Blog posts

Quite often - especially during holiday times - spending time with my family can interfere with the optimal sourdough build schedules.

If we then run out of bread I usually make some improvisations based on Dan DiMuzio's Pain De Campagne (90% bread flour, 10% medium rye, 68% water, 2% salt, 0.3% instant yeast, from memory).

These breads are quick because they are same-day breads; but they still take about 5 hours from start to finish.

Two of these variations have been especially popular with my family:

These are great crepes to make using up your sourdough discards.

Crepes make wonderful little packages.  Fill them with fruits, cream, cheeses.  Savory crepes are wonderful too!  Let your imagination run wild.

Mike loved the I served him after dinner.  He plans on putting one together for himself tonight.  Yes, even he can do it.

These aren’t your normal whole grain bagels - not that whole grain ones are at all normal much less made with SD and YW.  What we did was take the 25% of the sifted out portion of home milled grains and used that to feed the SD starter where the liquid for it was yeast water.

Last Wednesday me and my wife have decide that Thursday is going to be Pizza Night!

Both of us simply loooove pizza. For me it's my favorite food, the one I can just can't get enough of (if it is good). the perfect combination of dough,tomatoes  and cheese. This time the pizza night enjoyment was doubled as the dough came out prefect (on my opinion). And the pleasure of eating was spiced up by the fulfillment from the success of a good bake!

Here are some pictures flowed by the recipe  

Expanding on the bread I baked last week, the seeded sourdough loaf, I increased the total hydration to about 73-75%.

This time only sunflower seeds inside the bread, and topped with sesame. Baked at a slightly higher temperature. Could have done with a bit more final proofing, cause the bread had quite some oven spring. 

master baker at work even if you have seen it before.  The picture is a take on David Snyder's Pugliesi Caprioccio (sp?)and the video is Chad Robertson not baking with a DO :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5kKeKSfyOE

Happy baking

We haven’t made English Muffins for a while and wanted to up the whole grains and use YW for the leaven.   We used the 25% sifted out portion of our whole grain milling to feed the YW levain so this has the effect of being 4 times that amount being whole grain for calculations.  Thee grains milled were rye, whole wheat, spelt, farro and Kamut.

So at first I intended to use some local rye to make a Ryeguette.  A few years back in San Fran I believe at the main La Boulangerie I had a light rye baguette with pistachios that I just loved.  I've been meaning to create a rye baguette since and its been a long time coming.  Well I ran out of Central Millings Baker's Craft which I was going to blend 70/30 with the local rye.  I had to go buy more flour (I usually buy from my work at good prices/bakers perk)  I noticed King Arthur's whole white hard wheat and had to go with that.

I made a couple of adjustments with this bake.  For the batard, I reduced the proofing time to 35 minutes and voila, the lame worked like it was supposed to and for the first time I have the grigne I have been trying for.

I reduced proofing time on the boule to 50 minutes and once again got a clean score with the lame.  The boule contains 10% whole wheat, 15% organic rye which were autolysed in an equal weight of water overnight, oil and honey.  I baked the boule in a hot DO as I wanted to try and get it right today after a poor effort yesterday.