Blog posts

I did another experiment.  A few weeks ago, I made my first Vermont sourdough.  I froze half the dough to bake later.  The photo at top is the loaf I made today with the frozen dough. (The dough was frozen after bulk fermentation).  I defrosted it in the refrigerator and took it out last night.  It was still pretty cold (with a small frozen center), so I let it warm up and did three stretch and folds and sprayed a little water on the dough as it was stiff.

To use up the last of this super duper levain we ground up some more of our 8 multigrain mix of: wheat, buckwheat, oat, farro, rye, spelt, barley and Kamut.  We got an 85% extraction when we did the sifting this time and used the 15% hard nits to feed the levain.

I usually make this bread as  500g boules, but the beautiful large bâtards and miches I've seen  from Josh, Syd and others in the past week or so had me craving a larger loaf. So this 1kg bâtard was baked this afternoon, and it is good. I think it's kind of pretty, too.

It's been too long.  I use to make this religiously before I moved to the West Coast.  Bread has overcome my desire to make pastry in the past 8 years.  And crazy enough i was able to apply so much I've learned since this recipe was born.  I switched a flying sponge for an overnight Biga and squeezed 16 % Whole Grain in there with no problem  I'll keep increasing this every time til I notice it losing its luster.  

Shaped

   Spring is finally here so along with grilling hamburgers and hot dogs and steak it was time to crank up the grill and make some pizza.

My pizza set-up allows me to get the temperature over 700 degrees.  I'm not sure how hot is really get since my thermometer only goes to 700 degrees so I would say it's probably closer to 800 or higher.

The absorption necessary to produce this soft loaf was relatively high, at 82%. This is the second loaf that I have made with Bob's Red Mill stone ground whole wheat flour. I used 78% absorption on the first run, which caused excessive loading on the mixer. Water was added to bring the absorption up to 80½%, which still resulted in a somewhat dry crumb.

This loaf was (of course) made with the re-mixed straight dough method. Here are a few more observations on dough mixing and re-mixing:

We decided to grind up some more whole grains to feed then 15% extraction to this Levain Beast.  It loved the hard bits and doubled in less than an 2 hours again as we pulled out 100 g to make the naan.

I am new to this site so hello to all! I have been baking bread for a long time, but I am seriously trying to get into it more, learn about it and try out lots of different things. I have just signed up to here, got a lot of books in my wish list on Amazon waiting for pay day at the end of the month, and have been reading a great magazine that you can find here: http://bread.insanelyinterested.com/issue/issue-1/ The additions are free from 2012, and then look a reasonable price for 2013 and current editions.

I'm upping the ante to two bakes a week.  One to trade at market and one to sell and raise money for more ingredients/pay bills while I try to find my own "spot".  I figured I must give this formula its due and remake with proper hydration.  I made one other change based on the flavor profile of the "botched" batch and split the whole wheat half Hard Red Winter and half Hard White Winter.  I also added a longer autolyse.  The previous loaf was a fine sammi bread but it had a bitter finish and these changes were to help that aspect.