around a bit in the layer of 'muddy' dough you get and then started to cohere again on the dough hook, all took about 30 seconds. But then I added another 4g of water and it was at this point that things went wrong. The dough did not cohere again, rather it started puddling worse and worse, I let it run for a total of 2 minutes but those 2 minutes were enough to turn the dough into the soup. I tried adding the salt then, but it did nothing to tighten this dough (as it does with other doughs).

It's interesting that this happened on a slow mixer speed with a fairly low hydration - 60% overall - and a fairly low amount of bassinage water - 8g.  So my question is, in general is bassinage in a stand mixer like this an inherently bad thing? Should bassinage always be done by hand, or not at all? Or is it that the doughs were already fairly well developed and shouldn't have been in the mixer, or were too well developed for bassinage? Can a flour exceed its ability to hold water at such a low hydration with such a small amount of bassinage? The soupy dough 'runs' - it pours. It looks like it has lost the gluten that it had. In the past I've baked with it in loaf tins but it really doesn't produce a nice bread once it has broken like this.