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Today's Bake

Rouge de Bourdeaux & White Whole Wheat Sourdough

Based on: Tartine - Book No. 3 by Chad Robertson - White-Wheat Blend (Ode to Bourdon)

I've become interested in milling my own flour but before I took the plunge I purchased some Rouge de Bourdeaux freshly ground flour from Barton Spring Mill (https://bartonspringsmill.com/products/copy-of-rouge-de-bordeaux) to check it out.

I did not bring my starter with me to Florida.  Instead, I have decided that I would bake using preferments using tiny amounts of IDY.  Today I baked a loaf using a biga.  The main reason I chose a biga is that I want milk to be the main hydrating liquid for this bread rather than water, it is a milk bread after all.  I didn’t do a good job accounting for the humidity of Fort Lauderdale and the formula I wrote up ended up with a dough that was too wet.  I gradually added little bits of flour until it wasn’t so wet.

Got a sourdough starter up and living about 3 weeks ago. That had some challenges. The biggest being when my wife didn't realize it was happy inside the oven and she turned the oven to 400 deg. Needless to say my new little starter and the plastic container it was living in did not fair well.

Tried baking my first loaf using a 85% hydration dough. That was a little too much to handle for a 1st try. Took a step back and went with a 72% hydration dough, Maurizio's beginner sourdough. I cooked this in a clay cloche. I think it turned out pretty well.

It’s been a while since I posted my successes with flaking grain. I got new oat groats from Breadtopia and wanted to do a very short tutorial. I have an older Marga Marcato hand crank with aluminum rollers. The steel rollers are not available and the price of this one has gone up. There are other flakers available and the Mock Mill folks have an electric one. 

This is my take on a Finnish bread.  I've changed it up quite a bit from the original, so I'm not sure I should even call it that anymore.  For the most part, the ingredients are true to the recipe.  However, this uses a 2-stage pre-ferment, a yeast water for leavening, and a mash.  The original is a straight dough yeasted recipe.

After I posted my first sourdough Mazanec and Vanocka, I heard from many European bakers on IG who love these breads and they said that they eat them year round that’s how much they are loved.  We leave for Florida in a couple of days, unless we are delayed by the newly forming tropical storm, so I needed to bake another Christmas present, this time for the staff of our building.  With the feedback from the first bake, I decided to make some adjustments to Maurizio Leo’s recipe.

A few weeks ago I accidentally got into baguettes. I liked the sound of alfanso’s baguettes with durum flour, fennel, pine nuts, and golden raisins, so I attempted them. They came out ok but I wanted to see whether I could improve my technique. 

Ok, so I'm not an artist in any way, shape, or form!  Lovely images that I can see in my mind's eye always turn out as stick figures, and not very good ones at that! :)  So, it's a bit surprising, then, that I decided to try some decorative scoring on my weekly loaves this week.  Back story.......we hosted our annual Halloween party on Monday, and one of our guests brought a loaf of bread that had a "Jack Skellington" skeleton face scored on the top of it.  I thought to myself, "Hey, this would be a cool thing for me to make next year to go with my BBQ Skeleton.....

I ran out of bread, hard to believe since I’m semi retired with more time to bake, but it happened.  I found a bit of whole kamut in the back of the closet so that gave me the idea of combining it with some semola rimacinata (semolina) since they are related and both have a great yellow colour.  I decided to try doing a cold retard after shaping.  I’ve never done this with a milk bread that I can recall.  This is the reason for the blisters on the crust, which for this type of bread I’m not a huge fan of.