Blog posts

The last bread we are making for Thanksgiving is Mini’s Rye Bread at 100% hydration sans Chia seeds but adding a Munich Dopplebock, some soaker water, flax seed and yeast water to the mix and deleting the gargantuan pine nuts she found in Chili.  Her bake is found here:

Mini's 100% Dark Rye & Chia Recipe ...Love at 104% hydration

I tried something different with this one in that I used a starter that I fed with rye flour.  It really took off and improved the "lift" for my starter.  I had used all AP flour previously and was not getting much rise lately. It's getting colder as well, so that doesn't help.  The dough was a bit wetter than usual, and the shaping was much more difficult than I anticipated. I had to knead in a bit more flour, but finally got it to where I wanted it.

Another day, another loaf. Same concept here, use the "My Daily Bread" recipe as a basis for modification. In this case it is also a basis for education.

CONCLUSION(S): I think that I have been chronically underproofing my loaves and I think the "retarding" in the fridge is really exacerbating this problem ... so in the next loaf I'll wait longer for the final rise. I also have been very loosey-goosey with my measuring, I don't like this approach (mostly because I am not sure of the final hydration) and therefore I'll 1) formulate a recipe and 2) follow it.

Time flies: I just noticed my most recent blog post so far here on The Fresh Loaf was published almost exactly a year ago! Many times, I have thought of writing something, but the work on my magazine Bread and the requests from my kids have taken all the time. Maybe it's all about priorities, or maybe I'm just not very good at keeping too many balls in the air at once.

Anyway, today I have something to share, so I thought it's time to stop the silence and write another post.

Last week, I’ve baked my first recipe from Andrew Whitely’s  “BREAD MATTERS”: seeded rye bread. The bread was wonderfully delicious and truly addictive. However, I failed to notice that the dough weighs 650g, and cannot fill up my large terrine pan. The bread, however, was an immediate success and half of it was literally devoured while being sliced!

It took  awhile, but this is my take on Karin’s Cecilienhof Ancient Grain Rye Bread challenge.  The list of ingredients involved initially had me convinced I would stay on the sidelines for this challenge.  But I had more of them than I realized on hand already and a little searching turned up the rest (ah, the power of the internet!).  Still, I haven’t had to think this hard about a bread in a long time.             &

I love baking with Durum flour and bake with it all the time, so I figured it was time to finally make a 100% Durum bread.  I have not used the 36 hour method in a while so I incorporated it into this bake and used some KAF Durum flour in the 2 stage starter and in the final dough.  Technically there is a little bit of AP flour in the seed starter but I hope you won't hold that against me.

I picked up the little mill attachment for my new mixer and have been experimenting with it my last couple bakes.

My first batch used 40% fresh milled flour (hard red wheat), my second about 25%.  The flavour seems really nice, though I've got a bit of the cold and thus don't have the most nuanced sense of taste right now.

This is the second time I have made this recipe, so I am still working on it.  First time I made it, the starter was really active, and after I made the dough, I had to go out and left it too long, so it was over proofed. I brought some sourdough starter to my hometown of Milwaukee when my husband and I were in town this summer.

I didn't know I couldn't post more than 1 pic for a blog entry. D'oh.

Here is a pic of the crumb of Loaf #1 (there were 2 loaves from the batch of dough).

Cheers-
Dave