I thought I'd give a brief update on what I've been tinkering with in my kitchen over the weekend. I baked a nice rye loaf on Saturday morning - it's based on my regular 70% rye recipe, but I added some toasted sunflower seeds and whole-rye flour to a cold soaker. The dough is a breeze to mix and work with, without being terribly sticky or otherwise up to no good. You can find the recipe here. The loaf is pictured below:
I baked some sourdough chocolate donuts and heart shaped muffins this weekend. At last the fresh cherries are flowing so I chopped up a pound of fresh Bing Cherries to fold into the batter (and some chocolate chips too).
A lurker finally comes out. I just baked my first loaves from my "new" (about 5 days old) wild yeast starter. They came out great. I used Shiao Ping's version of Chad Robertson's Country Sourdough. I tweaked the schedule a bit to fit my personal commitment, but generally followed her schedule and formula. I did replace about 20% of the total flour with King Arthur Traditional Whole Wheat Flour.
I have a wolfgang mill and would like to know if I would be losing
much nutritional value by milling 5 pounds of wheat at a time and keeping it
in an air tight refrigerated container. Is there anything I should be aware of
before I do it ?... It would be used up in about two weeks and much more
convenient for me.
Thanks
Two months ago I bought a new oven so I had to learn how it works, I mean what is the best setup for sourdough heart baking. This led me to change my setup: no more covered baking!
Have you ever seen the incredible oven spring, great crust color, beautiful ears you have with a professional steam injected deck oven? Just take a look at these photos from Wally's excellent post "My Excellent Adventures at King Arthur Flour".
I have some experience baking Jewish Sour Ryes and German-type rye breads. Suas' formula for “Sourdough Rye Bread” (Advanced Bread and Pastry, pp. 212-213) seems to me to be for a French-style “Pain de Seigle,” although Suas does not label it as such. It uses a stiff levain identical to the one Suas uses for his “San Francisco Sourdough,” but then the final dough is 60% rye flour. Overall, the rye content is 52% of the total flour. The overall dough hydration is 70%.
this is the Italian bread from Bread Bakers Apprentice, made with my Uncle's home grown olive oil. These loaves were too long for my peel and I had a devil of a time getting them in the oven. I had to cook them diagonally one at a time. The 2nd one was dusted with flour before scoring because the first one almost completely deflated when scoring. This dough was very hard to move around; it may have over proofed but I had to run some errands. I try to schedule bread in between all my other activities but sometimes it just doesn't work.
We have had this ravioli plate for decades. My mother-in-law had it and when she and my father-in-law passed we inherited it. We have never used it. I often thought about tossing it but never did. The other day David mentioned ravioli on my pasta post. Well that started the wheels turning...no pun intended :) My DH made his usual pasta dough and then I looked up a few YouTube videos on ravioli and we were off. Three dozen later I can honestly say this is VERY easy. I took photos to show step by step.
I was in Walmart last week and noticed a new green bag on the shelf next to the bright yellow Bread Flour from Gold Medal. It could be that this isn't a new offering from GM but it's the first time I have seen the Green package. I thought I would try a bag and see how it like it compared to other AP flours I use. First, the price made me take a second look. It was priced at $4.74 for a 5 pound bag. The Bread flour next to it is $2.65.
