Leftover brandy from all those festive season plum puddings and cake. So I decided to make Sweetened Brandy Buns for brekky in the new year. Not nearly as sweet as I expected. It is quite good with something more savoury, butter and a gentle cheese like a gouda. From The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard.
Came across this bread on Instagram posted by "fullproofbaking" - Milk & butter oat porridge sourdough. I have attempted to follow her recipe, scaling it to make two loaves. I tried to keep bakers percent as close as possible. This was baked on 31st December 2018.
29/12/18: Refresh starter and convert offshoot to 100% hydration
30/12/18:
8 am build levain – I needed 129 g 100% hydration
I haven't cut one open yet to see the crumb but my first time using spelt and was fun to do.
Used the Mock Mill to grind my cornmeal. There isn’t much information out there so had to experiment. I ordered 6# of Hoosier Hill Farm yellow popcorn. Haha I was optimistic about my new project!
I used “10” to start thinking it would be good for polenta. I then took out one cup of that and moved down to “5” then “1”.
I had an excess of sweet potatoes in the pantry so it was time to try a bread with potatoes in it. Thank to whoever mentioned that sweet potatoes are 70% hydration. That really helped in making sure I didn’t end up with soup instead of dough. ?
Makes 3 Loaves
Ingredients
Decided to make my first adventurous sourdough an Irish one and also wanted to bring porridge into it as i haven't tried that yet. So i settled with a strong cheddar + stout/oat soaker. I was thinking the stout soaker would be a good idea as the oats would soak up the stout/alcohol and wouldnt effect my bulk dough performance as much to try make the results a bit more predictable.
My last 2 bakes have been Tartine country bread so i loosely based this recipe and process off that.
Gathered my ingredients:
I have kept this bread simple as half of it was give away to some friends.
30% Toasted Sprouted Black Quinoa Sourdough
Dough flour (all freshly milled):
180g 60% Whole white wheat flour
90g 30% Toasted sprouted black quinoa flour
I continue to work with multi-grain sourdough breads using home-milled flours. Today, I baked two loaves. Both used the same dough, a mix of Central Milling ABC flour, whole Sirvinta wheat, Spelt and Rye. The Sirvinta whole wheat is the thirstiest I have ever encountered. For today's bake, I boosted the dough hydration to 85% with good results.
I mixed the doughs for each loaf separately and folded in 20% each dried cranberries and lightly toasted pecans in one of the doughs.
Photo Gallery
Recently, my loaves have not been fully up to scratch – a bit spready on the peel, poor loft and poor ears.
My starter seemed to be performing OK, but sometimes with starters, who knows? I’m not the sort of baker who would cherish a 100 year old starter, so time to try a new one!
