Blog posts

I've posted other examples of my 72% hydrated Foccacia.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/33820/sourdough-focaccia

This time I incorporated 3/4 cup of diced sun-dried tomatoes. These tomatoes, imported from Italy, are sold by BJ's. They are preserved in olive oil, and infused with capers, peppers, wine vinegar and other spices.

I incorporate a third of the tomatoes in each of three S&F before bulk fermenting overnight at 54°F in my wine cooler.

It has been forever since Lucy and I baked a no knead bread but emkay baked a beautiful one earlier this week so Lucy was all hot to trot to make one too.  We have been messing around with sprouted multigrain flour for the past 3 bakes and wanted to continue along those lines with a high % of whole and sprouted grains.

It was a nice run.  The Farmer's Market Blog that is, but it's time to move on.  It was a great project and after nearly two years I'll go ahead and call it a full blown success.  

Finally, I got this one right!!!(hopefully)

Poolish

• 500g AP flour 
• 500g water (fridge cold)
• 0.4g yeast

Final Dough

• 400g AP flour
• 100g WW flour
• 230g water (20g water short)
• 22g salt (I love salt)
• 3g yeast

Method

I know I haven't posted in a while, so here's a recent loaf.

Formula was dmsnyder's SF sourdough take IV (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/27892/my-san-francisco-sourdough-quest-take-4)

Edits:

One thing that happens when you bake for other people is they tell you what they want, and if you don't have it, sometimes they just walk away.   So it has gone for the past few months at farmer's markets, where a small but determined group must have their whole wheat bread, and won't even look at other offerings if it is not there.    I have been keeping a close eye on TFL for whole wheat baking.   True I have baked 100% whole wheat breads -- particularly Reinhardt's and also Pain de Mie following Janetcook's lead.   Neither of these satisfied m

This loaf was made using the sponge and dough method. A KitchenAid K5SS stand mixer equipped with a spiral dough hook was employed. The sponge was set in the mixer bowl and covered with plastic wrap, then fermented for eight hours. The dough was re-mixed for a little over two minutes because of the high rye content.

Formula:
Sponge
33.3% Dark Rye Flour
37.5% Stone Ground White Whole Wheat Flour
2% Vital Wheat Gluten
0.5% Salt
0.5% Instant Yeast
68% Water (Variable)

Dough
29.2% Bread Flour
5.6% Honey
2% Shortening
1.5% Salt

My wife claims that the older I get, the more like my mother I become. One of her idiosyncrasies was her distrust of any food not prepared by her.

I guess I am a little like that. I bake almost all of our bread, and I recently started culturing my own yogurt. I've noticed that, unless I strain some of the water out the yogurt is thinner than the supermarket variety, but it makes a perfect substitute for buttermilk in muffin, scone, pancake, and biscuit recipes. It's the consistency of store bought buttermilk.

The no knead bread has been all the rage since Bittman wrote about Lahey's method in the NY Times. I've always wanted to try it out, but just never got around to it. I had about 50 grams of sourdough starter leftover after feeding. It had only been about 15 hours since it had been fed (at 1:3:3), so instead of discarding it I used it to experiment with a naturally leavened no knead bread.