Blog posts

Greetings friends, I haven't been posting much lately, as I haven't been baking much.

Super happy with my FoodSaver for storing fresh food and particularly bread. I baked a batch of soft pull apart dinner rolls April 26th. By vacuum sealing, freezing and taken out as needed. My last roll is as fresh today, 3 weeks later as it was when fresh from the oven! Take out a roll, re-vacuum and re-seal, then back in the fridge.

As a single ski bum I have either had to give bread away or double bag it in zip locks to freeze which never gave me a good re-heated product.

My future SIL had a bachelor party in SF over the weekend and he was kind enough bring me a boule f the closest thing that Acme makes to traditional SFSD.  It was a bit more than day old by the time I got it.  Here is the website - they just call it Sourdough - http://acmebread.com/bread

This post has no pictures and is not going to interest a lot of readers since I did it to help my own understanding of what is going on in the oven.  Writing it down forced me to explain more when I didn't understand why and fix apparent inconsistencies.  If it is too much technobabble, just jump out and find something interesting.

I made 4 small batards with a 1 hour autolyse and a fairly quick fermentation period quite pleased with the result especially the flavour

 It is really difficult to buy fine ground semolina (durum) flour here in NZ. I found a supplier who could remill it and today tried the above for the first time. 

Sponge: 

140 g durum

140 g bread flour

195 g water

yeast 3 g IDY and 13.9 g sugar.

mixed and left to mature 2 hours.

Added 237 g water and 34.8 g olive oil and mixed well before adding 209 g durum, 209 g bread four and 12.5 g salt.

Pain Rustique as a batard and baguettes.  I've seen a few pain rustique posts come through recently.  Well maybe one, maybe more.  And it occurred to me that I hadn't made this before.  Being poolish based, it is a rare bake these days where I don't use a levain as my pre-ferment.

      This was my first bake after being back from a long 2 week business trip to Asia.  Being away is hard on my wife but my dogs really get upset when I don't come home at the end of the day :(.  With that said, I made this one in Lexi and Max's honor.  A nice porridge bread made with fresh milled durum flour and KAF French style flour.  The potatoes really made this one nice and soft and extra moist and the Greek Yogurt didn't hurt either.

All in all this one came out very tasty with a nice open and moist crumb.

Any pics at this stage would look just like last week's batch, so I'll hold off until it comes out of the oven. Using whole wheat because my wife is officially retiring on her next birthday, and I realized I have about 10 weeks to use up a LOT of whole wheat flour before we leave town and head for Mexico. Wish me luck!...

[UPDATE: late edit, catching up on photos since changing online image sources :) ]

can you add honey to a sour dough starter? What's the out come?

This has got to be the most beautiful loaf I've ever baked yet. After working on this recipe for weeks, I've produced 3 beautiful and tasty loaves so far. But this one's special. This is my first loaf baked in my turbo broiler that had actual oven spring! I've never had oven spring baking loaves in it before.

Covering the top of the loaf with aluminium foil for the first 25 minutes of baking seems to do the trick. Next time, I'm going to attempt another loaf, but scored. Let's see how that fares.