Blog posts

Kümmel-Bier Brot (Caraway Beer Bread) from The Rye Baker book. This bread is for lovers of caraway seed (sorry Benny!); it has a whopping 2% caraway seed. The bread is 50% rye and 50% first clear or high-gluten flour, barley malt syrup, and beer for half the liquid. The recipe calls for 2:1 white/medium rye to approximate German 997 rye flour. I did not have any white rye flour but used all medium rye (KA brand) and increased the hydration from 60% to 65%. Vital wheat gluten was used to boost KA bread flour to 14% gluten; beer was Destihl Weissenheimer hefeweizen.

My liquid preferment became active and bubbly yesterday. The taste turned from sweet to pleasantly acidic. Early in the morning I made a preferment, which probably will be ready in 12 hours or so

I received The Bread Baker's Apprentice as a gift this year, which I hadn't baked from yet.  I also have a bag of Central Milling's Old World Bread Flour I got this Fall, which is my favorite bread flour I've tried so far, but due to my fondness for whole grain home milling, I haven't been using it.  I put them together to make Reinhart's simple Pizza Napoletana recipe and to get some practice with instant yeast.

574 g flour

12.5 salt

3 g yeast

25 g olive oil

411 g water

Dough:

Bread flour, 800g

Mashed potatoes (they had some dill in them) 200g

Water, 520g

Diastatic malt,  10g

Salt, 12 g or to taste 

Olive oil, two splashes

Toppings: 

1. Grape tomatoes, cut in half,  oregano 

2. Mashed potatoes, scooped with a teaspoon, spicy vegan sausage,  herbs (dried chive blossoms and thyme) 

I also used emulsion of water, olive oil and salt on both focaccias 

Version 2.0

Last week I made a lemon cranberry kugelhof and quite enjoyed it. However, Naturaleigh mentioned getting more out of my lemon zest by mashing it with the sugar. I started wondering what other innovations I could try to amplify flavour, loft and richness.

Modifications

I modified last week's recipe as follows:

I made a batch of pizza dough balls last night for next week's and it just occurred to me to steal one to make a baguette this morning, which is exactly what I did. It had 20% WW, 30% whole grain Kamut, and the rest was with bread flour. My pizza and baguette doughs share the same recipe except the pizza dough had a lower hydration and less developed, all made with a 95% biga and a 5% SD starter. I was very pleased with the expansion in the oven, which had twice the height and roundness of a 50% rye loaf I baked yesterday.

I was looking for something different that included cranberries and found this: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/66533/cranberry-poppy-seed-and-grapefruit-kamut-sourdough. 

To learn more about concentrated lactic acid sourdough (CLAS), please see here and here. 

Trying different grains now that I have the Mockmill 200, and this week, I experimented with Turkey Red and Red Fife.  Recipe was my standard overnight sourdough recipe with equal parts of Turkey Red and Red Fife as the whole grain component.  The grains were milled to pass through a #40 sieve.  Result was about 95% extraction.  The bran collected was then scalded and used in the final mix.  Real happy with how they turned out externally.  Nice blisters and bloom.  On one of the doughs, I tried using a modified version of Danni's shaping method to use with

Two days ago, misinterpreting what Dan was after, I posted a Pullman loaf that baked up short and dense.  With the feedback from several folks, a few YouTube videos and a consultation with Mr. Hamelman via his book, I made a series of changes, seemingly all for the better.