Blog posts

 A few days ago my wife decided to make her delicious meat sauce and I volunteered to make a bread to go with it.  I didn't have time to create a starter so I made a straight dough based on the German Style rolls I have made before which I posted about here.

I of course had to change it up a little since that's kind of what I like to do.  I added some freshly ground whole Kamut flour and used honey instead of sugar.

The Chinese steamed bun is the bread of my childhood. The dough can be used for many different applications. The most well known would be char siu bao (steamed BBQ pork bun). The dough can also be filled with other savory things like chicken or vegetables. There are sweet bean paste and custard filled ones too. My mom likes to roll up a piece of Chinese sausage (lop cheong) to make a Chinese version of 'pig-in-a-blanket'. And they can be plain when meant to be served with Peking duck or pork belly.

2014 Dabrownman’s TFL Blog Index

1/1/2014 - New Year’s Panettone - 2014

1/3/2014 - YW SD Spelt and White Whole Wheat Miche

1/5/2014 -  Saturday Night Pizza - 1/4/2014

I did another experiment.  A few weeks ago, I made my first Vermont sourdough.  I froze half the dough to bake later.  The photo at top is the loaf I made today with the frozen dough. (The dough was frozen after bulk fermentation).  I defrosted it in the refrigerator and took it out last night.  It was still pretty cold (with a small frozen center), so I let it warm up and did three stretch and folds and sprayed a little water on the dough as it was stiff.

To use up the last of this super duper levain we ground up some more of our 8 multigrain mix of: wheat, buckwheat, oat, farro, rye, spelt, barley and Kamut.  We got an 85% extraction when we did the sifting this time and used the 15% hard nits to feed the levain.

I usually make this bread as  500g boules, but the beautiful large bâtards and miches I've seen  from Josh, Syd and others in the past week or so had me craving a larger loaf. So this 1kg bâtard was baked this afternoon, and it is good. I think it's kind of pretty, too.

It's been too long.  I use to make this religiously before I moved to the West Coast.  Bread has overcome my desire to make pastry in the past 8 years.  And crazy enough i was able to apply so much I've learned since this recipe was born.  I switched a flying sponge for an overnight Biga and squeezed 16 % Whole Grain in there with no problem  I'll keep increasing this every time til I notice it losing its luster.  

Shaped

   Spring is finally here so along with grilling hamburgers and hot dogs and steak it was time to crank up the grill and make some pizza.

My pizza set-up allows me to get the temperature over 700 degrees.  I'm not sure how hot is really get since my thermometer only goes to 700 degrees so I would say it's probably closer to 800 or higher.

The absorption necessary to produce this soft loaf was relatively high, at 82%. This is the second loaf that I have made with Bob's Red Mill stone ground whole wheat flour. I used 78% absorption on the first run, which caused excessive loading on the mixer. Water was added to bring the absorption up to 80½%, which still resulted in a somewhat dry crumb.

This loaf was (of course) made with the re-mixed straight dough method. Here are a few more observations on dough mixing and re-mixing:

We decided to grind up some more whole grains to feed then 15% extraction to this Levain Beast.  It loved the hard bits and doubled in less than an 2 hours again as we pulled out 100 g to make the naan.