Blog posts

I don’t usually bake mid week, but I had requests from family and friends who needed bread ASAP! I was also asked to repeat the 5 grain levain loaves but since I like to try different combinations, I thought I would take inspiration from Frank’s Let’s Blame CNN bread and Hamelman’s 5 grain levain. 

I was going to retard the levain it since time was of the essence, I ended up going for a young levain. It seemed to be quite active and rose nicely in spite of short timelines. 

Multi-grain Sourdough Bread with home-milled flour

David Snyder

August 8, 2018

Today's bake is another variation on the multi-grain sourdough breads I have been baking for the past few years. This one has a bit more whole grain flour – 40% versus 30%. Some fresh-milled spelt was substituted for some AP flour. The whole grain flours were milled in a MockMill 100, just before mixing. Because of the higher percentage whole grain flour, I also bumped the hydration up from 78 to 83%.

After some inspiration from recent posts about different kinds of yeast water folks are making, I revived one I'd had neglected in my fridge for about a year. It was originally made with plums from my back yard, but I ended up maintaining the apple one I made at the same time and ignoring the plum one, until now. I took it out - it looked and smelled fine, so I scooped out the depleted plum pulp and dumped in a handful of fresh blackberries. After two days it was beautifully fizzy and smelled great!

It was  a Great day to have the oven on last week with a cold blustery day outside,  decided on a fruit loaf as the grand daughter was having a sleepover that night. i had a new bread tin that has a sliding lid in the cupboard so it was going to have its maiden bake and here it is sweet dough with 50% Pitted Prune Pan Loaf. hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Yesterday i gave good old Black and Gold flour a run. The sour dough culture was revived from its slumber (2 months away) and was good to go. i decided it was time to try Chad Robertson's Tartine Country loaf. The formula differs from my normal 3:2:1 which has the levan @33% CR uses 20%.
I didn't have any wholemeal flour on hand so substituted that for Kakulas Sisters Multigrain flour i also added some wheatgerm too but other than that it pretty much followed the formula in his book. i also used less water too.

I have a nostalgic childhood memory of a black or near black bread that used to appear on the table at family get togethers in the East End of London just before and after the war. Once in a while that memory returns strongly enough to encourage me to start yet another futile unsuccessful search to discover what this exotic bread was…….. futile that is until last month when I came across  This video on YouTube under the name rus brot.

My starter has been living in the fridge since its creation, but last week it decided to die for some reason. Fortunately, I had some dry starter chips in the fridge, which I could revive and after two feeds the "new" starter was good to go, very active. 

I hydrated the dry chips for 4 hours, and then fed it twice over the next 20 hours. Notice that I used tap water directly and things worked out fine. I believe the tap water here does not have a lot of chlorine.

Another fine artisan baker with a French Flair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMTwNU-8glE

We are back from the holidays and needed bread...

So back to baking some Champlains and was a bit nervous as my last bake before the

holidays did not go very well.....

I like the 'square scoring' that the Italian baker Matteo Festo sometime uses and his stuff on IG is amazing! He says it helps with oven spring and I gave it a go.....

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bdm9H_YAP5F/?taken-by=ca_mia_breadlab

I love the way it just opens up like a flap!

mantra and calling card.  My wife is from St Louis and I grew up in Kansas City.  I ran across this youtube video about artisan bread in St Louis and Kansas City with a treat at the end that reminds me of where we live now and what we think about when it comes to cuisine and what we like to eat and drink.  I would suggest to smoke the Italian sausage though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD7E5nD7900

Happy viewing.