Some lavender baking for Karin, a sourdough, and a ciabatta
Hello,
These are some breads made using some new flour: Central Milling's Organic Artisan Baker's Craft flour (malted).
The flour is unbleached, hard red winter wheat, 11-11.5% protein; it is a joy to work with!
This weekend's baking with lavender is for Karin...she posted about her lovely Lavendelbrot [1] recently...
such pretty little breads!
I love Karin's formulas; her methods and instruction are always so good, and breads, so flavorful.
My little lavender plant in the garden just sent up a small, second batch of flowers :^) ... a good sign it was time to try making Karin's bread.
I used 50% of the CM Baker's Craft flour, and 50% purple wheat flour, upping the hydration slightly and decreasing fermenting/proofing time a little bit because of the flour adjustment. I added some lavender syrup in place of sugar (being lavender weekend in my kitchen!, I was making lavender syrup to glaze a poundcake...decided to throw some into the bread).
The bread has the most wonderful scent and taste of lavender!
When baking, I tried something I read about in (I'm pretty sure it was from) one of the SFBI newsletters; after loading the bread and steaming the oven, I closed the oven door and turned the oven off, setting the timer for 2-1/2 minutes. After 2-1/2 minutes, I turned the oven back on. (Turning the oven off is supposed to help the steam settle on the dough's surface, to help with expansion while baking. I was happy with how the little batards opened up during this bake -
may try this again).
Trying to score some of the little breads (using scissors) to look like lavender flowers was not successful!:
A crumb shot:
...purplish from the 50% purple wheat flour?
Or is it my wishful thinking? :^)
My local herbfarm lady introduced me to culinary lavender last summer - I fell in love with with lavender lemonade;
I thought it might be nice to combine those flavors in my favorite lemon poundcake. The poundcake is a recipe from Fine Cooking magazine [2]. I added a generous half-teaspoon of lavender flowers to the dry ingredients when mixing the cake, and glazed the cake with a lavender syrup [3] while it was warm from the oven. Mmm, mmm, good, imho!:
It was a lovely slice, for dessert last night:
These next two breads are a two-feed Sourdough with liquid levain, and a poolish Ciabatta, taught to us at the Guild class
I recently took at SFBI. This Central Milling Artisan Baker's Craft flour is everything I hoped it would be!
It's absolutely wonderful flour!
A sourdough boule:
This is the poolish Ciabatta:
<--- this loaf, horizontally sliced--->
Two close ups of the crumb - I included these pictures because I liked the little bubbles, and gluten strands :^)
This is the crumb shot from another ciabatta loaf, from this bake:
I really did have fun making these breads. Thanks again, so much, to Karin...and Central Milling! And of course, big thanks to Mac at SFBI, for his helpful and patient instruction!
Happy baking everyone!
:^) from breadsong