I have not done much baking in the last month and a half since my Father suffered a stroke. After a brief stay in the hospital, he was moved to a rehabilitation center for speech, occupational and physical therapy. Subsequently, our days were busy with work, shuttling my mother back and forth from her apartment to the rehab center where she would spend all day with him and preparing dinner for her in the evening since she was too tired to even think about herself. Unfortunately, because the stroke had affected his speech and ability to swallow food, he was progressively getting weaker and complications set in until he was moved back to the hospital where the doctors told us that basically they could not do anything else for him. We moved him to a Hospice Center in the Washington area a week from this past Tuesday, a beautiful and peaceful place.

Since all my siblings and their families were in town to visit my Father and to comfort my Mother, this past Saturday morning, I made two batches of dough for a family dinner. One was a white flour Baguette dough with liquid levain and the other was a high extraction Pain de Campagne dough with liquid levain, both intended for overnight cold retardation and baking on Sunday. The doughs had just gone through partial bulk fermentation and were put in the refrigerator in the early afternoon. We headed to the Hospice Center to spend the afternoon with my Father but upon arrival, learned that he had just slipped away peacefully. He was 91 years-old.

The next 3 days were a blurr with so many things to attend to. The funeral and cremation occurred on Tuesday July 20. It was preceded by a heart-warming Buddhist Ceremony and gathering of many Relatives and Friends.

Yesterday, we finally had a day to wind down when I realized that the doughs after three and a half days were still sitting in the refrigerator waiting to be baked. They had tripled in size and the high extraction dough had rendered some liquid. Since we had planned a Family Dinner yesterday evening, I decided to go ahead and bake them anyway and share them with my Family in memory of my Father.

The doughs had become very extensible to the point of becoming limp. As my head was still preoccupied with so many thoughts, by mistake, I baked the high extraction dough as Baguettes and the white dough as a Batard.

The Baguettes did not have the usual oven spring but the taste was surprisingly sweet and nutty. The crumb was a little bit denser but not overly tangy in spite of the extensive retardation. The Batard had much better oven spring and the crumb was open, slightly chewy and again not overly sour. We enjoyed them with a perfectly ripe Camembert and toasted to the memory of my Dear Father and Mentor, the man who taught me so much about the enjoyment of good food and wines.

Goodbye Dad...

Don

This is a variation on a formula I learned at the SFBI baguette workshop. The original version was delicious, but crumb was not that open since hydration was only 68%(probably to make it easier for students to handle). I increased the hydration to 75%, scaled the amount to fit home ovens, kept the rest the same. Still minimal hand mixing, with a long bulk rise and several folds. Delicious and nice open crumb.

Poolish Baguette With Sunflower Seeds (adapted from SFBI)

-Poolish

Bread Flour (I used KA AP flour), 163g

Instant Yeast, 0.12g (I mixed 1/2tsp of yeast, which is about 1.5g, in 150g of water, then took 12g of yeast water)

water, 163g (if you measure yeast like I did above, minus 12g of water from this amount)

1.Mix and leave at room temp for 12 hours.

-Main dough

Bread Flour (KA AP), 330g

water, 173g (I used 207 to bring the hydration to 75%)

yeast, 1g

salt, 10g

toasted sunflower seeds, 59g

malt extract, 2.5g (I used barley malt syrup)

poolish from above

2.Mix water, flour, malt, and poolish,autolyse for 20mins

3.Add salt and sunflower seeds, hand mix to combine

4.bulk rise for 3 hours, with 3 folds at 45, 90, 135min.

5.divide into 4x220g, preshape, shape into baguettes

6.proof for about 45min

7.bake with steam at 460F.

Sunflower seeds don't absort that much water, so it was a very wet dough. Scoring is tough, no ears to speak of.

Nice open crumb though

The taste is incredibly nutty and fragrant from the sunflower seeds, can't stop eating those!

Living somewhat secluded from quality bakeries and grocery marts lately I've been missing the amazing Amoroso hoagie rolls I got all the time when I lived in Philly. Over the years its become somewhat of a habit for me to just look at calorie content at the bread at the market because I figure if its going to be blah and stale I may as well try to avoid cankles. So I thought about possibly mixing the idea of great hoagie or hamburger rolls with maybe a little added health. I utilize flaxseed meal and flax seeds to these buns and they came out wonderful, slightly nutty in flavor with a soft texture perfect for cold cuts or even burgers. 

Link to external blog post and recipe: http://neo-homesteading.blogspot.com/2010/07/flax-sandwich-buns.html

I love English muffins, not only for breakfast but as a sometime lunch mate (ok, so I like tuna melts). But they pose a quandary for me: my usual recipe is easy to work with and handle, but produces muffins with a rather tight crumb. And let's face it, English muffins are all about nooks and crannies, so this won't do.

There are, of course, lots of recipes for English muffins that are based on dough with a batter consistency that produces wonderful open crumb. But these necessitate using either muffin rings or accumulated empty tins of canned tuna. Frankly, my kitchen already has too much stuff and I'm not about to begin assigning a shelf to empty StarKist cans. Plus, I want a formula that can be used in a bakery where production might involve a hundred or more on a daily basis. For that, EM rings (or empty tuna cans) aren't the answer.

So after a lot of playing with the hydration in this recipe I think it's reached a point where the dough is both hydrated enough to produce those wonderful nooks and crannies we all love, yet still amenable to shaping. (Hydration is 70%.)

One of the nice things about this particular recipe is that the levain constitutes over 30% of the dough weight, so it brings a tremendous amount of flavor to the muffins.

This will produce six, 3.5 oz/99 g English muffins, and a smidge of leftover dough.

Levain: Mixed 12 - 14 hours prior to final dough
Flour   .15 lbs/67 g
Water  .15 lbs
Levain .15 lbs

Final dough:
Flour   .59 lbs/266 g
Water  .34 lbs/155 g
Salt      .02 lbs/7 g
Instant dry yeast ¼ tsp/1 g
Levain .45 lb/202 g

Mix: DDT = 76° F
Add levain to water, then add dry ingredients and mix on speed 1 for approximately 3 - 4 minutes. Mix an additional 3 - 4 minutes on speed 2 until moderate gluten development. (With my fairly weak Hamilton Beach I'll sometimes go to speed 3 for a minute if the dough insists on climbing up the dough hook).

Place dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover and allow to ferment for 1 ½ hours.

On a well-floured surface, divide dough into 3.5oz/99 g pieces. I roll these by turning the floured side up, and using the stickiness of the non-floured dough which is now side-down to let me create apricot-sized pieces.

Place rounded dough balls on a well-semolina-dusted pan with ½" sides. (They don't need to be ½", but for purposes of shape, you don't want to use either a flat sheet pan or one with, say, 1" sides). Leave sufficient space between them so that they can spread out without touching. Spray tops of dough with Pam and then tightly wrap the pan with plastic crap (dmsnyder's most apt description). The tight wrap with plastic will allow the dough to rise out versus up during its final proof, thus creating nicely shaped rounds of the appropriate size. (Also the reason for a pan with sides!)

Proof for 1 hour.

Heat electric skillet to 400° F and very lightly oil. Place muffins, semolina side down, in the pan, being careful not to overcrowd. (The dough will be very sticky, so the method I've adopted which allows me to handle without misshaping them in the process is to lightly wet my finger tips and then pick them up and place them in the skillet.)

Cook (I'm so used to saying bake this seems unnatural) 8 minutes - 6 minutes at 400° F and 2 minutes at 350°F. Turn and cook another 7 minutes at 350° F. Place on wire racks to cool.  (Below on left, a cut muffin, on the right, a 'forked' one.)

I'm pleased with the openness of the crumb that this recipe achieves - and without the hassle (to me at least) of having to use molds to keep the muffin shape.

And now, on a very warm Washington, DC evening, salade niçoise à la English muffin.

Larry