Blog posts

I used the King Arthur recipe here. The Daisy flour I used tends to be wet and needs hydration cut back. I didn't do that and ended up adding more flour, which made the rolls drier than they should have been. Will correct that next time. All-in-all, they are pretty good. Had one with homemade corned beef the next day and my jaw got the workout I expected.

I started baking bread at home circa 2020.  I watched a few John Kirkwood videos which made the whole process seem reasonably simple. Much to my surprise my first attempt yielded a bread superior in taste to anything I could buy from my local in-store supermarket bakery.  I was instantly hooked.  My main pursuit since has been the elusive “perfect baguette”.

In last baguette post before this, I told you I have specific started problem, Djinn Carne (was Cariah Marey) and Whoreass Silver don't take rice well, dough ends up sticky and melty usually.

Say hi to Whoreass Silver!

Whoreass says: *making some random jazz noise* "doo ba da ba doo ba da bee doo LAY LAY LAY LAY LAY LAY LAY LAY low low low low low low🎷🎺🎼"

Lol. I named him after my all time favorite jazz musical artist Horace Silver. It's the second and last installment of my starters showcase series. (see part one)

(edit September 10th: I found Djinn Carne behaves differently toward lactose and powdered milk; she ferments powdered milk much longer than lactose at the same lactose saturation. I will adjust the feeding to favor powdered milk, to aim for substrate specificity. I will edit the post once she settles with powdered milk)

So, weeks ago I kinda promise to make starters showcase posts. God knows I've been beating myself a lot lately and couldn't conserve extra energy to make dedicated posts about my starters.

'life is good when the rye bread is good'

Rob/Bor

another one from 'the "who kidnapped Rob?" cookbook.'

Adapted from Sarah Owens. I changed the recipe to whole wheat (basically because I wanted to use up some of what I have in my cabinet.) I subbed in violife faux-butter, soy milk, and a flax seed faux-egg for the animal equivalents.

Results:

a fun experiment, but -- 

Inspired by some recipes from the internet I decided to bake a bread with sautéed onions and bacon, twisted in grated cheese for the final proof.

50% white flour

50% Ruchmehl

2% salt

22% whole wheat preferment

80% final hydration

25% (raw) onions (sautéed before incorporating)

25% (raw) bacon (lightly fried before incorporating)

more than enough grated cheese for the "crust"

The shaping was just a gentle twist in a huge amount of grated cheese.

Bulk and final proof at ca. 25-26ºC, baked for 30-32min at 200ºC with steam.

Doughnuts with LM Revisited

While pizza is a twice weekly affair, I wanted to put my ever-improving LM to the test by using it in an enriched dough. I cast an on eye over my blog where I found the recipe for doughnuts. Mentally scaling it down to a more manageable quantity, I opted to do a 2/3rds yield.

My wife found these smoked cherries online, from a company called SMKD, so of course, I needed to try them. They are very smoky tasting, so I didn’t want to go overboard and only used a small amount.

I figured some caramelized onions would be a good complement, along with the fresh milled durum and Butlers Gold whole wheat.

The natural sugars in the cherries and caramelized onions, along with the FMF, really supercharged the bulk, and it probably was a little over-fermented.