One of my Christmas gifts this year was several pounds of barley and of oats to feed my home milling habit. After noodling around here on TFL and the web, I cobbled together a formula to use some barley flour.
Ingredients
400g whole wheat flour, freshly milled
400g whole barley flour, freshly milled
400g all purpose flour
5g malted grain (I used malted barley)
900g water
60g honey
24g salt
10g active dry yeast
Process
Our oven has been rather busy lately, especially with the Christmas cookies that my wife likes to make at this time of year. In spite of all of that going on, I still managed to work in three different breads yesterday.
First up was the Tyrolean Christmas Zelten from The Rye Baker:
Ian asked that I post something from my bakes (it has been ages). So, here's today’s bread, a simple pain de compagne. It's yeasted, rather than sourdough and will form the base for some DIY grilled cheese sandwiches for tomorrow's class. The other bread the students will make is pain a la ancienne.
My running debate with myself over whether to buy a mill or do without came to an abrupt end the week before last when I saw a post about a KoMo Fidibus Classic for sale at an attractive price. The new-to-me mill arrived early last week but I wasn’t able to play with it until I purchased some wheat this weekend.
My work schedule is set up so that I get every other Friday off. Or, as my employer puts it, I'm on a 9/80 work schedule. That means Mondays through Thursdays are 9 hours a day, one Friday is 8 hours, and the following Friday is off. I love it. Having a 3-day weekend every other week is a wonderful thing.
One of the all-time favorite recipes here on TFL is the Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid that Floyd posted clear back in 2005. If you haven't yet, or haven't recently, read that post and the long string of comments that follow, I suggest that you have a look. There are a lot of good ideas in that thread.
