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It's the 21st day of 2022, I hope everyone is doing great and keeping up with each resolution-.. I made one this year: I need to drink less coffee this year! I decided to revisit my old habits like making masala tea from scratch. Normally, we would use Assam, Ceylon or even Darjeeling but I've English breakfast for now. The very first loaf of sourdough I made this year only happened the day before yesterday, also thanks to masala tea.

Today's bake is loosely based on Ken Forkish's "Overnight Country Brown." I increased the levain and did the "overnight" in the fridge after dividing and shaping rather than in bulk at room temperature. Well, the hydration is higher too - 85.5 versus 78%. The result is a moderately sour, crusty loaf with a fairly open, deliciously moist and tender crumb. The flavor is more straight ahead wheaty than my favorite multigrain sourdough, but this is also a spectacularly delicious bread. I had some almost cooled with a light smear of butter, along with a bowl of split pea soup for lunch.

Background

My first attempts at this bread were flawed in that I got very little rise. Debra Wink (DW) contacted me and suggested some tweaks. As a result, I introduced some Vital Wheat Gluten (VWG) to increase the protein percent of my whole-wheat flour. I also pre-fermented 5 percent of the flour in a stiff levain. I wasn’t sure what effect the levain would have; rise, flavour enhancement, crumb or all. I’ve had a great result by incorporating both the VWG and the levain now for many weeks.

Today’s Experiment

To learn more about concentrated lactic acid sourdough (CLAS), please see here and here. 

I detailed the first bake with this recipe here.  I wanted to revisit it without the matcha powder and see how it worked as a hearth loaf.

I have never had much luck making crumpets. I came across this recipe elsewhere,and decided to give it a try. Success at last!! There used to be 8 (I scaled the recipe down a tad), but two were eaten hot off the pan. The rest have cooled and are frozen.

A few notes of possible interest:

This was an experiment with walnuts and some purple barley that I had on hand.  I modified my everyday loaf to incorporate the nuts and soaked barley during lamination (after an initial 2 S&Fs).  Although I nearly let the fermentation get away from me while busy cooking dinner last night, I'm happy with the crumb all things considered, not the least of which was the weight of the walnuts.  The areas of the crumb that have more purple are actually from the barley and not the walnuts (since those got toasted first).  The flavor is really nice and the crumb is quit