Blog posts

Has anyone else here  also enjoyed the new audiobook by Chad Robertson and Jennifer Latham?

I have started using their double booster feeding with good results and also love their mixing schedule introducing water in steps. Now I have been doing that anyway but love the shorter intervals and tried going beyond by normal comfort zone and upping by feel..ending on 87% hydration for a loaf with 2O% WW, 30% Canadian white and the rest Shipton Mill No. 4 Strong White..

This is an adapted recipe from The Perfect Loaf where I put in  my usual amount of 250 g of levain rather than the 180 g that the recipe scales up to when I increase everything to make 3 loaves. I did this to speed up fermentation since this was a very sluggish dough based on the last time I made this. Adding the extra levain cut the bulk by an hour (total bulk was 4 hours and 15 minutes rather than 5 and a quarter hours). 

I also reduced the hydration a bit and soaked the raisins in Bourbon. 

This time I used yellow miso which is milder in flavour than the more assertive red miso I usually use, only because red miso was unavailable the last time I bought miso.  Also my homemade miso is far from ready yet needing many more months to ferment.  The furikake I bought for this bake didn’t have the bonito flakes in it so instead was a simpler seaweed and sesame seed.  The furikake is so delicious with just steamed rice and that is what I usually eat it with.

Today I baked Hamelman’s Deli Rye Bread with caraway seeds. I used 15% freshly milled stone-ground rye that was pre-fermented overnight in an 80% hydration stiff sourdough starter. The overall formula is 66% hydration and includes 1.75% caraway seeds. The dough had a good feel throughout the process and was proofed in a linen couche. I baked the loaf on an oven stone in a pre-steamed oven and steam for the first 10 minutes. The oven spring was particularly good and crumb nice and soft.

I tried a couple of Maurizio's recipes with Kamut (baguettes and ciabatta), and while I had other issues with those breads, I loved the nutty/buttery taste of that grain!

I had some Kamut flour left from those bakes, and recently saw Benito posted his amazing looking 20% and 30% Kamut breads. So I decided to also just go for it! I used his 30% recipe, with some simplifications of the procedure (e.g. no lamination and shorter autolyse). Here is the compositions of the bread (I made two loaves): https://fgbc.dk/qeo

Back at the same sesame semolina sourdough baguettes but with some changes to try to improve the crumb. So I made some changes in the hopes of achieving a more open crumb. The first significant change I made was to delete the commercial yeast altogether, this change was made by accident and wasn’t planned as removing the commercial yeast wasn’t something that I thought would improve the crumb.  In fact, I thought that the addition of commercial yeast was part of what was giving my an open crumb.

my journey into flour milling started after stumbling upon a video of Michael Pollan lamenting about commercial flours inferiority. 

(Above image is pre-cooked, shortly after mixing.)

Sep 15, 2020.

This is the rolled oats and seed loaf, called "Adventure Bread", from "Josey Baker Bread."

http://www.amazon.com/Josey-Baker-Bread-Baking-Awesome-ebook/dp/B00GOJT6LU?tag=froglallabout-20

I try to keep my loaves around the 50% whole grain level for health reasons and decided I should just bite the bullet and go for 100% this time.

Ingredients:

• 350g home milled hard red winter wheat (Redeemer)
• 75g home milled spelt
• 85g starter at 100% hydration (my starter did contain some KABF so technically the loaf is more like 95% whole grain)
• 360g water
• 10g salt

Process: