Blog posts

I got a bag of Rouge de Bourdeaux (85% extraction) flour from Dayspring Farms recently and have been wanting to test out the flavor of it.  Here's a quick write up of my first go-rounds with it.  

My first attempt was a purist attempt to get an unclouded sense of the flour:

100% Rouge de Bourdeaux flour (85%) extraction

80% hydration

standard process and timing (as much as this current heat will allow) except for a slightly longer autolyse

I’ve done swirled, flavored milk breads before but they were based on another baker’s formula. This is my first time doing a swirled milk bread based on my 25% whole wheat Hokkaido milk bread recipe. If you look closely at the formula I’ve greatly increased the percent pre-fermented flour. The reason for this is that this dough is even more enriched than usual. Both the matcha paste and cocoa have extra sugar added to them. Without the extra fermentation from the larger amount of levain, there is a great risk that the dough would ferment extremely slowly.

The other request for the weekend was a porridge bread.  I've made this one quite a few times now, and it's becoming a go-to bread when I get a request for a loaf.  To-date, I've always made the porridge as a soaker about 1-2 hours before final mix.  This time I made it as a mash following Benny's recent post.  My usual mash method followed Peter Rhinehart's (heat water to 165 deg F, add grains, hold temp at 150 deg F for 1-3 hours).  For this bake, I cooked the porridge in the microwave until it just started to boil (about 40 seconds) and then set in on the co

it’s been a while since I posted, I still check TFL from time to time.  Today’s visit showed some really interesting posts.  This bake was just a straight up 1:2:3 bake.

My starter was refreshed the day before and had a final feed in the morning. I was late getting home in the afternoon but as the starter was looking really good I went ahead.

4:20 pm Weigh flours and Mix dough

My parents are visiting this week, and my mom likes rye bread.  I made this once before with good success using a LAS.  I've been able to keep my "sour" raisin yeast water going and refreshed so I decided to make this loaf using that instead of the LAS.  The concept being the sour yeast water provides the leavening and acidity that a rye needs without using a traditional sourdough starter.  Similar concept to a LAS without having to take 2-3 days to make one.  The method uses a 2 stage levain build with the rye followed by a final proof after the spelt and soaker is

We frequently get questions around here about how to take care of your starter.  I thought I’d share what I do which is simple and waste free so long as you plan your bakes a bit ahead of time.

It has been a while since I had my initial thoughts dealing with Bakers Percent and all that goes with it. Knowing that spreadsheets & baking are made for each other was one thing, however, figuring out the slightly complicated initial & overall Baker’s Percent did seem discouraging at first. Getting it onto a spreadsheet, even more so.

Finally starting to get the hang of my Ooni Koda 16 pizza oven.  The dough had mostly Caputo 00 flour with a little fresh whole wheat and rye.  I used two types of sausages with one being chicken stuffed with cheddar and the other a pork variety with no nitrates or artificial anything.

The dough was fermented after being balled up and refrigerated for 36 hours.  I was very happy overall how this came out.  

I was so impressed by the original Semolina Sourdough I made from Tartine Bread that I decided I had to try the variation listed in the book. The variation should be a sweet take on an amazing savory bread. 

My usual sourdough routine has been streamlined and I generally don't have discard. In fact if I want to make pancakes I have to build extra levain when I'm prepping bread so I can make pancakes later. So when Hendrik at The Bread Code  posted a video of this bread, and said it was one of his favorites, I knew I had another bread to try. I slowly built up some discard but the process was very slow and actually took a few months to build up enough to make a tiny loaf of bread.