Blog posts

Some of my classroom time for the Master Food Volunteer Program run by Kansas State Research Extension Service has been spent at the Olathe, KS campus of Kansas State University. It's a nice, modern building equipped with up to date classrooms, communications, conference rooms and a well equipped test kitchen that my class has been fortunate to use as a kind of playground for making jellies, baking pies, drying foods, and more.

No not a publishing company, or a fancy new German housewares line - just a humble cobbler's loaf and miller's miche.  

Easter came early in our house this year J

No, seriously, I wanted to re-jigg my Hot Cross buns recipe in time for Easter and decided to start practicing well in advance.

The result has exceeded all my expectations – deliciously fluffy buns, studded with a variety of spiced fruit – read the whole recipe on my blog here

There are times when I stare at my pantry and decide to be creative and use leftover flours in bread, this is one of those times.

I had some Whole spelt flour, and Whole wheat flour, and therefore decided to use both in a 50% wholegrain sourdough hearth bread. I made up a formula that benefits from my ripe White liquid starter, here it is:

Preferment:

Bread Flour: 188 g

Water: 188 g

White Starter: 1.5 Tbl

Dough:

Whole Wheat Flour: 280 g

Whole Spelt Flour: 120 g

All Purpose Flour: 251 g

Well, I have strung everybody along for long enough ...

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So I'm about three months into my sourdough "experiment", have my starter (I call him Niles) nicely sour and thriving. Having tried a number of recipes, my biggest problem has been consistency. The nice thing about making bread... one dollar experiments.

Has anyone else noticed that the bags of 5lb bag are an ounce light? My last three bags have been short, and that's not counting the bag itself!

Cheers,

Wingnut

Organic Sprouted Wheat Berry with Whole wheat and Rye & 50% Sourdough Starter.

 400 gm.  Organic AP flour

  60 gm.  Organic KA WW

  30 gm.  Organic Medium Rye

  11 gm.  Kosher salt

1 TPSP Brown Sugar (Just cause I thought a little sweetness would go well with the wheat berry taste)

300 gm. H20

250 gm. 100% hydration starter fed twice

~ 1/8 tsp instant yeast (just to help in my cold damp Seattle kitchen J)

~ 1 cup sprouted wheat berries

12:00 AM March 9, 2013 (72 hrs)

Red

Lots of small bubbles on the surface only. Sorry; too hard to photograph. :(

Blue

Flattened to sides of container but no difference in volume. Based on the time passed, the directions say I should refresh now. But it hasn't puffed up the way Sweetbird's did . Line of dough on container is the true measurement. I've decided to give this another 24 hours and see what happens. Ugh...