Blog posts

This is my first blog entry and porridge sourdough.

I have started baking bread for less than a year and they are almost all no-knead overnight artisan bread. Since the start of this year, I have been trying my hand at sourdough as I successfully made a starter at the first attempt. Though, as a year 1 student, time is not something I have a lot to sparse so all of my loaf are essentially no-knead, stretch and fold type. 

This is my first trial of porridge sourdough inspired by the Polenta and Rosemary Sourdough from The Perfect Loaf.

I've been very busy with university life recently but I'm glad I was able to squeeze in this bake, it relieved all of the stress that I've been experiencing for the past few weeks.

Good days folks I have been trying to make a regular white bread for the past year that would not have those millions little little air bubbles and tiny holes inside the bread.

Can someone please assist in how to eliminate or drastically reduce the air bubbles and little hole inside the bread

I  will be travelling away from Australia to Europe later this year  and looking for some s/d starter to use on my adventure, meeting other bakers is also great fun. I will be staying in Huddersfield (UK) but also Guizerex in the Sth of France,  Barga in Tuscany and also Rome in Italy Time frame is May - June.  Not long now

Kind regards Derek

This bread contains 20% of buckwheat flour and 80% of strong bread flour (in my case it was Italian Costa d'Amalfi).

Hydration about 75% and cold retarded.

So, I made a big pot of caramelized onions the other day, and wanted to try various recipes. I was also inspired by a discussion we had about using beer in sourdough. So that serendipity of events led to a bake of Hamelman's Beer bread with added caramelized onions!

This is 100% spelt bread - 10% whole-grain spelt flour home milled, 90% white spelt flour, 70% hydration, 10% inoculation.

This is a popular flavor I do for our local farmers market. The loaves are packed with pimento cheese (that a friend makes,) and topped with a dutch crunch that uses corn grits instead of rice flour. These things are dang tasty. Please excuse formatting, the formulas are cut and pasted from my recipe spreadsheet. 

Grits Dutch Crunch Recipe (prepare the day before)

This has got to be the absolutely best way to caramelize a bunch of onions (in this case, about 8 largish ones). Last night I sliced them all with the mandoline (still made me cry), filled up my crock pot and tossed them by hand with a few tablespoons of olive oil and a bit of salt.

They cooked overnight (about 10 hours) on low, then a couple more hours with the lid partly off to cook down the liquid. I'll now freeze them in 100 gram batches for use in all kinds of things!

 I used recipe for Challah from Hamelman's book "Bread" for preparing the dough. The only difference was that I used milk instead of water. The dough is on stiiff side so it is relatively easy to work with it.