Blog posts

One of the advantages of doing the same recipe back to back combined with having reasonably decent notes is it's easier to reproduce the last bake.

Tweaks for this bake: No steam (sprayed with water instead), and a foil tent for the second half of the bake. Otherwise, I did everything the same as bake #1 (same hydration, fermentation times, all of it). Oh and I followed minioven's advice and made sure the rim if the pan was in the center of the toaster oven.

Have never made a bad olive bread. And the same is also true for breads made with blueberries! And when blueberry is in the dough the bread gets a beautiful painterly effect.

Spent Grain was the dough that i have wanted to do for a while so having secured a quantity to try it got a run today i also took one of the loaves down to the brewery for them to try too. i used Caputo Classica flour and the spent grain from a Stout preparation. The dough was a 3 hour bulk fermentation . I used the home brew Miners Stout that i have brewed for next months bake day and i used that as the liquid component of the dough. The spent grain was at the rate of 25%.

To prevent unsightly pinhole crumbs caused by excessive hydration of whole wheat flour, before I bake, I test the flour's absorption capacity by autolyzing it under different hydration levels and observing its gluten development. The hydration at which the dough starts to slack/tear is the bottom line for me to stop adding water to the dough. 

Our kitchen has been completely out of commission for a partial remodel (cabinet refacing, which required every cabinet and drawer be emptied and packed out of harms way) for the last 2 weeks. Things are put back together enough now that I got to bake today. Still using the toaster oven outside for now, until I can put the new oven through a few trial runs to verify temps and learn how to work it. 

I haven't made a miche in a very long time. Last week, I got a bag of high extraction ("Type 80") flour from Central Milling and remembered that I had previously (like 11 years ago!) used this kind of flour for a miche based on the San Francisco Baking Institute formula that I liked a lot. We had made this bread for the Artisan II (Sourdough) workshop. Although we used white flour, our instructor told us that, ideally, it would be made with a high-extraction flour. My experience indicates this formula makes delicious bead either way.

To learn more about concentrated lactic acid sourdough (CLAS), please see here and here. 

It must be the cooler weather that is encouraging more baking or perhaps the desire to check out breads that im going to be taking to functions or checking yeast quantities for timed yeasted doughs, but here is another. This is a dough using a mix called Super food blend from Aldi. i didnt make it a sweet dough as i envisage it being used on a cheese board at an 80 year old birthday celebration. happy with it but may end up making it into thinner sticks just right for cheese or plain butter. it should go well alongside the Parmesan and onion bread i did prior to this one 

I haven’t made a pizza in ages and had a hankering for sourdough pizza.  I’m made minor changes to how I ferment my sourdough pizza dough, I’ve realized that my pizza dough in the past had been underfermented.

Checking on the yeast quantities required for a 4 hour bulk fermentation 1.3% fresh compressed yeast seems to be about right The dough is a cheese and onion bread which i will be making again on the weekend for an 80th birthday celebration for one of my gym class mates

  5% raw brown onion and 10% shaved Parmesan cheese