Blog posts

Today's bake: Semolina Bread

Bread - A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes - Jeffery Hamelman 2nd Ed.

This bread is made from a majority of fresh ground durum wheat along with bread flour and a bit of whole rye which is in the culture. This is my first time making as well as tasting a semolina bread. The durum has a really nice nutty flavor that makes the sesame seeds really stand out. I baked this 2 mins longer than optimal which I've adjusted in the process section. I really like this bread and will definitely make it again.

Tasting Notes

 I wanted to try  another new grain I purchased from Barton Springs Mill called Butler’s Gold Whole Wheat.  The whole wheat berries are harvested from a small farm in Texas.  It’s supposed to be a good neutral flavored whole wheat perfect for mixing with other stronger flours.  I decided to use this exclusively and only mixed it with a small amount of BF.  I did use KAF BF in the Levain so overall it ended up being a  50% WW bread.  I milled the Butler’s Gold berries to a high extraction sifting and milling twice.

Panettone can be made is a wide variety of flavors, not just the classic raisins and candied orange peel. In this case, I used apple chunks, caramel bits, and cider donut spices, which combine beautifully with the light buttery and fermentation notes of the panettone.

After seeing some nice bakes based on the Pain de Campagne in Martin Philip's post, Don't be a bread hostage at the KAF website, I decided to give it a try. It seems in keeping with my recent effort to simplify my baking. Besides, after all the more neutral pan breads I've been making lately, I was in the mood for a sourdough. 

We had some friends over for dinner and had to have some nice soft rolls to go with my chicken with artichoke hearts and sun dried tomatoes.  I decided that I wanted something with rosemary since the chicken dish has rosemary in it.  So I prepared a mashed Russet potato and added rosemary and black pepper to taste.

I am still trying to get used to our oven down here in Florida.  For this bake, I wanted to see how I might add steam to a bake.  I wanted some more sandwich bread, but thought I’d make a loaf that used a tangzhong with milk but without milk in the mix or butter in the dough.  I decided to use olive oil instead for the enrichment.  To add some flavour there is King Arthur whole wheat in the dough and the three types of sesame seeds on the crust.

This recipe was brought to my attention in a recent post here with a link to the King Arthur blog post. 
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2020/04/06/dont-be-a-bread-hostage 

Found the CB page on ciabatta over the weekend, thought the Biga recipe from mwilson looked interesting. In the past my ciabatta was all over the place, the flour I was baking with was inconsistent. Slightly adapted, wanted to see how much water the flour could take, could have probably pushed it slightly more, but this is one of the better ciabatta I have made, definitely the softest. Ended with a very strong dough if I understand correctly this if from the large portion of Biga. 

Could have probably proofed it for an extra hour, but was getting late.

We're (finally) getting settled in our new home, and I have mostly figured out what needs doing for a successful bake at 6,000 ft. My starter had been on (to borrow a medical term) "comfort measures only" for about 4-5 months. It was fed just often enough to prevent death by neglect, but it wasn't exactly thriving. After series of feedings a few weeks ago, it was back to it's robust self. 

We are seeing some friends in our building tonight for dinner and I offered to bring some rolls. We are still here in Florida and without my starter so these were made with IDY. I wanted to bring something that wasn’t just a milk bread so decided to add mashed steamed sweet potato to the dough. I couldn’t find purple sweet potatoes anywhere near me so went with the regular orange ones. I didn’t measure the amount of sweet potato that I added. I added it after the dough was well developed after adding the butter/flour paste.