Blog posts

I again used my YW/ SSD levains to make a pulla dough. Having chocolate butter cream and cinnamon sugar ITJB, sliced almonds and chopped hazelnuts on hand, I rolled the dough out as a babka. The Kranz variation as I Googled, involves cutting the rolled up babka in two and twisting the stands together. Then I folded it into a loaf pan. Oh my!

Happy baking, Brian 

This would sort of be our everyday sandwich bread if we had one t least one with a crumb that doesn’t have bits of seeds, nuts and fruits in it.   We do like bits of stuff in the crumb a lot but we have been working on improving the tastes of Lucy’s take on  Josh’s more whole grain version of Pain Maggione.

Short post

40% Whole Wheat Sourdough

[URL=http://s1292.photobucket.com/user/Steelhead503/media/Baking/32014Bake1_zpse237142c.jpg.html][/URL]

Crumb Shot

I've been craving a little burger action this week and thought why don't I try my hand at baking some buns.  After all, everyone knows that you can't have a good burger with out a good bun.

The Whole Wheat bread on the left has 283 grams of sprouted wheat kernels. The second loaf is Whole Wheat with  Millet. And both loaves contained 100% freshly milled hard Red Spring Wheat from Great River Milling. The flour actually had a bouquet - that's a first. The recipes are from PR's Whole Grain Breads. Both used a delayed fermentation with sourdough ( refrigerated for 18 hours) and followed PR's epoxy directions for the soaker and the sourdough starter.  Sprouted loaf is slightly sour, soft, wheaty and moist. 

I bought 5/500g  bags of Italian Chestnut flour a number of years ago. Somehow I never found anything that I liked to use it in so it sat in the freezer in its vacuum packs waiting...and waiting..and....well you get the idea. I have been cleaning out and sorting and using up . I decided to only cook from my larder for 2014  , at least as much as possible. 

Ian had posted a date SD and I thought I would go with that basic idea. I added 100g toasted almonds and 2 tbsp grated orange zest. Levain was my rye starter fed with apple yeast water. I used whey for 292g of the dough water and AYW for the rest . I soaked the coarsley chopped dates in warm whey but didn't cook them down. I divided it into 3 boules. Great fragrance and very tender crumb. Sticky goodness when you get a date chunk. Baked in 500 degree pots for 5 min. and then 10 min at 460 lid removed and 15 more min. Bold bake and nice ears.

  It doesn't get much better than this.  A pretty simple ingredient list....for me at least put together with TxFarmer's amazing 36 hours method and you have an amazing loaf of bread.  When you can just eat the bread without anything else, you know you have done something right.

I was inspired by David's San Francisco Sourdough Quest (see recipe link below) and set out to duplicate his fantastic loaves.  I stayed as close to the recipe as possible.

I'd like to start a discussion on the direction that the baking industry is going in. Why is something so fundamentally essential to qualities of human life, trending towards inhumanity. Frankly, the logistics are this; It's a difficult industry to make a living at, the personal costs are innumerably higher than most professions and the overall quality, including of staff as well is decreasing dramatically each year.