Blog posts

Admittedly, it doesn't look like much, but there is a story to this.

After baking >10 loaves of cheese bread in a row, I decided to take a break from it and whip up a simple dough instead. This dough contained nothing but water, whole wheat flour and salt. Ok, there were also walnuts but they weren’t part of the “dough”. Although the dough was well developed, I accidentally let it over-proof for quite a bit… Uh oh… Yet thanks to this, I now feel more confident about rescuing over-proofed dough.

From the number of recent postings about sourdough starters, it appears that many have taken up bread baking.  This seemed a good opportunity to illustrate various steps during my preparation of Country Rye from the Tartine book.  I always benefit from seeing what something is supposed to look like, which is why I have included so many photos.

I've made Abel's 90% Biga loaf several times since he published it and in my view it's a TFL classic. However, although I've had great results with the yeasted version, I've never had success with the sourdough one.

I don't have pictures of everything- but I've been baking (a lot) and wanted to do a side by side comparison of Reinhart's Crust and Crumb San Francisco sourdough versus King Arthur Flour's no knead sourdough. I last made both at different times and with different skill levels. Time for a show down on even playing ground.

The contenders: Reinhart Crust & Crumb San Francisco Sourdough

Same bread made with CLAS, but using a different flour. 

I'd been a loyal customer of another brand of flour for over a decade, but I felt being ditched during this time when flour is so difficult to source.  So, I "deflected".  Maybe it's about time to change, and I love the new flour!

After my success with Hamelman’s 50% whole-wheat (Hello and thankyou everyone for your contributions) I tried adapting his procedure to use 100% whole-wheat, which has always been my favourite. I used 78% hydration to get a nice shaggy dough and found that using a hand whisk followed by manual kneading was much better than using my Kenwood Chef with the dough hook.

Image

Bread with warts.(before)

Ok so have had this going for close on a week, 1st day had massive rise then posted on here and was told it was too wet.....added flour to thicken waited 24hrs then back to 100g starter and 50g flour and 50g water......this is what I have 2 days after “saving it” am I on track or do I scrap and start over!? 
many help is magnificent!!!

I used these buns to make kimchi-brined chicken sandwiches from seriouseats. Honestly the buns might've been better appreciated on their own, though the sandwich turned out pretty sublime.

Tangzhong

12 g flour
60 g milk

Dough

20 g cooked sweet potato
250 g AP flour
30 g sugar
1 tbs ADY
70 g milk
1 large egg
1/2 tsp salt (omit if using salted butter)
40 g softened salted butter

Steps