Benito's blog

Still trying to improve my 100% whole grain baking.  In this iteration I changed two things I believe needed to be addressed.  I’ve lowered the hydration and reduced the final proof.  I believe those changes have helped but still not quite where I want this to be, particularly the oven spring.  Despite the dough coming out of the banneton and standing tall, there was still more spread during baking than I want to see.  So it is still overproofed.

This started out as Eric’s Sourdough Deli Rye, but I started to worry about my KA mixer after I added the levain to the developed initial dough as is just wasn’t building any strength.  My KA mixer is a newish model with the plastic gears so I didn’t want to kill it just to bake this as a hearth loaf.  So I decided to make my first lean sandwich loaf.  I poured the dough (it was pretty loose) into the greased pullman pan, smoothed the top and placed it into the proofing box.  I baked it after it had risen to 1 cm below the rim of the pan.

Some of you maybe familiar with anko, but for those of you who aren’t it is a paste that is made from azuki beans and sweetened with sugar and is a popular component in many Asian desserts.  For this bread, I made a Koshian Anko (smooth anko) but a Tsubuan or chunky anko could be used as well.  If anyone is interested I can post the recipe for the anko.

Overnight levain build

14 g starter + 86 g cold water + 86 g bread flour left to ferment at 77ºF overnight.

For the Black sesame powder

I am not having any luck with my 100% whole grain bakes.  I thought I’d give it another try, but this time with a different grain, this is a stoneground 100% whole wheat.  I should have applied some of the lessons from my previous two whole red fife bakes, those would have been to lower the hydration (isn’t that what we always advise new bakers?  I should take my own advice) and reduce the proofing.  Being a bit stubborn I went ahead and ignored some of that advice and thought that it was the red fife flour that was the problem.

I actually baked this twice now because I thought I had severely overproofed my first loaf.  After shortening the bench final proof before cold retard on my second loaf to compensate the second loaf was more or less the same.  Unfortunately I believe that this flour is too soft for me to bake at 100% as a hearth loaf.  It is hard to believe the difference between this loaf and the one I very recently baked at 75% red fife.  If my belief that red fife is too lacking in gluten is incorrect please let me know, I’m interested in hearing your ideas.

I don’t remember the last time I made a cobbler, and I was looking at my final half bag of frozen rhubarb sitting in my freezer that a friend gave me last spring from his garden and thought time to make a cobbler.  Of course, also feeling lazy I decided to buy frozen strawberries instead of fresh.  Although that is the lazy route, the frozen ones are much better than the fresh I can get this time of year so this should be better than fresh.  I don’t recall where I found this recipe that I’ve had saved in my Notes app for some time so cannot give the author credit.