Blog posts

4 types of bread baked for christmas lunch

bottom left is a Potato and Rosemarie s/d with white flour

bottom centre is a 1kg  brioche plait white flour

bottom right is a multigrain using London Porter as the  liquid content

 top is two curved epis  with black spanish olives and fennell seeds

flours used were an imported italian Granoro il Primo tipo "00" and a multigrain from a local providora in Fremantle.

I like easy bread. I bake because I am too lazy to go down to a bakery and buy bread. There have been times when I could put the tea kettle on, and step out the door, and be back with an excellent baguette before the kettle boiled.  If I could still do that, I would bake less often. 

Goals: 1200 g dough, 90% hydration, 1.9% salt.  Use last 266 g of home-milled Prairie Gold, and use equal amount, 266 g, of home-milled Kamut, and rest King Arthur All Purpose. Soak the 532 g (266+266) of home-milled flour for an hour with 88 % hydration, because it is coarse-milled. Use 100 g of starter, 125% hydration, with Cultures For Health San-Fran Sourdourgh culture (not the Whole Wheat/desem culture).  Fed it two days ago, hoping to bake then, but it sat in fridge.  Looks active, so I'll chance using it without feeding.

Given a busy holiday season and the very cold weather in my apartment, I wanted to try letting the bulk ferment go overnight. With the encouragement of the good TFL folks, I decided to try two loaves using 5% pre-fermented flour (50g starter/500g flour/375g water/10g salt) for an 11 hour room temp bulk (approximately 65 degrees) followed by 11 hours in the fridge. 

Dec. 18, 2019.

Goal:  25% KA AP loaf, 75% home-milled whole wheat.  Intending for largest loaf to fit in the deep part of the Lodge 3.2qt combo cooker.  Was off by 145 g, should have been 1200 g, instead of 1345 g.  88% hydration for the soaker with the home milled flour.  Approx 87% final hydration. 1.9% salt.  Using a new starter from CFH, SF  Sourdough, not the Carl's 1847, or the "Whole Wheat/desem" that I had used prior to that.

Happy Holiday Wishes to All!

It's been a long time since I've posted anything.   

I came back today searching for this yeasted bread to bake for a family Christmas breakfast bread.

 It's been so long!  I could not remember the name or where to find the recipe.  After searching I found it. 'Peter Reinhart's, The Bread Baker's Apprentice cinnamon raisin walnut bread'.

 My favorite is to use white raisins and pecans.

This bread is loved and has been baked by so many of our long time Freshloafers!

Made these two to give away (one sent priority mail along with a spelt boule), so unfortunately I have no pictures of the crumb. They smelled delicious and I got great oven spring. They are both just under 25% whole wheat (a mix of mostly HRSW with some Kamut that I had on hand, all freshly ground), with the remainder being half AP and half bread flour. My starter is 100% hydration organic whole wheat. Formula makes two loaves, amounts are in grams.

I haven't posted any breads on here for a long time because I haven't felt like I've baked anything different enough to be worth posting. Nonetheless, I still enjoy looking at the site every once in a while, and especially seeing people's blogs about their recent bakes.

This boule is a mix of two doughs (that I also baked separately).
The purple dough was made up of this (+salt @ around 2% of flour + potato):

I am a novice bread baker. My only two efforts have met with disaster after placing the loaves in their pans for second rising. They don’t. I’m open to ideas to improve my success. 

Loaf 1: Forno Antico Santa Chiara Durum Wheat