Rose Levy Beranbaum has put together a step-by-step guide to making bread, plus essential equipment and ingredients and 8 classic recipes for Epicurious. The primer looks good. Except for one part. I would revise the list of "essential equipment" for bread baking by including only the following:
Absolutely Essential:
The Roasted Potato Bread from Jeffrey Hamelman's "Bread" is another bread that has been on my "to bake list" for a long, long time. It is a yeasted, lean bread made with pâte fermentée. It uses a mix of bread and whole wheat flour, and, of course, roasted potatoes.
I made these in the recommended, traditional "pain fendu" (split bread) shape. It looked cool in the pictures and gave me an excuse to buy yet another wooden rolling pin, because my others are too thick, and the dowling I have is too thin. I'm sure you all understand.
I decided to revive my dormant Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail starter last week, so I had a lot of nice ripe starter by the end of the week on hand that I wanted to use up. I used an excel spreadsheet I made up for Flo's 1-2-3 sourdough to use up any amount of excess ripe sourdough starter, except in this case, I needed to increase the hydration since I was using all whole wheat flour in the final dough, so it became 1-2.25-3 bread (78% hydration final dough).
Susan's "Faux Deli Rye"
75g firm starter
210g water
25g rye flour
275g high-gluten flour (if using bread flour or AP, adjust the water)
1 tsp caraway seed powder (optional, but good)
1 tbsp caraway seeds
6g salt
I'll have to give this sourdough recipe another try...it is very tasty! I bulk fermented it overnite in my very cool bathroom! Though I did not succeed in this loaf turning out the way I felt it should...I think it definately deserves a little more effort next time!
I used a mixture of Dark and Golden Raisins. With a light sprinkle of brown sugar and cinnamon!
A busy morning today. First up was a birthday party for my son at a local rollerskating rink. The high point was the Spy vs. Spy theme cake that dstroy decorated:
Based on this image. Note that the wick of the bomb was a candle.
Last week, I made baguettes using Pat's (proth5) recipe. They were good. I was amazed at the open crumb I got from a 65% hydration dough. See my blog entry:
http://tfl.thefreshloaf.com/node/10852/baguette-crumb-65-hydration-dough
My usual sourdough starter is semi-firm. I make it at a 1:3:4 ratio of starter to water to flour. Many of the sourdough bakers on TFL favor a 1:2:2 ratio, but fewer seem to use a true "liquid levain" which is more like 125% hydration. I was curious to try a pain au levain using a liquid starter and found the Pain au Campagne recipe in Leader's "Local Breads."
