Benito's blog

I baked Maurizio’s sourdough Pain de Mie today.

Based on his recipe and recommendations I made a 700 g dough to fit in my 8.5” x 4.5” loaf pan, however, it came out rather small, I’d say it could easily have been 800 go for that size.

Anyhow, as per his recipe it is all white flour, 12% butter unsalted, 7% honey, 22% milk, 48% water, and 2% salt.

I’m feeling more confident now with this sourdough recipe.  I’ve had pretty good success now that I’ve baked it a few times with the hydration lowered to 74% from about 78%.  This is Maurizio’s beginner sourdough recipe which fortunately we love the flavour of.  The only change this time was that I added 0.5% diastatic malt powder to the dough during the autolyse.

I loved last weekend’s apple pie and needed to bake another dessert to go with dinner tonight with friends.  I decided to make this Cranberry Apple Bourbon Pie this weekend.  I tried to do a plaid lattice design to also do something different than I have tried before.  As I have been doing, I used Bravetart’s all butter crust again as it has become my favorite.

I am still lacking consistency bake to bake.  One reason is that I’m only baking sourdough every 2 weeks on average, but this week got another bake in.  I’ve still been trying Maurizio’s Beginner Sourdough as that was the first one I started with and wanted to gain some confidence baking it.  Two weeks ago I made an error and added way too much water and the dough lacked structure, it tasted fine but it was a bit on the pancake side of things.  This week I decided to hold back 20 g of water during autolyse, so rather than 78% hydration the bread would be 74%.

Well a year and a half into my pie baking “career” I’ve finally made my first apple pie.  I know a lot of people love apple pie, but I hate peeling apples and have no space for a dedicated apple peeler in my apartment kitchen.  However, this apple pie turned out so well I might have to make room.

I followed the Bravetart Apple Pie recipe almost exactly and overall it turned out well.  I used once again the all butter crust recipe from Bravetart however, this time I subbed 40 g of the water for 40 g of vodka to see if it would make the pastry a touch more tender.

I am still working on my skills with sourdough, having had some recent success I thought I see if I can replicate that success.  With this bake I also thought I’d try shaping using a spritz of water on the counter and my hands, unfortunately that didn’t go so well.  I’m not sure why it didn’t work, perhaps I used too much water, that is the most likely cause.  After the shaping didn’t go well with water, I let the blob rest and then reshaped using flour, this went a bit better but not as good as my previous bake.

I’m sorry about posting another Beginner’s Sourdough loaf but I wanted to repeat it a few more times to see if I am getting any more consistent results.  I reduced the hydration by 20 gms when mixing to try to account for water added while doing coil folds etc.  I found that the dough was quite stiff despite a several hour autolyze, I think this was the reduced hydration unless I actually reduced by even more than I thought.  The lower hydration made slap and folds very hard.

Tonight’s dinner.  Again I used the Community Bake Recipe for sourdough pizza dough, thanks again to Danny and ThePieKing for the CB.

I have found that the dough is even better after a 72 hour cold fermentation and that the gluten hasn’t broken down at all.

Sourdough Pizza with balsamic olive oil marinated arugula and grape tomatoes with egg and avocados.