Blog posts

In the immortal words of the Commodores:
"Ow, she's a brick house"

Wells fellas and gals, this bake did not go so well.

Recap:

The wife has tasked me to come up with a sandwich bread recipe our family can bake at least once a weak to completely replace our regularly purchased box store sandwich bread.

This post is for the results of my 4th attempt to make the perfect loaf.

Requirements

This morning I baked Sarah Owen's Buttermilk Rye. This is a nice bread! It's interesting in that it uses banana in the starter as a Japanese influence. Otherwise it's (for rye I think) a relatively straight forward bread. Personally I'm after making a seeded rye bread that I can use as a "go to" loaf. But I read this recipe in her book "Toast and Jam" and thought to give it a try. It is so good!! I"m actually not a huge rye bread guy. And I find it so strange to work with dough that feels like I'm a stone mason handling concrete! But this is fun and tasty!

I’ve always loved the idea of babkas when I first saw them on the internet.  They look so shiny and sticky and yummy.  Now that I have sent John Dough to rehab and have him on an all rye diet I thought I would test him out and build a white levain to raise this my first babka.  My old starter could never raise a good white starter, I’d always have to add some whole grain of some sort to it for it to have an adequate rise.

Well, I got corona tested today, I don't have coronavirus, just a cold. I plan to bake again tomorrow morning.

My wife was very pleased with my last loaf, but she had some requests that I will be adding to my requirements list.

On the spur of the moment decided to have another run with the Caputo Integrale this time  using Potato, Rosemary and Thyme. I soaked the Caputo again 65% but this time just plain water 65% and again 0.5 yeast for 2 hours .Then mixed the remaining White plain flour 35%, salt 2%, malt 2%, potato 10%, butter 2%. rosemay and thyme  3:1 ratio 0.5%. mixed on the bench and bulk proved for 2 hours.

Dang!!! What a bake! Great Loaf!

I took advantage of Thanksgiving weekend to bake a bunch. I have the perennial problem of never following through completely on my plans because I try to do too much, but I'm still happy with what I accomplished.

Bake 1- Fullproof baking basic sourdough, but used 30% whole grain

Table of Contents for my BLOG

The following are a compilation of my bakes for the Rye Bread Community Bake.

Bake #1

Today we had a first in-person lab meeting at work since the beginning of the pandemic, and I wanted to bring a loaf of bread to share with my colleagues. Usually we would have something sweet, like cake, at these meetings, so I wanted a flavourful bread on the sweeter side, that would also not require butter or any other topping, to enjoy. So I improvised with the ingredients (almost wrote "reagents") that I had: I selected dried cranberries, poppy seeds and grapefruit zest. I also added a little honey to the mix for a little additional sweetness.