A classic German party bread makes for an attractive center piece. Guests can help themselves by pulling apart these pretty little rolls. I wanted to decorate it with sesame and poppy seeds but since poppy seeds aren't available here, I used nigella seeds instead.
Adapted from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's book Bread
Now that my new starter is up and running and my wife work mates are requesting more bread I baked again.
20% Whole Wheat Sourdough with Pumpkin Seeds
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20% Whole Wheat Sourdough (for me)….
Breakfast. Hmm. What to do? Cold cereal? Not appealing. Omelette? Appealing, but too fussy. Blueberry pancakes? Ah, that has possibilities. Wait, wait, wasn't there a Cherry-Studded Scone recipe in Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads? Could that be bent just a bit to feature blueberries instead of cherries? Why yes, yes it could!
And so it was:
And so it went:
I thought I should clear out some old bread photos from the last few months that I never got around to posting, along with some more recent ones as well. All but one were taken this year, most have crumb shots, but some don't. Many of these breads were made with a yeasted preferment of some kind, either a poolish, biga, or Pate Fermentee. My starter had been put to bed for a few weeks, mainly to change things up a bit and to play around on the other side of yeasted leavening for a while.
Last Tuesday was one of thous days where I came back early form work and just had the urge to bake bread. For some time now the guys at work are daring me to produces a good dense rich rye bread. Well time was short and I did not had time for those multi-builds long fermentation formulas. So I figure if am not going to follow a meticulous recipe, I might as well go all the way and prepare it all by feel and sight (and with a few not so traditional additions ). I was very pleased with the result, and so does my co-workers that finished it all up!
Finding American equivalents or substitutes for foreign ingredients can be quite challenging. Whether you move to Europe, or like me, come to the US from Germany, you naively expect common products like flour or milk to be the same.
Sure, my American whole wheat breads turned out just fine, I was happy that they rose so nicely. But when I tried baking everyday German rolls, Weizenbrötchen, with all-purpose flour (wasn't that for all purposes, after all?) I was in for a surprise.
Just finished baking this miche. This dough is a foray into working with high hydration. After kneading, the dough was still a tad bit sticky, but I decided not to do stretch and folds since I was planning on long, cold fermentation. Used low percentage of yeast because of fermentation time, as well.
It's just out of the oven, so I don't have a crumb shot yet. But I figured I would share the initial results and recipe. Worst part of making a miche is waiting hours before cutting into it.
Formula:
250g KA whole wheat 25%
375g KA bread flour 37.5%
It's been a year or more since I've made Jason's Quick Ciabatta recipe, so I made a variation first and followed the next day with his standard recipe.
For the variation, I mixed Jason's standard 95% hydration dough until it started to climb the mixer paddle. At that time I added enough flour to make a 75% hydrated dough and retarded it overnight in the fridge. The next day, I shaped, proofed and baked the loaves.
Today, I attended my first farmer's market as a vendor. Yesterday I baked around three times more bread at one time than I had ever done before. Miraculously it all came out fine with no kitchen disasters. This morning I finished up the baking and drove a couple towns over to Carlisle. I had never been to the Carlisle market before. I had two reasons for picking it. One, I figured, given that Carlisle is pretty sparsely populated, that the market might be small enough for me to be able to manage. The second is tha
