Blog posts

For this bake I wanted to use the Bob's Red Mill hot cereal mix that I had in the freezer.  Inspiration from Danni3113  who has made some great porridge mix breads.

8 am mix

Hot cereal mix  117 gm 

170 gm boiling water.

Cover and leave on bench until I got home 

2 pm autolyse 1 hour

466 gm bread flour

203 gm water - too dry so added another 50 gm, total 253 gm

Edit: include cereal mix in autolyse

3 pm

Add 12 gm salt and 

 262 gm 100% hydration rye levain and knead. 

      This is a new version of a recipe I made a while ago.  I replaced around 30% of the high gluten flour with fresh milled and sifted whole wheat flour and used First Clear flour instead of High Gluten flour.  I added some cheese on top of some of them just to make it interesting.  I also added some extra water which the thirsty whole wheat gobbled up.

For the water in the main dough I used ice water.

Thanks to the influence of Isand66 and danni3ll3 and dabrownman (among others), I seem to have become somewhat hooked on the textures and flavours created by adding a cooked porridge made with toasted grains.  Since I wasn't sure how my "challenge" rolls would taste, I still wanted a moist and flavourful loaf for our sandwiches, and went with one of my favourite techniques:

A couple of weeks back, leslieruf posted another gorgeous bake http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/387329#comment-387329 , and in the conversation about it issued a challenge for a one-day bake – to see whether “good” flavour could be built that quickly. 

100% whole wheat Irish soda bread

Hello, friends,

My interpretation, is a hybrid of the white flour soda bread I make and Ms. Masons formula. The following are some of the extras I added.

I want to thank Flour.ish.en for the inspiration for this one. The herbes de Provence that I bought have a bit of lavender so it has a nice little zing to it. I am super happy with the crumb on this one considering the amount of add-ins in it.

This recipe makes 3 small loaves. Recipe:

1. Toast 60 g of sunflower seeds and 115 g of walnuts in a dry frying pan. Cool.

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine about my tiny little cottage baking business. He asked what kind of bread I baked -- I'm not sure he'd ever heard of challah. But we started talking about a kind of bread that his Finnish grandmother used to bake all the time: pulla. Fast forward to about a week later and I sent him a picture of that week's batch of challah and he immediately responded that it looked EXACTLY like his grandmother's pulla. Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued.

Followed the method pretty much exactly.  Made 1/2 recipe using my own flour blend (bread flour, 15% whole wheat, 15% sprouted buckwheat).  Hydration 77% when all was said and done.

Hey All, 

I finally started a project and unintentionally ditched the blog.  So much social media work and i had no blogging left.

Thought I'd say hello to any of the folks still hanging around and show some of my work/progress.