Benito's blog

I wanted to see how far I could push bulk fermentation and with this bake I probably went a bit far.  I’ve baked this bread before which is in total 50% whole grains but I’ve never pushed the hydration to 83% which I did for this bake.  I also used my aliquot jar and shaped once it showed that the dough had risen 50%.  Given the lack of oven spring, I think for my skill set, 83% hydration and 50% rise made the resultant dough a bit too loose to shape tightly and attain better oven spring.  I’ll post photos of the crumb when I slice it tomorrow.

Once again using my favourite sourdough pizza dough recipe that was written by Will the Pie King and shared during the Community Bake, I made a Marinated Artichoke and Olive sourdough pizza.  Actually I made two 9-10” pizzas tonight and will make another two tomorrow.  In the past I have usually cold retarded them for 48 and 72 hours.  This time I wanted to see what would happen if I cold retarded for 72 and 96 hours.  Well tonight of course was the 72 hours and the dough performed as expected, very well.

So I decided to try baguettes again having had one previous attempt.  This time I tried the Anis Bouabsa recipe more or less based on what MTloaf and Alfanso posted here.

So after much prodding from certain people, you know who you are, I finally tried making baguettes.  I decided to try to keep it as simple as possible and just try an IDY recipe.  I had a look at Peter Reinhart’s recipe and decided to have a go at that.  It didn’t require a poolish nor levain, just IDY.

I tried to put together another variety of sourdough discard cracker this morning, furikake.  Those of you familiar with Japanese food will know that Furikake (振り掛け / ふりかけ) is a dry Japanese seasoning meant to be sprinkled on top of cooked rice, vegetables, and fish. It typically consists of a mixture of dried fish, sesame seeds, chopped seaweed, sugar, salt, and monosodium glutamate. ... Furikake is often brightly colored and flaky.

I haven’t been feeling great about my baking lately, I’d been over proofing my bread and really disappointed in how they turned out.  I decided that I needed to go back to a recipe that I’d made many times when I first started to bake sourdough, so I went back to Maurizio’s Beginner Sourdough from The Perfect Loaf.  For some reason the flavour of this bread always speaks to me.  However, I decided I still wanted some sort of add in, but one that wouldn’t negatively affect the crumb too much, so since I love sesame seeds I went with black and white sesame seeds.

This is another recipe from Full Proof Baking.  This is really simple just keep the butter cold and you’re golden.  Don’t throw away your discard, there are so many things to make with your discard.

I’ve been following Kirsten of FullProofBaking on Instagram and have been interested in trying her Butterfly Pea Flower Sourdough for sometime.  I finally purchased some butterfly pea flowers on Amazon and decided I’d try to bake this.

Butterfly pea flowers 14.5 g dried flowers, green leaves and stems plucked off.  Steeped in 360 g boiling water x 10 mins and cooled, then 342.5 g added to flour during autolyse.

Total Dough Weight 900 g

Bread flour 80%  

Whole Grain 20%  

On the weekend we decided that it’s been much too long since I’ve made pizza.  So using the same recipe for sourdough pizza that Will shared with us all during the Community Bake, I put together 4 dough balls so we could have four 9” pizzas over two days.  I didn’t use the diastatic malt, but I think without it I could allow the dough to cold ferment much longer.  Usually I bake after 48-72 hours in the fridge, today’s bake was the 48 hour cold ferment.  I’m thinking without the diastatic malt 72-96 hours would probably be even better.

My partner requested a cheddar and apple bread so I put together this iteration based on Kirsten’s Basic Open Sourdough recipe.

Levain build 1:2:2

20 g mature starter

20 g bread flour

20 g whole wheat flour

40 g water

311 g white bread flour.               74% including levain

46 g whole wheat flour.               21% including levain