Blog posts

Vienna Bread

While looking through my copy of "Manna" for a particular recipe, I chanced upon the chapter entitled "Vienna Bread". Vienna bread became very popular throughout most of Europe towards the end of the 19th century, with the arrival of roller milled white flour, compressed  yeast and steam injected ovens.

It is characterised by a soft, fairly tight crumb and a thin crispy crust and is usually made as rolls or small batons.

A few months ago, Jack Sturgess mentioned that a breadstick challenge stumped most of the British Bake Off contestants. I happened to be making a batch of ciabatta at the time, so I thought, why not dedicate some of the dough to breadsticks. The results were pretty good and we love a crunchy snack with our nightly glass or two of wine. Anyway, after 4 passes, I think I finally have a repeatable process that produces attractive, munchable grissini.

 

Used one whole bag /1# of the new Kernza grain I received this week. I made a YW levain and used YW as part of the hydration. I prepped and flaked 1/2 the Kernza and ground the rest into flour . I have my second order from L’Epicerie for the t65 arriving Monday so used that as well as some Turkey Red that I ground . 

Ammerland Black Bread   Ammerlander Schwarzbrot (Germany)

The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg

I baked this bread mid-Dec and haven't had a chance to post. 

This bread is a nice heavy and crunchy loaf. I think I baked it a little too long which made it a tad dry but I wanted to be sure it was not gummy.

Tasting Notes:

I'm still working on learning to bake with 100% whole spelt since I received a lovely Christmas present of a 2 kg bag of Anita's Organic Whole Spelt from the mill!  So to also learn about about the use of a stiff sweet levain I thought I'd use one in this non enriched dough for the first time.  As you may know having a significant amount of sugar in the starter creates osmotic pressure causing the microbes to dehydrate.  This has a greater negative effect on the LAB than it does on the yeast.

I've been meaning to make these sablés for some time.  I've adapted a recipe I found in Jennifer Lapidus' book Southern Ground.

YIELD: ABOUT 40 COOKIES

240g (2⅔ cups) whole-rye flour

270g (2¼ cups) whole einkorn flour

390g (1¾ cups) unsalted butter, at room temperature

180g (1 cup) granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling, I would use turbinado sugar for coating in the future rather than granulated

½ teaspoon fine sea salt

100g (4 ounces) bittersweet chocolate, chopped

For 20 cookies

Jan. 6 - 7, 2022.  78th bake.  RYE!  

This will be my first attempt at a 100% rye. I'm kind of following Denisa's post here: 
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/67054/100-whole-grain-rye-sourdough-bread

The goal is to divide her formula by 3 and make one loaf of about 835 g.

Summer here where I live. Family favourite; Base is Neapolitan pizza dough. 

Margherita pizza from our backyard brick oven. Hard to beat.

Jan 4, 2022.

This is a remake of #71, scaled for 3 clay pots (4" diameter at top), but will be baked in regular sized muffin cups.

Soaker: