Just wanted to give a shout out to Allbulkfoods. I ordered 50 pounds of Prairie Gold for about $38, and with shipping , it was only $60, and the best part is I put in my order on Monday night, and it arrived on Wednesday, which is pretty quick.
Does anyone have the recipe for Nancy Silverton's "Country White" sourdough from Breads of La Brea Bakery? My copy is sitting in a storage locker, and all I have are my notes but not the recipe and timeline.
Thanks for the help!
I’m reading through Stanley Ginsberg’s The Rye Baker and I have a question about the Sour Culture Maintenance Refresh instructions:
The rye sour culture that is built over seven days weighs about 210 g. For the refresh, does that mean to discard all but 7 g of the rye sour culture? That seems very wasteful.
Or are these instructions meant for building a sponge to be used in a recipe?
I have not baked with sourdough for many, many years, so I’m trying to learn about current practices. I’m also mainly interested in using the sour for rye breads, not for all my bakes.
Thanks!
So, there was this thing that Don said the other day in a TFL blog post that really got me thinking. Think it was a quote from Jennifer Lathams about tweaks to the Tartine bakery method, and the thing that was said was "[...] longer includes the leaven in the autolyse and salt is not added until enough water has been incorporated to make a very extensible dough."
I think I've been doing bassinage wrong! I usually try it after the salt is already in the dough.
This weekend's loaf came out surprisingly well when I left the salt out until the end. After a one hour autolyse I incorporated levain with the machine mixer (only about 3 minutes, the last two minutes on speed 2 of the Kenwood), and the mixer bowl was staying clean after the mix and could feel the dough was already nice and taut and felt like it had some strength. Then by hand I spent ten minutes adding the additional bassinage water 10g at a time by means of what I would describe as 'circular' stretch and folds turning the bowl as I did it. And then, using the same method by hand another 3 minutes to incorporate the salt. And it worked so well. Sometimes you can tell the dough is going to bake well, and it stretched out beautifully when I laminated the olives in.
The loaf is a little darker than I wanted (probably from the 1% baker's malt) but the eating was great - sometimes the stars align and I get that great crust and soft crumb and this was one of those days! It does feel like the stars are aligning more frequently recently, but it might just be my mixer! Unless I've actually stumbled upon something that can be repeated with the mix by machine, bassinage by hand and add salt after method. Will only know next time I bake, but the old hands here are probably getting ready to tell me of even better ways to do the bassinage.
The scoring was a simple cross, I didn't want to jinx things and get a flat loaf as I did let the aliquot jar show an 80% increase (shaping at 50%) and was afraid it would flatten in the oven, but oven spring was good too.
I actually baked this twice now because I thought I had severely overproofed my first loaf. After shortening the bench final proof before cold retard on my second loaf to compensate the second loaf was more or less the same. Unfortunately I believe that this flour is too soft for me to bake at 100% as a hearth loaf. It is hard to believe the difference between this loaf and the one I very recently baked at 75% red fife. If my belief that red fife is too lacking in gluten is incorrect please let me know, I’m interested in hearing your ideas.
During bassinage, I actually increased the hydration to 87% as the dough seemed to want more water.
Overnight saltolyse and levain build done.
In the morning add levain to saltolyse dough, mix to incorporate with Rubaud mixing.
Slap and fold to good gluten development. 800 done good windowpane
Rest 30 min then bench letterfold ferment at 80ºF removing 30 g of dough for aliquot jar
Rest 30 min then lamination and add black sesame seeds
Then every 30 mins coil fold
End bulk when aliquot jar 60% rise
Shape then bench rest until aliquot jar 90% rise
Next day
Preheat oven 500ºF with dutch oven inside.
Once over reaches temp, turn dough out of banneton, score and bake in dutch oven for 20 mins at 450ºF with lid on. Drop temperature to 420ºF and bake 10 mins with lid on.
Remove lid and bake for 20 mins or until done with the bread out of the dutch oven on rack directly.
I’ll post crumb photos later today, this is hot just out of the oven.
I don’t remember the last time I made a cobbler, and I was looking at my final half bag of frozen rhubarb sitting in my freezer that a friend gave me last spring from his garden and thought time to make a cobbler. Of course, also feeling lazy I decided to buy frozen strawberries instead of fresh. Although that is the lazy route, the frozen ones are much better than the fresh I can get this time of year so this should be better than fresh. I don’t recall where I found this recipe that I’ve had saved in my Notes app for some time so cannot give the author credit.
PREP TIME
40 mins
COOK TIME
35 mins
TOTAL TIME
75 mins
The cobbler as written is pretty tart; if you prefer a sweeter cobbler you may want to take up the sugar a notch, perhaps another 1/4 to 1/2 cup.
Ingredients
Fruit mixture
Cobbler crust
Method
Preheat oven to 350°F:
(175°C).
Make the biscuit topping:
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, 2 Tbsp sugar, the baking powder and salt.
Use your (clean) hands to work the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs, with pieces of butter no bigger than a pea.
Stir in the milk and egg until just moistened (do not over-mix!).
A nice recipe for beginners (like me) or someone who wants to do a bake without a lot of dough manipulation throughout the day. Makes a nice crumb.
Details on the bake in this blog.
Today's bake was based on this method with really only a change in hydration to suit my flours. That, and I made a sandwich loaf versus a boule.
Built the WW starter from my rye starter over two builds. First build was at 100% hydration (1.5:6:6) and then the levain at 80% hydration (per method in attached photo). Levain had a very nice smell, almost buttery, when ripe. I have some coarse, local flour that I've been slowly using up, and I used it for the levain. Used KAF WW for the main dough.
Overall, very happy with the loaf. Crumb turned out uniform and what I really like for a sandwich bread. I think this will be my go to recipe for the weekly sandwich loaf. The color in the photo at the top of the post is very accurate. The crust is really nice reddish brown. Crispy but not tough.
Crumb was still a little moist after 4+ hours of cooling. Will see if it dries a little more. Finding the endpoint on my bakes is still elusive for me. I've tried temp, but it seems to vary from loaf to loaf. I've tried listening for the hollow thump. I think I hear a good hollow sound, but either I'm not listening for the right sound or too many years of industrial noise exposure has made hearing that sound not possible. :-) Something to continue working on...
Hello all,
Not sure if there's a subforum for this (if not maybe one can be created?) but need some help figuring out what went wrong with a dough I made yesterday.
Poolish - 24 hr ferment
500g - white flour
500g - water
1/8tsp - yeast
Final mix - 3 hr bulk fermentation
450g - white flour
50g - whole wheat flour
250g - water
21g - salt
3g - yeast
Following method found in "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast" by Ken Forkish.
I've made the recipe several times and have had great results so far, however, yesterday's batch came out of bulk fermentation lacking any strength. Dough resembled a super high hydration dough fresh off of autolyse and had a similar consistency. Tried to knead the dough but wasn't able to develope any strength or tension and ended up scrapping it and starting over. Any thoughts? Sorry I didn't think to get a pic at the time.
Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.
I am trying to eliminate as much Wheat as I can from my diet.
Before I joined this group I had ordered San Francisco Sour Dough Starter Culture.
Can I use it to make a starter using almond flour?
Thanks
Don Parent
