Blog posts

My old trusty recipe with tiny modification

7 am

Preferment 

160g old starter

160g warm water

160g rye flour

Mix , cover and place in a warm place (I put it in the oven alongside a pot of very hot water or leave the oven light on) 

Scald, 7 am

80g rye flour 

240ml boiling water

1 tbsp ground coriander 

Mix until smooth, wait until no longer hot but stil very warm,  add 1 tbsp rye flour,  mix in, cover, place in the same spot as the preferment

3 pm

I used 500g Prairie Gold whole wheat flour and, initially, 400g water, 4 g yeast and 10g salt. After autolyse decided to gently and gradually add 100g more. 

People made very good bread for a long time before they added Vitamin C to their flour.

I do think the effect of Vitamin C is detectable to a careful hand baker. However, hand bakers can easily compensate by using a slightly wetter dough or longer fermentation times.

At this point, I think Vitamin C is added for professional bakers using mechanical dough mixing and handling equipment on a tight production schedule.  

This was an experiment to see what happens if Benny's 100% WW Hokkaido is done without dairy. The method was fairly faithful to the original recipe with a direct substitution of 'plant butter' for the butter and commercial almond milk in place of milk, even in the tangzhong.

Edited to add : I think my bread is trying to tell me something!!! Huge!!!  Unprecedented! Amazing! Ok enough. No egg wash. I can’t tolerate the smell after having Covid 😩😬. Fragrance and powerful growth . Same flour as I brought it with me as well as the YW so everything is the same. Will bake it probably one more time in 2 weeks. Keep ya posted. 

I recently read and enjoyed Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. I was pleasantly surprised as I was reading it that my method of baking sourdough is very similar to the process outlined in the book. With that in mind I figured it would be easy to pick up any of the recipes in the book and go to town with some very mild adjustments or experimentation. All of the variations of breads listed had my mouth watering and I was (and still am) keen to try some things beyond a standard sourdough. 

Last year Rus Brot posted a series of videos in an attempt to reproduce and demonstrate how bread was, or at least could have been baked, "in the old times" in Russian villages: https://youtu.be/meVg13NtnPw. "Yeast-less" refers to a fad in Russia about how using commercial yeast is bad for you, and sourdough bread is marketed as "yeast-less", which is of course absurd (and he's made fun of this multiple times on his channel).

We recently spent a week in Hawaii, and while I couldn't bring back any fresh fruit, I was able to bring back some good macadamia nuts (Sea Salt Roasted).  Wanted to use some of them in a bake and came up with the following idea.  I used the Sourdough Cinnamon Roll recipe from Breadtopia's Sourdough Cookbook for Beginners (Pg. 102) as the basis for the recipe and then developed my own filling using the macadamia nuts.  Gave a few to friends, and the early reviews are great!  

I like fresh stone ground flour. One issue is that the dough is not as extensible as commercial bread flours that contain citric acid. Good extensibility is important for good oven spring.  Certainly,  small amount (2%) of rye will improve extensibility, and long ferments generate acids that improve extensibility. 

I love pie, it is my favourite dessert.  The pie I made last week was great and the pastry was the best most tender all butter pastry for pie crust that I’ve ever used.  If you’re interested in that recipe I shared it here.  This recipe I’m making this week is from The Book on Pie by Erin McDowell.  If you haven’t seen her book yet, it is very good with lots of unique pie ideas.