It was a Great day to have the oven on last week with a cold blustery day outside, decided on a fruit loaf as the grand daughter was having a sleepover that night. i had a new bread tin that has a sliding lid in the cupboard so it was going to have its maiden bake and here it is sweet dough with 50% Pitted Prune Pan Loaf. hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Yesterday i gave good old Black and Gold flour a run. The sour dough culture was revived from its slumber (2 months away) and was good to go. i decided it was time to try Chad Robertson's Tartine Country loaf. The formula differs from my normal 3:2:1 which has the levan @33% CR uses 20%. I didn't have any wholemeal flour on hand so substituted that for Kakulas Sisters Multigrain flour i also added some wheatgerm too but other than that it pretty much followed the formula in his book. i also used less water too. The method was to combine the levan and the water first then to add the flours and bring together into a cohesive mass leaving the salt aside for the Autolyse (rest) period, Mine lasted an hour, you then sprinkle over the salt and work it into the dough with a squeezing action until it dissipates the dough is then set aside in a good sized container and allowed to rest covered for an hour, the dough is then given a series of stretch and folds each hour and set to rest again each time i did S & F's over 4 hours, on the 5th hour the dough was turned out onto the bench and divided into 1 piece @750g for my regular Banneton and the other @ over 1100g for my longer larger Banneton. The dough pieces were pre shaped and allowed further bench rest of around half an hour, they were then shaped and inverterd in the bannetons (seam side up) they were placed in the much maligned single use plastic shopping bag (no longer single use) to protect from droughts and skinning, it also catches transpiration gases and moisture and maintains a moist environment for the dough piece to expand. The kitchen was quite cool @19 deg C so i used the Subaru wagon sitting outside in the sun with a very pleasant 31 degrees C Just about perfect. After just over 2 hours the proof was now ready the oven was pre heated to the max the tray with boiling water and a terry towel hand towel was doing its thing in the bottom of the oven the first loaf was tipped out onto a hot baking sheet and scored and into the oven the temperature was set at 210 C. The idea of cranking up to max is that a lot of the hot air is lost when the door is opened for loading plus the steam generation is also lowering the temp as steam is formed at 100. the steam tray is pulled from the oven after 10 to 15 minutes once the crust is set and there is no more oven spring taking place. the bake takes 30 to 35 minutes to complete. On this occasion the second loaf followed the first, i had placed this in the fridge whilst the first loaf baked just to slow its development. Over all very happy with the result and will be trying this one again quite soon, It will be a good swap for some caper bush cuttings and possibly some caper seeds too from Fiona
i have attached a chart showing the differences from the Chad Robertson formula and mine
I will be travelling away from Australia to Europe later this year and looking for some s/d starter to use on my adventure, meeting other bakers is also great fun. I will be staying in Huddersfield (UK) but also Guizerex in the Sth of France, Barga in Tuscany and also Rome in Italy Time frame is May - June. Not long now
I made some bread today to give away as a thankyou to some one that belongs to the local facebook "available for Barter" group its an Orange and Poppyseed loaf. its the first time i've made it and was quite pleased with the result the smaller loaf was for us and the other for giving away.
the dough was a 3 hour dough
the larger loaf weighed off at 500g the smaller one was 334g
There is 0.5% Turmeric in this dough 2% salt 2% lard 2% poppy seed and 1% dry yeast 13,75% OJ 42% water 1 Egg
thought I would share this nice little loaf that I made for a friend the other day its 50% wholemeal with home brew stout, a yeasted loaf. Unfortunately no inside shot as it was given away and well received by a friend that was showing us his commercial smoking equipment that can also bake a loaf of bread but not at the same time of course .
I was looking at doing a loaf from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery book Potato Bread from around 19th century, I ended up having to improvise, I used wholemeal Spelt instead of wholewheatmeal @ 30% then when weighing up the 70% white flour ran out and had to add a small amount of multigrain. The potato was 13% and I also used the potato water from boiling them, with half milk for the liquid. In the book it said that this bread was particularly popular for the making of toast and that the loaf was soft ,moist and airy to which I can concur. Not quite following the book but pretty close to it and definitely one I will make again
Mothers day here in Australia tomorrow so I made a batch of dinner rolls by request from my daughter for tomorrow's celebration. I know its not mothers day all over, and my mum used to think it was great as she lived in England and ended up having two mothers days. Sadly she is no longer with us, but I do have a super mother in law so to her and any of the Aussie mums out there I do hope you enjoy your very special day.
I made a nice soft loaf the other day using milk in the dough, I wanted to make another similar loaf as my wife enjoyed it so much So this time I enriched the dough with olive oil and cottage cheese along with an egg and added dried garlic flakes for good measure. I topped that by adding grated chedder and parmesan on top in the last 5 minutes of the bake
In the last shot you can see the softness of the crumb as the loaf is yielding under its own weight where I propped the loaf up for a better angle to the light picture it bounces right back, the taste is all there and I am sure it will make wonderful toast if it lasts that long , if the first slices for the pictures and taste testing are anything to go by
It was the slightly misshapen one that got the chop, you can see some of the garlic flake in the loaf
I have not posted for a while but thought id share some bread that was made today , I was using up some stout that I had opened and I also used up the wholemeal flour that I had, it was intended to be 50% but it ended up a bit more than that. same goes for the stout where I used 420mls and 160ml s of water. I soaked the w/m in all the liquid and had chores to attend to. I weighed up the rest of the ingredients so that I could add them upon my return. As it happened l had to go to the city to file some legal papers and the soak ended up being 7 hours! The dough was then mixed by hand and again used up some compressed yeast that I had on hand. The dough ended up having a 3 hour bulk fermentation and was divided and given 20 minutes bench rest before final shaping . I made 2 loaves that I have not previously shaped before and I cant recall the name given to these, but they remind me of a frenchmen's beret .They are currently cooling so will have to post an inside shot later.
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