Today's bake was the Pain au Levain from Hamelman's Bread. It is the "whitest" bread I bake - the opposite end of a spectrum from the 80% rye I recently posted - yet I also characterize it as a "real bread."
It took a few days to recover from bread overload I got at the Boston TFL meetup (thanks so much for organizing, Varda). Time to try something new. Pumpkin seed bread from the Seven Stars Bakery in Providence, RI as described by MC Farine has been on the list for a while.
So today i made a Cinnamon Brown Sugar Babka. I am quite new to baking and i'm fairly certain i'm not taking the regular route a novice baker would. I've made a few loaves of regular bread, some Pita bread that was quite heavenly (along with some Pita chips), and now today a Babka. I'm thinking about a baguette or perhaps some bagels next. Anyway here are some pictures of this lovely piece of heaven!
This is off topic, I recognize, but this was only the second time in eight years I stepped away from TFL for more than a day or two, so I hope you'll allow me to indulge in a couple of off topic posts! Hopefully they'll be a of interest to some of you. -Floyd
It wasn’t until we arrived that I realized how long it had been since we last visited Poland. Seventeen years.
After baking out take on Karin’s (Hanseata) great post with her take on Maria Speck’s Aroma Bread here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32830/aroma-bread-love-story
One of the things I like about this nice yeasty cake is its versatility. You can fill it with just about anything you can imagine: the lazy amongst us will just spread some berry jelly or apple-sauce, the more adventurous will chop apples, grind walnuts and start mincing cloves. And on top, well, just about anything you can think of. The most popular is a streusel, but I've seen chocolate chips, sprinkles and even whole plums. Me? I like the simple elegance of a chocolate filling and sugar water on top.
I've baked this recipe twice before, but this one i wanted to exclude the yeast and extend the bulk fermentation. Actually, this bake was sort of a controlled test that was aimed at verifying whether or not i could bake during my working weekdays, which i'am happy to say: YES, it works!
First day eve, I started feeding my starter one day to creat the levain for the next day;
Second day, when i came back from work i mixed the levain into a dough and retarded the dough after 2.5 hours;
Third day after work, i preshaped, shaped and baked.
Made some Italian Easter bread and everybody helped shape it. I'll have to check on revealing the carefully saved family recipe from a likely long out of print cookbook. I can reveal that it has a nice mix of fennel seeds and lemon zest that I haven't seen in other Easter bread recipes making the rounds.
After returning from a great weekend at the first ever The Fresh Loaf get together just outside of Boston I ended up with some left over starters that I had brought with me. I decided to use most of the corn flour/AP starter along with some AP starter to make my next bread.
This one isn't very seasonal at the moment, but I love eating it for breakfast. It's so buttery and soft that I really don't think it needs an accompaniment. The recipe is taken from "non solo zucchero vol.II" where it is called pandoro evolution, but it is very similar to the pandoro a sfoglia from Cresci.
Main impasto - in grams
sweet starter (50% humidity) 45
dry active yeast 3
very strong flour 179
sugar 36
unsalted butter (soft but not melted) 27
egg 107
salt 3.5
half a vanilla pod
