Blog posts

I had never heard this origin story for baguettes: that they came about as an attempt to cut down on knife fights in Paris by creating a loaf that met weight requirements but didn't require a knife to cut like boules and miches do.

Wikipedia lists a few other possible origins. Regardless, it makes a good story!

This is my submission to the Community Bake - The No Comfort Zone Bake.

The write up is here: 

Community Bake - The No Comfort Zone Bake | The Fresh Loaf

Cheers,

Gavin

In my quest to make a perfect, consistent, large miche (~2kg), I have made a slow transition from partially yeasted to my current formula, which is sourdough only, 80% hydration. I'm learning that different flours behave very differently, and many of my experiments have resulted in mud, pancake-flat loaves, giant air chambers, flying saucers etc. 

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

Ingredients (pre-warmed and maintained at 30-32C/86-89.6F throughout the process):

50% freshly ground, unsifted whole wheat (All the whole rye/wheat flours I bought are rancid.)

42% freshly ground, unsifted whole rye

8% whole rye CLAS

30% + 9% water

Here we report an experiment designed to increase a levain's natural yeast titre.  Possible* novel aspects are (1) an "Overnight" version of Raisin Yeast Water (ORYW) and (2) growing SD levain in undiluted RYW.  (*nihil sub sōle novum when it comes to bread baking but I don't recall seeing exactly this described before)

Materials & Methods

First loaf-bread bake with Patel's house brand 100% WW stone ground durum. For a picture of the bag, see here: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/469299#comment-469299

It was $7.99 for a 20-pound bag, $.40/pound.  Ingredient list is just "durum whole wheat."  No enrichments.

I've done tortillas, pizza crust (didn't let it autolyse/soak enough), and noodles, but this was the first loaf bread with this flour.

Inspired by one of Ilya's recent posts about a rye bread, I decided to try a recipe from Maurizio Leo's site (The Perfect Loaf) for a rye bread with some seeds.  The night before the bake I prepared the levain, which consists of mature starter (47 g), rye flour (234 g of King Arthur White Rye Flour), and water (234 g).  At the same time I put roasted unsalted sunflower seeds (65 g), roasted unsalted pumpkin seeds (65 g), and whole flaxseed (30 g) in a bowl and added enough hot tap water (214 g) to submerge the seeds.  Both the levain and the soaker were covered with plastic w

Has anyone baked the little dough used for gauging fermentation? 🤣 This is my baby dough (sitting on a teaspoon) from today’s sourdough cheese-stuffed fougasse (adapted from Maurizio’s) - this lil one took 18 minutes to bake. 

There were also baked potato skins with butter chicken filling and ..

My sourdough adventures this past week were to make potica rolls (essentially cinnamon rolls that used a tangzhong) but I substituted levain for the instant yeast.