Miscellany

It's been a while since I've been here, but not since I've made bread. I've got a pumpernickel on the counter, a sourdough slow fermenting in the fridge, and a soaker/biga combo for a whole wheat sesame sandwich loaf I'll make tomorrow. With nothing to do I'm considering making a partial whole wheat hokkaido milk roll...

In any case, I'm realizing that I'm just not the sort of person to faithfully keep a baking log. But perhaps I can give an impressionistic account of the current state of my bread baking journey.

My last post concluded "getting comfortable with commercial yeast and ultimately returning to sourdough." Since then I've been going through a lot of commercial yeast!

My favorite loaf has to be Peter Reinhart's "oat broom" bread which I make with 4 oz. of roasted sesame seeds mixed in. I was making some great loaves in my pullman pan, but the last couple haven't been as lofty. I had been using a bag of Robin Hood whole wheat I picked up in Canada over the holidays, but now I'm back on King Arthur. There may be something to this Canadian flour conspiracy theory.

I've also been dipping my toes in tangzhong. Stella Park's bagel recipe once, and a few different hokkaido milk bread recipes. I've made this one a couple times, but I've got to scale down the recipe because it makes too much dough for me. That's what brings me here today... I'm thinking of branching out to whole wheat hokkaido milk roll (partly to use up this flour, partly because I've got nothing to do right now). But I'll leave that to another time. I've got too much going on today. 

Besides Hokkaido, there's been plenty of enriched white breads that often end up slathered with chocolate goo. The whole wheat hokkaido would let me have my cake and not feel guilty too. 

I haven't been doing as much sourdough... Louis's health hasn't been great, but inactivity hasn't helped any. So I'm working on that. Probably I just have to stop associating sourdough with "artisinal" boules and just start making levain sourdough so I can have a healthy throughput of flour running through him.

In any event, that's what I've been up to lately.