Blog posts

   Who doesn’t like a good English Muffin…toasted with butter or cream cheese?  Nobody that I know of or at least admits to it!  

I’ve made English Muffins many times with varying degrees of success and I have to say this formula is by far my favorite.  It’s adapted from a version I found on King Arthur Flour but with many changes.

I wanted to see how this would work with really old stored starter and a substantial amount of fresh milled whole wheat. Worked beautifully! 

My stored YW starter hasn’t been refreshed in I don’t know how long… maybe months. I milled 400g of a generic WW . I used 40 g of the stored starter and for good measure subbed 200g of stored Apple YW for part of the water. 

My first use of teff flour came during our Gluten Free Community Bake.  Comments made here intrigued me, and I finally got around to experimenting.

To get a good taste of the teff flour, I kept the recipe simple.  I created a teff flour starter over a 3-day period by using my white flour starter and then doing a 1:4:4 refresh every 8 hours.  From there, I used my standard sourdough loaf approach but used a 100% teff flour levain for the 15% prefermented flour.

Today's bake: Semolina Bread

Bread - A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes - Jeffery Hamelman 2nd Ed.

This bread is made from a majority of fresh ground durum wheat along with bread flour and a bit of whole rye which is in the culture. This is my first time making as well as tasting a semolina bread. The durum has a really nice nutty flavor that makes the sesame seeds really stand out. I baked this 2 mins longer than optimal which I've adjusted in the process section. I really like this bread and will definitely make it again.

Tasting Notes

 I wanted to try  another new grain I purchased from Barton Springs Mill called Butler’s Gold Whole Wheat.  The whole wheat berries are harvested from a small farm in Texas.  It’s supposed to be a good neutral flavored whole wheat perfect for mixing with other stronger flours.  I decided to use this exclusively and only mixed it with a small amount of BF.  I did use KAF BF in the Levain so overall it ended up being a  50% WW bread.  I milled the Butler’s Gold berries to a high extraction sifting and milling twice.

Panettone can be made is a wide variety of flavors, not just the classic raisins and candied orange peel. In this case, I used apple chunks, caramel bits, and cider donut spices, which combine beautifully with the light buttery and fermentation notes of the panettone.

After seeing some nice bakes based on the Pain de Campagne in Martin Philip's post, Don't be a bread hostage at the KAF website, I decided to give it a try. It seems in keeping with my recent effort to simplify my baking. Besides, after all the more neutral pan breads I've been making lately, I was in the mood for a sourdough. 

We had some friends over for dinner and had to have some nice soft rolls to go with my chicken with artichoke hearts and sun dried tomatoes.  I decided that I wanted something with rosemary since the chicken dish has rosemary in it.  So I prepared a mashed Russet potato and added rosemary and black pepper to taste.

I am still trying to get used to our oven down here in Florida.  For this bake, I wanted to see how I might add steam to a bake.  I wanted some more sandwich bread, but thought I’d make a loaf that used a tangzhong with milk but without milk in the mix or butter in the dough.  I decided to use olive oil instead for the enrichment.  To add some flavour there is King Arthur whole wheat in the dough and the three types of sesame seeds on the crust.

This recipe was brought to my attention in a recent post here with a link to the King Arthur blog post. 
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2020/04/06/dont-be-a-bread-hostage