I liked the Buttermilk-Whole-Wheat-Bread which I baked just a couple days ago so much that I decided to continue with 100% whole wheat. The Buttermilk-Whole-Wheat-Bread was very soft and light, I have never seen a whole-wheat bread like this.
I thought I would introduce myself here, having been lurking, occasionally commenting and learning more than I thought was possible. (Most notably, sourdough pancakes. Wow!)
I've been baking bread almost since I can remember -- my mother used to make an amazingly sloppy wholemeal loaf that received no kneading and generally ended up brick like; I forget what it was called. Most of my baking was based on Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and Bernard Clayton Jr's The Complete Book of Breads (with a hatred for volume measures every time I used it).
All credit for these go to DedeMed and her inspirational YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEJy5Yksew8&feature=channel.
I made these last night.
Here's my blog post, plus the recipe.
In all honesty, the entire brownie baking night came about because I was bored and wanted something chocolate. The ranting about grocery store brownies was actually me being pissed at myself because I broke down and, instead of baking my much better tasting ones, bought some frosted ones at the store a few nights ago in a pregnancy-craving-induced spending spree.I've been messing with Hamelman's 40% rye with caraway. I like to stick to wild yeast and the bread calls for a bit of commercial yeast. He does suggest that you can just leave it out and ferment it longer, but I wanted to experiment with a long bulk fermentation of the wheat along with the 15 hour preparation of the rye sour. I wanted to bring out more flavour in the wheat as a background against the caraway. It worked out well with my starter refreshment schedule; I have 30g of 100% rye starter discard, I used 17g with the 363g of rye flour and 300g of water.
One of the consequences of being unemployed is that you have all this free time to do whatever your heart wants to do, and my heart wants to cook and bake and spend my waking moments in the kitchen (if I'm not in front of the computer trying to look for long-lost high school classmates). This makes my college-age daughter, home for the summer, happy as a clam for about 3-4 days, then she starts to plead with me to stop else she tips the scale more than she wants to.
My trusted sourdough starter is a firm white one, that I've had for just under a year now. We got off to a shaky start, but it's become amazingly reliable and flexible. It seems to respond very quickly to feedings and has a great leavening capacity. My only minor complaint would be that it's very mild in flavour, and imparts only a slight tanginess to the loaves. So, as an experiment, I decided to start a new rye starter from scratch, and see if this would result in more sour breads.
Happy to say my bread won two blue ribbons and the Scali got a merit award too! Have to admit that there was no other sourdough entered, and it is a small enough fair that nearly everyone gets a ribbon. My sourdough looked pretty sad and it didn't appear to have been cut, but we found a small piece had been removed from one side. All of the other loaves had been cut in half so maybe the judge couldn't get a knife through the crust! A fun experience and I wouldn't be so uptight about it another year. Thanks for all the good wishes, A.
Just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone here at TFL for this amazing community. With the help of all your comments and post I have been able to enjoy baking a variety of bread. Still taking baby steps but very excited. The handbook is also very helpful.
I know I have a long way to go still but I'm enjoying the ride at the moment.
Tereze, Sydney
This is a Wholemeal seeded loaf
I've packed all my stuff, cleaned everything, thrown so much out . . . I'm moving to Basel on Sunday and I'm getting read for it! Yeyy. That's why I stayed the whole day at home. I had to get all these rather annoying things done. Now my room looks very clean and rather empty. Well done, Salome!
Still, I had to make my day somewhat more fun, and a full day at home is perfect for bread baking. Unfortunately, I realized this just after breakfast, so I didn't have time to get my sourdough ready.
