Blog posts

The other day I was so loving the feel of my dough for pizza (those Italian pizza flours are something special) that I was wondering how it would turn out as one of the components in a bread.

These somewhat whimsical breads are a result of that. A mashup of two quite different doughs!

The one component is a pizza dough made with a poolish and a small amount of instant yeast and produced in the fridge over 48 hours (24 hours for the poolish and 24 for the final dough) with a couple of warm hours here and there to let it puff up.

I hadn’t baked a Hokkaido Milk Bread in a long time since I’ve been playing around with high pff loaves which have been largely lean doughs.  We have guests staying with us a few days so wanted to baked something delicious and pretty.  I decided to bake a 100% organic stoneground whole wheat black sesame sourdough Hokkaido milk bread using ground black sesame seeds.  This is the first time I’ve used flowers on a milk bread, I wasn’t sure how the flowers would do with an egg wash, but they did well.

Today's planned experiment was adding vital wheat gluten (hoping for more rise and softer crumb). The unplanned one was baking the double batch of dough as one huge loaf. i don't know what I was thinking. 

It was over 2kg of dough. The largest loaf I've attempted. Almost a miche? Ok, maybe it doesn't qualify cos it's oval and has too many ingredients. It had to be oval to fit in my oven. (Sigh. One day. Everyone has a Grail Loaf, right?)

I mainly use chakki atta flour because it's inexpensive and easy to get. In 10kg bags too. And the mill is almost local to where I live. My bread is slowly improving in spite of my lack of skills - by changing just one thing each time I bake. In this version I added olive oil. I'm hoping for fluffy-ish. One day.

800g water

1000g chakki atta flour (Gingin Flour Mill)

0.5 tsp diastatic malt 

1.5 tsp salt

200g starter

2 tbsp olive oil 

0.5 cup mixed oats and seeds

This year I have been baking a great deal more Whole Grain bread, and I have been intrigued especially by the work of danni3ll3.  I have several bakes from her blog in my bookmarks.  This is based fairly closely on one of them.  There are some variations though:  I had no Spelt grain or flour, so I left it out and made up the weight in the Red Fife.  I used low fat yogurt since that is what I had.

I was not originally planning on using my pullman pan for this bake, but with the high percentage of rye and spelt fresh-milled flour in this bake, there was no chance of getting this into anything else to bake.

I used fresh milled Ryman Rye from Barton Springs Mill along with some fresh milled spelt. Both were sifted once with a #30 drum sieve and re-milled at the finest setting in my MockMill 200.

I decided to do a scald, which provides added plasticity to the crust and crumb. It also tends to make the crumb softer. I used fresh-milled Ryman Rye that was not sifted.

The only store-bought flour used in this bake was the small amount from the seed starter to make the levain. I wanted to use as close to 100% fresh-milled flour as I could. Barton Springs Mill, Butler’s Gold whole wheat berries, and Blue Hopi corn were used in this bake. The results were pretty good. The dough fermented a little too long during bulk, and there was not much oven spring or refrigerator rise either.

I used my new, smaller-sized square bannetons, and I could have definitely used more dough in each basket. Next time, I will up the overall dough amount.

The recipe for this bread comes from That Sourdough Gal: https://thatsourdoughgal.com. I followed it almost exactly as written, but my bulk fermentation was much shorter than hers. The taste and texture of this bread is wonderful. I really recommend this formula.

I'm embarassed to admit it took 7 batches of trials just for cinnamon rolls lol. Don't get me wrong. Although I did some dough-related tweaks, it was designing the filling and topping that gave me headache.

And look at the cute shape! I almost changed the watermark to I-just-hit-puberty. by Jay 😆 lol

I love cinnamon rolls, but there are several things that I perceive as product flaws to the classic ones that I wanted to address (along with the tweaks):

For our dinner party tonight we will be seeing from friends from Fort Lauderdale Florida who we won’t see very often anymore since we sold our apartment there.  So I had a busy baking weekend to ensure that they have a good meal at our place.  I have made this cake once before, but having made this once, I made some improvements on it.