albacore's blog

The blog title is actually short for "Middlings Levain Bread", but it's a bit of a mouthful - read on....

I'm always on the lookout for ways to add more wholegrain to my loaves without reducing loaf volume and crumb tenderness too much. I have tried sift and scald but never been too happy with the result - the scald seems to make the bran tougher to me. I've also tried sifting and reducing the particle size of the bran fraction the bran fraction in a spice grinder to reduce particle size. This is quite effective, but rather messy.

I wanted to make some soda bread but didn't have any buttermilk. There are recipes that use baking powder or cream of tartar/bicarb, but I got to thinking that lactic acid might be closer to acidic dairy flavours, so why not use some of that? - especially as I had a bag of it (food grade), bought for another project, but not yet used.

A bit of ChatGPT investigation suggested for every gram of baking soda, to use 0.65g lactic acid powder, so this was my recipe:

Dietmar Kappl of homebaking.at has recently written his first book entitled "Baking next level mit Roggen". Unfortunately it's only available in German and in printed format. Of course, no sensible baker publishes ebooks these days because they will be instantly pirated.

Haferflocken brötchen is one of the recipes in the book. I'm not going to publish it here to respect copyright, but if you go on the book publisher's website there is a small sample from the book with a few recipes - this is one of them.

Here is my contribution to the latest community bake. It is Adjaruli Khachapuri. The recipe I used was from Chainbaker https://www.chainbaker.com/khachapuri/

For once I more or less followed the recipe. My dough was a little soft, so I added half a scoop of WW atta to firm it up a little.

Also I split the dough into 2 medium and one small bread as I think just 2 breads would be rather large.

The breads were rich but tasty. We had the small one cold as a snack the day after and it was still nice cold.

Spelt in thirds - one third freshly milled spelt grain, one third white spelt and one third organic bread flour. Plenty of spelt flavour, but without the heaviness of too much wholegrain.
 

I saw this new recipe on homebaking.at and thought I would give it a try. I'm not exactly sure what a Körnerrebe is; it translates as grain vine, so a bit of a mystery - perhaps someone can enlighten me.

It's a yeasted recipe with a biga and a scald, but pretty simple. One thing to watch is that a special "half active" malt is used. I used my normal amount of diastatic malt ( 2.5g for a half recipe, which is what I made) and made up the difference with liquid ND malt extract (7.5g).

Taking inspration from some very nice looking Semola/Durum loaves recently posted on the forum, I thought it was time to try my hand.

I haven't baked with semola rimacinata for a while; I think the last time was based on Maurizio's excellent Pane Siciliano recipe.

This time it was to be an homage to pane di Altamura with 100% semola rimacinata including the levain. I already had a bag of this flour:

Not a misprint, but I thought why not use two bigas? One yeasted for loft, one SD for flavour. Both in the same tub, to save space and washing up. So that's how it went!

 Both bigas made in the kenwood with K beater. I refreshed my SD starter prior to use at 100% to make mxing it into the biga easier.

Overall dough hydration was 69%.

A few months ago I was given some French flour by my sister after her holiday in Brittany. So it was time to have another try at "proper" French pain au levain.

Another Italian style bake using my DIY multi-cereal flour blend, as developed for my recent Pagnotta Multicereali bake.

It comprises 85% Dallagiovanna Manitoba flour with the balance being an equal parts mix of wheat, rye, barley, oats and rice grain all freshly milled together.

I've never had much luck with naturally leavened ciabatta - mine tend to be tough as old boots and with small alveoli, so I used fresh yeast in a 45% hydration biga. 100% of the flour is in the biga.