Blog posts

Below is the crumb shot.  I am working on my own flour blend.  Fortunately, my sister is with me at the cottage, and she has a sensitive palette.  And she loves bread.

This is a mixture of bread flour, whole wheat flour, sprouted buckwheat flour, and whole dark rye flour at 72% hydration. I made an error with the percentages of the different flours because I'm challenged with math, so I aways work with 1000 grams of my base flour (white bread flour), I can duplicate.

It tasted wonderful.

A really fascinating exercise: wild yeast water. Not sourdough, as I used the water straight up without making a flour-based pre-ferment. I've subsequently read about different applications of the water, basically to strengthen the sour starter, but I was ecstatic to see that it actually leavened the bread on its own. That's magic.

After a long time I decide to experiment with tastes and colors. Right now the elderberry in our vicinity is getting mature and there is abundance of Hokkaido squashes on our home garden. I also decided to coat the bread and dust it with extra flour before scoring it to get some extra effects.

Breaking this bread is tantamount to opening a holiday present. At least, it feels that way when I cut the bread. The abundant good eats: olives, walnuts, sunflower seeds, herbs de Provence, lemon zest, filled the interior to the rim, are what make this bread sing. 

So I added some bread flour, reduced the rye flour and left the H2O the same. Net reduction in hydration.

So here I am again- 8 years after the last post.  It's great to be back!  I see some old familiar names from the last decade.  I see more new members who, doubtless, will feel like old friends soon enough.

While I was putting together our "treats" (rolls for the man and rye for me), I still wanted to bake some day-to-day sandwich bread that we both would enjoy.  I hadn't done any high-percentage whole durum for a while, so I put together a dough with 55% durum on the Thursday, and it ended up in the fridge to ferment overnight.

I'm mostly down to one crutch or a cane, and moving around better, so thought that it would be a good week to re-stock the freezer with my husband's favourite (the oat kamut rolls from http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/52425/catching-myself-oat-kamut-rolls-july-7), and a variation on my own favourite, which is 100% rye.

Upon request of some friends, I repeated the Cranberry Wild Rice version from a couple of weeks ago but with a few changes. I put in currants instead of raisins and pumpkin seeds instead of Pecans. 

We've been away  visiting family in Switzerland (with a side trip to Ireland) for. the last couple of months.  While there I  couldn't resist having a try with Swiss flour etc.  So a niece had a rye starter that I was able to use.  I just used  30% rye flour and the rest the white bread flour.  just a basic 1:2:3 loaf. Funny baking in someone else's kitchen, using an unknown starter, unfamiliar flours and equipment and oven.