Blog posts

Nothing new and exciting baking here this week, except my wife's French Plum Crisp. I baked a couple of my go to breads. My version of Forkish's Pain de Campagne, very different from his, actually. I do use his baking procedure, although it's really Chad Robertson's. Oh, well. It makes really good, crusty bread.

  Fresh milled Spelt flour and Rye along with rye chops, cracked wheat and barley flakes were left to autolyse for 24 hours.  The resulting bread was an earthy, nutty wholesome bread perfect for sandwiches, grilled bread or just spread with some butter.

Well this was almost a bust! I am not sure what happened but my bread didn't rise very much at all. I thought it might have been that the alcohol in the cider killed the yeast but there are sourdough recipes out there done with hard cider. This was on top of messing up the hydration when I realized I was short 65 g of levain and took some of my stiff starter from the fridge and added water to it. So this is not a true 1-2-3 sourdough. This is what I did.

For the honey bread challenge, I got the inspiration from here: https://bakingfanatic.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/gorgonzola-and-pear-sourdough-loaves/

I had a piece of leftover Gorgonzola from making pizzas and some dried pears on hand and thought that honey would go great with them. I added an oat soaker because I love the texture it gives to bread.

This week’s bake is my third try (in a row) at oat porridge bread. The results of the first two tries were good, but i’ve been trying to get the feel of the dough right. First time was way to wet and, second time was a bit too stiff, third time was just right!

The flour blend is also a bit different from last week, I went with a 70:30 split instead of 60:40 (thanks CedarMountain for the tip).

Formula:

My attempt at Poilâne-style bread, here's the recipe - Breadtopia's seemed reasonably authentic and reliable. My starter was rye and perhaps a bit more runny than it should have been but the dough proved nicely, sprang beautifully in the oven and cracked handsomely on top.

Delicious bread!  Thank you, Ian!

Making bread with durum flour, potatoes, and cheese - new experience to me!

We gone for a few days in Texas our daughter’s graduation from PA school at UTMB.  She did very well graduating with honors and awards so we rented a Jamaica beach house in Galveston to celebrate with her, family and friends – there were a dozen of us.

Okay, this was fun! Inspired by some of the suggestions on the 123 challenge (notably Mini Oven's question about using Coca Cola in bread), I decided to try something completely different. This is a 123 bread but, instead of using 100 grams of fresh 'sourdough' starter I made a poolish with 50 grams of root beer, 50 grams of bread flour and a pinch (1/16th tsp) of dry yeast. It looked and smelled nice. I used a 'natural' root beer without a lot of chemicals.

I mixed up some NMNF starter on 6/25/16. I thought I'd share some at a friend's July 4th cookout so I pulled some of the NMNF out, added more rye to make a thick dough and kneaded it in. Rolled it up, and wrapped in plastic wrap, ready to share my science project. There were no takers. Silly rabbits.

These dough balls, about the size of jumbo marbles, have been sitting in the refrigerator ever since. Wrapped in plastic, placed in a plastic container, and stored in a zip-loc baggie. Today, I thought I'd take one out for a spin and start Ru007 and Dani3ll3's oat bread.