Blog posts

I had a good handful of toasted sweetened shredded coconut leftover from a pie that I made a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to try adding it to a sandwich bread.  I didn’t want the bread to taste too much like dessert so other than the sugar I used for the stiff sweet levain, there were no other sweeteners added to the dough.  I did decide to add some olive oil to this dough to soften it up a bit and keep it fresh longer without having to make a tangzhong.

The second time around. Much better than the last time. 

Hands-on laboratory practice exercise 03/14 - 03/16

Area of improvement

No unsightly burnt crust

Oven spring

Area needs improvement

Scoring 80% hydration dough is a challenge even straight out of the refrigerator

Country Bread EIB Style (Forkish) AKA

Pain de Champagne 

KA Bread flour

Hayden Einkorn Whole grain Wheat 

Hayden Gazal Whole grain Rye

Hayden Purple Barley

Hydration 80%

Prefermented flour 20%

Salt 2.2%

The 100% biga bake was not very successful. 

Got an OK loaf at the end, but was a little too heavy and chewy.

Used 30% wholegrain rye and 70% strong white wheat. 

Used all 400g for the biga, with 40g of liquid SD starter and 180g of water. Added the remainder of the water to the biga after 24h.

Biga smelt nice and looked developed correctly.

Happy π Day 3.14159.   The year of our Lord 2024. 

The tale of the tape.

For the cracker Jack crew at Banner imaging Mesa

1. NY street slice pie

1. Queen Margarita of Savoy

Results of my first round of Colomba testing.

I think that results were satisfactory, but I learned several things:

1. Recipe: Colomba is not the same as panettone. I used my current panettone recipe, and the results were almost too soft and airy; Colomba is a long, flat cake, and so it needs a bit of structural integrity to be physically stable. Make sure your recipe isn't extreme in any direction.

If you think about it, the spicing used in falafels (cumin & coriander, garlic, cardamom...) is like a recipe for a bread spice. The thing is though, how would you put a falafel into a bread. Home made falafel mixture, with freshly minced chickpeas, fava beans or lentils? Even better still why not use a box mix which has already been dehydrated and they've done part of the work for you already!

It's been a while since I made a bread using eggs. I wanted to make something using fresh milled durum as well and included some freshly milled Stardust whole wheat from Barton Springs Mill.

I love cherries so I added some dried cherries that I soaked in water to rehydrate them and used the water in the main dough. I've recently read on a Facebook post that using freeze-dried fruit is actually the best way to go. I will definitely have to try that soon. In any case I should have doubled the amount of cherries as it wasn't nearly enough.

To be honest, posting more in order to use the above tabloid-type title rather than to share some new bread breakthrough, but here goes anyway. Apologies for overdoing the biga theme in the process.

My latest bake was a 50% white spelt 50% strong white wheat flour loaf with 5% golden flaxseeds (pre-full hydration). All the spelt went into the 'shaggy' biga.

Still working on my sandwich bread (bake in a Pullman pan) that isn’t enriched with fat.  I decided to add a touch of honey to balance the sour notes since I didn’t use a stiff sweet levain for this bake.  I may switch to a stiff sweet levain next time to reduce the sour notes, we’ll see how I feel when that next time comes up.

I have to stop eating gluten for a while, so why not to learn how to bake stuff without it.

My no recipe approach does not work anymore. I produced a hideous monster of a loaf ans it is going to enrich my compost pile today. I thought: it cannot be any more complicated than a rye bread. Well, it can.

Anyway, I found this beautiful recipe on YouTube and this bread is just lovely.  The dough was very pleasant to work with and the result actually exceeded my expectations.  Slices great, makes a lovely toast.