As stressful as the last few weeks were for me in the business, I was fortunate to find 3 days to get away to my favourite B.C.
We had a crowd over on Firday night for a pizza party. Of the dozen balls of dough I prepared, we made 10 pizzas in my wfo with various toppings. I was the pizziaolo and with all of the activity there were no photos taken of any of the final products :(
This is a favorite here, but i decided to tweak the formula abit as i was short on whole wheat flour. To compensate for the shortage of ww flour, i increased the soaker by 20%. The dough was also fermented in the fridge during the initial fermentation for 7 hours, so i decided to add 1.5 tsp of diastatic wheat malt flour.
Having almost twice the levain on hand, i decided to increase the total dough yield and bake 2.3 kg dough into 4 batards.
A week ago i started my own starter, the wild yeast starter i found here. After a week, my starter looked a bit like an ADHD-starter. Very active, bubbles, smelled nice so even though i planned on baking after 14 days, i already baked something.
And... wauw. Amazing! The taste, the texture... i am in love. I made a Norwich Sourdough, an easy first-time sourdough but one that i will continue to bake.
Some pictures; before final rise overnight in the fridge:
This is from the same sourdough burger buns dough that has been retarded overnight
It being summer in AZ, we are baking our pizzas on the gas grill outside. We prefer the big old GE inside for pizzas but the gas grill does a half decent job with the pizza stone heated up. One plus is that the gas grill can get to 650 F and the crust is super crispy, even though the top may not be browned enough.
See through pepperoni can go under the cheese adn still bake up well trapping that fat next to the sauce.
Using the recipe from a member here (dwfender) to produce this lovely soft burger bun.
In order to produce a healthier bun yet maintaining its fluffy texture. I replaced 30% of the white bread flour with wholewheat flour and increased the milk by 45g.
So with these produce pack we are 12 weeks into a 26 week season. I can't believe I am already that far and still coming up with new ideas for breads. My maple oat idea hasn't worked out yet but we are thinking closer to October will be a good time for that one. This weeks bread was Sundried Tomato and Basil. This bread was easily one of the best breads of the season. It has a slight red tint to the whole bread with a rustic floured crust. there were more orders for this one as well so I know it was popular. As far as this weeks farmers market I got pretty ambitious.
Ever since I read about this bread baked by Varda (recipe here) I have wanted to try to bake one. I managed to pick up what I thought was Chocolate Malted Rye which is one of the key ingredients at a local brewers supply store. Unfortunately I later learned that what I bought was chocolate malted barley. Never the less I still figured it was worth giving it a go anyway.
We needed to come up with a white bread that had around 30% of home milled, whole grains that did't disappoint when it came to flavor and sour. We have been developing 80% and higher whole grains with robust flavor and sour but, some folks just don’t like breads like that .....even though that should be against the bread laws :-)
