Blog posts

In between World Cup games, I thought I’d catch up on a couple of recent bread experiments and bakery visits.  I’ve been traveling for work quite a bit this Spring/early Summer, and two recent trips afforded me the chance to stop by the bakeries of two favorite bread book authors, Chad Robertson (Bar Tartine) and Ken Forkish (Ken’s Artisan Bakery).

Coming up on four years since I first tried to bake bread.  The history has been kept here in my Fresh Loaf blog.  For the first two years or so, I baked almost weekly (and blogged often weakly).  Then, as my experimentation yielded satisfactory formulas and techniques, the baking became a bit less frequent and the blogging much less frequent.

Well after an extremely busy spring, I have found the slack time to begin baking again. 

Several weeks ago our local Sobey's grocery store was bought and re-branded to SaveOn Foods and I was given a coupon for a free loaf of bread. It was my first loaf of grocery store bread in nearly 21/2 years and to my surprise, I quite liked it. My first attempt at a YW multi grain bread resulted in a brick, so I bought another loaf of store bread.

We've started making Greek yogurt at home, which leaves us with lots of eft-over whey. We've made ricotta, and I've started experimenting with using whey for some portion of the water.   

Here's the formula I used:

Levain

100 g 100% starter

100 g KAF AP

70 g Water

30g Whey (yogurt-making byproduct)

16 hours

Dough

All of the starter

700g KAF AP

300 g Sprouted whole wheat

722 g Water

20g Kosher salt

The highly anticipated Oysterfest took place today and is the biggest draw up to this neck of this "woods", as far as events go.  There's beer and numerous vendors of oyster's in many different styles.  I'm not an oyster guy but apparently some of the world's best oysters come from right here.  There's an oyster eating competitions and all of the restaurants that vend compete for "best oyster" each year.  Many thousands gather and it's quite the spectacle.  

You find these muffins in places with an Azorean Portuguese population, like SE Massachusetts, where I've eaten plenty of them. Crisp on the outside, soft on the inside. Sort of a cross between Portuguese Sweet Bread and English Muffins. But better. Great at breakfast or tea-time, with or without butter. These are tarted up a bit with a biga and some lemon peel.

Biga

Today's bake is a focaccia! I've made a more then a few over the years and tried many recipes, and this is the one that finally pleased me.

It's based on this old post & recipe, with only minor adjustments.

Very excited to be part of the community.

Even more excited to bake my first successful pure sourdough bread using the 1, 2, 3 formula with some changes.

I'll post more pictures later.

100g of sourdough starter (100% hydration)

177.5g of water

300g flour

6g salt

 These are by far the best hot dog rolls I have made yet.  I wanted to make a nice soft and fluffy hot dog bun without resorting to intensive kneading so I used my last version of these buns and added cream cheese to soften it up.  I also increased the % of Semolina and reduced the Caputo 00 flour.

To compensate for the 55% water content in the cream cheese I decreased the water in the overall dough but the water content for the cream cheese is not taken into consideration for the overall hydration of the dough.