loydb's blog

After a brief dalliance with PR's whole wheat sandwich bread, I'm back to my traditional sourdough loaf (starter + water + flour + salt). These were around 80% hydration.The sandwich bread was delicious, but didn't keep nearly as well as the traditional loaf.

I had shoulder surgery a little over three months ago, which cut into the baking time pretty severely. I spent the last ten days rebuilding my starter, and made my first loaf yesterday. 100% fresh-milled whole wheat sourdough using Reinhart's basic whole wheat bread recipe (except no yeast).

We've been craving pizza for awhile, and I decided to use some of my dwindling supply of KAAP to make a batch of Roman Pizza Dough from PR's American Pie. I used some jarred tomato sauce that I modded with oregano & basil from the garden and shallots. Some asiago & mozz for cheese, mushrooms & pepperoni for toppings, and we are good to go.

We're probably having the other half of the dough for dinner tomorrow... :)

I've been baking yeasted breads while I rebuilt a starter. Yesterday was the first bake with it, and I'm pleased.

The recipe is the San Francisco sourdough from BBA. I milled 5% rye and 95% hard white wheat.

I did stretch and folds every 20 minutes for the first two hours, then left it alone for three hours. Shaped and put into a banneton, then into the fridge to proof for two hours.

It's very lightly sour, which I expect from a new starter. I'll see how it develops over the next month before making a decision to keep or not.

I've been on hiatus since we moved back to Austin, but since we're now in the middle of a flour and bread shortage (because apparently everyone is suddenly going to bake!), I've started milling flour for myself and my friends, and am back to baking my own again.

I don't currently have an active starter, so this is a yeasted loaf, about 75% fresh milled hard white wheat and 25% KABF.

This is a continuation of tweaking Maurizio Leo's Best Sourdough Recipe My first efforts can be found in my blog here.

My goal is to see how far I can push the freshly-milled whole grain percentage while still getting great oven spring. For this pass, I swapped out the 35g bread flour in the levain for whole wheat, and ended up using 250g of whole wheat and 700g of bread flour for the final dough, giving me roughly 25% whole grain. Because of how my freshly milled flour handles water, I ended up adding an additional 80g of whole wheat flour above and beyond the totals called for in the recipe. It was still a very wet dough, but it was much more workable than the first try, and built structure way faster.

The crumb still came out great, though. I'll try pushing it further next time!

Back when I first started this blog, I was trying out the San Francisco starter from sourdo.com. I was never able to get a flavor I loved from it. Almost six years down the line, I've learned a ton about sourdough in the interim. I was also growing bored with the rye strain I've been baking with for the last few years -- so I'm trying again with it. I've been building the starter for the last week, finally it was active enough to use.

Maurizio Leo's The Perfect Loaf is one of my favorite baking blogs, so I decided to try his Best Sourdough Recipe.

For the whole wheat portion, I used fresh-milled organic hard red Spring wheat. For the white flour, KA bread flour. This is a really high hydration dough. I didn't quite pour it into the bannetons, but it wasn't by any means even vaguely stiff.

It came out of the basket really nicely (rice flour), even if it was nearly flat. The oven, with a cloche inside, was preheated for an hour at 500 degrees F. After 25 minutes, I removed the top and dropped the temp to 450, and left it in for another 20 minutes, turning it halfway through. No convection.

I'm happy with the result. I'm hoping it gets a little more sour with time. Next time, I'm going to try upping the percentage of whole grain flour -- it has less than 10% right now.

I've been very quiet -- mainly because I've spent the last year baking the same recipe over and over, tweaking it slightly until I've got it completely reproducible. I've varied the additions (various seeds, dried fruits, etc.), but the base bread has been the same. For 2018, I'm going to venture out of this comfort zone and get more experimental again.

I've been working on this recipe for about 5 weeks now, I think this is loaf #11. It has finally started coming together like I want. 20% sprouted rye sourdough, 35% sprouted hard red wheat sourdough starter, 45% KABF, 75% hydration. I'm doing another couple of loaves on Sunday repeating this recipe, if I'm still happy with it then I'll do a detailed post.

I had about 500g extra of my 100% hydration WW start (90% hard red winter wheat, 10% rye), and needed to bake a loaf for some friends, plus some for us. I wanted a bit more rise than I've been getting with 100% WW, so I used AP for half the flour bill (Reinhart's basic sourdough recipe). I'm really happy with how it came out. 

edit: Crumb Shot