Blog posts

....and getting brave enough to post my progress. This is a no knead yeast recipe. 50% KAF AP, 50% home milled hard red winter wheat, 76% hydration. Progress!

I'm starting to feel comfortable enough with the basics to want to get into the sourdough world. Onward!

Now to figure out how to add the crumb shot.

Edit: even figured out how to add photos! I had better quit for the day while I'm ahead. ?

Russian bread, not an old GOST recipe, but rus brot reverse engineered it from the ingredient list: https://youtu.be/1Vwf3TzPTYU

Original formula: https://fgbc.dk/1696

Here is the formula, using a mix of light and whole rye flour available to me, instead of medium rye: https://fgbc.dk/1667

I ran out of bread (taking a break over the holidays) and needed a loaf to go with soup so I was looking for something simple. I love Spelt with porridge so this was it. 

Recipe 

Makes 3 loaves

Porridge 

100 g large rolled oats

200 g water

45 g honey

40 g butter

Dough

700 g strong bakers unbleached flour

300 g freshly milled wholegrain Spelt flour 

50 g freshly ground flax seeds

700 g water

23 g salt

30 g yogurt

Having returned from holiday with a spare pre-mixed Ziploc bag of Abe’s VSSD loaf ingredients, I decided to use them with Anis Bouabsa’s baguette method to see what they produced.  Main changes were upping VSSD’s hydration to +78% and, as the baguette’s 24-hour retard method yielded no dough expansion, I added a further 12-hour, overnight ferment at room temperature (the norm for VSSD), which only offered a meagre ~10% increase in volume.  The VSSD stiff starter was about 3 weeks old.

This is Hamelman’s Five-Grain Levain. I used the same grains as per the formula; cracked rye, flaxseeds (sold here as linseed), Sunflower seeds and oats. I made the cracked rye by milling the rye very coarsely, then sifting with a 40# mesh sieve.

I recalculated for a 750-gram dough (to suit my banneton) and have included the formula below.

I mixed the final build of the levain about 5 pm the day before and made the soaker at the same time. The levain and at its peak by 7 am the next morning.

In order to bring out much more miso flavour I used my red miso and increased it to 10%.

Total Flour 494 g 

Bread Flour 88.5% 437 g

Whole Wheat 11.5% 57 g all in levain 

Total Water 387.5 g 78.5% hydration 

Levain 115 g

Miso 49 g 10% 

Salt 7.5 g 

Overnight Levain build 1:6:6 

The holidays are playing all kinds of tricks with my baking schedule and thinking, so here is another salvaged near-flop.

My girlfriend's brother has been staying with us over the holidays, and when he was leaving yesterday I wanted to gift him a loaf of bread to take with him. But of course I didn't manage to plan it properly, and only could set up the very simple sourdough dough the night before, and spend minimal amount of hands-on time on it yesterday during the day.