Blog posts

Just over one year ago, I made the journey from Belgrade, Montana to Madrid, Spain with my bakery trailer, truck and all of my other household goodies.

During the past year as I wait, wait, wait, and wait some more, I've been sorting through the red tape and keeping myself busy through baking, teaching, and also working construction.

Through my previous European tours, I had made some very nice friendships in Moscow, Prague and the Netherlands.  Recently I had the opportunity to re-visit them.

For whatever reason I have far too many half eaten bags of oats lying around my pantry.  So this week I baked a version of Sarah Owens' honey spelt oat bread - without the spelt.  As has been a theme of late for many of us, Trevor Wilson was the inspiration. Trevor has been posting on Instagram some great fluffy-crumb pastry flour breads. I didn't have any pastry flour to use so I improvised with some all-purpose, whole wheat and bread flours. I thought using an all-purpose flour with it's lower protein content would be a reasonable substitute for pastry flour. 

I have been trying to achieve an open crumb with 75% hydration but today I managed to achieve a nice open crumb with 65% hydration. This was the result of long autolyse and fermentation, gentle handling and lower than normal temperature baking. I am happy with the results and got me to appreciate that what goes on to achieve an open crumb is many other factors than just increasing the hydration level. 

Have you managed to get an open crumb too ? any other technique you can share ? 

CedarMountain posted this recently and it looked absolutely delicious so I pretty well followed his recipe aside from reducing the hydration and adding a tiny bit more levain just to use it all up. He makes a batard and a boule but I made 3 boules out of the one batch of dough. 

Dough

80 g sifted rye (90 g of rye berries)

170 g sifted Selkirk wheat (190 g wheat berries)

750 g unbleached flour

700 g water

20 g salt

250 g levain (100% hydration)

Finally, I shared a bread recipe with no crazy combinations.

I feel like I was experimenting with some rather uncommon sourdough for too long. Not that they didn’t taste good but I’m suddenly craving a slice of plain and simple dark rye bread. Though I love the aroma of rye, I prefer the texture of wheat so 40% whole wheat and 10% whole spelt were included. 

 50% Dark Rye Sourdough with Dark Malt and Aromatics

No tangzhong in this method. I used my rye starter and also replaced 25% of the bread flour with wholewheat flour because I like a bit more texture. It cooled its heels in the fridge for nearly 2 days but rose beautifully and still produced a supersoft, light loaf. 

This is perhaps my 5th attempt at making bread with sourdough starter, without any commercial yeast. Three of my previous attempts used a Sourdough pain naturel recipe with various mixes of whole wheat, white bread flour, and unbleached all-purpose flour, and one was an improvised recipe using white flours. I used an overnight levain with only a small amount of starter (~15g) for all of these.

I had a request from a new customer for Rosemary bread the other day, so started poking around looking at recipes. There were previous posts on TFL about Daniel Leader's rosemary filone in "Local Breads" with some indication of difficulty in reproducing his results, but as I have the book I thought I'd give it a try. Being me, I didn't just make one or two but took orders for 11 and made 12, hoping it would turn out!

Part of the process of moving and opening up a bakery in a new land, is working with and testing the local flour.  

Here is a no-frills flour comparison between one American and two Spanish flours. 

Just flour and water at 67% hydration with no baking:

*General Mills, Harvest King (MT, US)

*Gabino Bobo, Ariana (Zamora, ES)

*Roca, Eco Força (Lleida, ES)

-Mark

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