Blog posts

I took the Tartine Country Rye recipe and added whole wheat.

Ingredients:

• 300g bread flour
• 115g whole wheat
• 85g rye flour
• 400g water
• 100g mature levain 
• 10g salt

After combining (yesterday afternoon) and a few turns in the bucket, that dough sat in the fridge overnight. This morning I went to shape it and had a hard time working with it. Just that little bit of Rye really made it sticky. But the good news is that my starter did just fine!

These were made as gifts for some of my office colleagues.  I ended up keeping one for tasting purposes :0.

I used hand milled durum and whole wheat both sifted and a little KAF bread flour.  The ricotta was added for some extra softness and that combined with the olive oil made for a nice smooth dough.  I added some smoked and black sesame seeds as a topping and on 2 of the breads topped it with some melted cheese.

The bread turned out great with a nice nutty flavor from the durum and a soft crumb.

I've been very quiet -- mainly because I've spent the last year baking the same recipe over and over, tweaking it slightly until I've got it completely reproducible. I've varied the additions (various seeds, dried fruits, etc.), but the base bread has been the same. For 2018, I'm going to venture out of this comfort zone and get more experimental again.

Lucy is back to making white bread batards with a small bran levain.  But this one was a bit different in a couple of 3 ways.  First off, the levain was a white one that was retarded for a week after it was built and the bran didn’t go in until the day before the bake as build number 4.

I performed my due diligence (old IT terms die hard!) and came up empty when looking to see whether anyone on the internet had posted a reference to the FWSY Field Blend #1 as baguettes.  So the door was swung open for me to get in “first”.

It's been a busy couple weeks since I've posted. Two notable things have happened: Louis has been misbehaving, and I took a brioche/challah class. 

Dec 4th: I can't remember what this was, but I'm guessing a 50% whole wheat overnight boule.

 I noticed last time I went to a large retailer that the KitchenAid attachment to grind grain was on sale for $30. I had 20 percent off coupons. I knew that wasn’t going to work well, but I thought that if I made  10 loaves of bread it would not be such a bad investmenI am now a convert. Although it was a clunky noisy machine that works slow Lee

Today I experimented with a recipe from the Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook that I borrowed from the library. Jim Lahey’s techniques are very different from anything I have done before. Besides his method for propagating  a biga, I tried his high speed mixing technique. I think it worked quite well, but I am waiting for it to cool enough to cut into it.

Since we are all about the bread....

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wheat-baking-insight/bakers-farmers-struggle-to-make-any-dough-on-poor-wheat-crop-idUSKBN1E518Y

   Coming in at 65% fresh milled high extraction Durum flour, this one is bursting with flavor.  The addition of the porridge and ricotta cheese takes it over the top.

This is the perfect bread for some home made tomato "gravy" and or grilled with some good olive oil and melted cheese.