Blog posts

June 9, 2021.

So I've been playing a lot with stone-ground WW durum. It makes great flatbread/chapatis at 100%, and great egg-less noodles at 50% mixed with 50% Golden Temple white/red bag durum.

I wrote somewhere, that anything over 33% WW durum in a leavened loaf bread just doesn't seem to be workable.  It becomes a brick, or a rubbery sponge.

Mariana mentioned that there is a popular Russian flour mix that uses 25% durum, so I thought I'd play with that number.

Plan:

I made these a while ago and thought to post them to my blog during our 4th COVID lockdown (bored). I learned how to make these during Chef Jacob Burton’s online culinary boot camp.  I learned the bun sizes for large, regular and slider buns.

155 g each for large (4.5 inch) buns - about 114 mm

100 g each for regular size (4 inch) buns - about 100 mm

55 g each for slider size (3 inch) buns - about 76 mm

A well-formed bun was baked using foil ring molds held together with a couple of staples.

Hello, friends.

Live flour incapsulation Experiment, Phase one.

 Italian La Molisana "00" DI GRANO TENARO 75% and il Molino Durum Wheat Fine Semolina. @ 75% and 25% respectively. 2 x Epi's out of the oven now and what a great day to have it on too! This is a 5 hour bulk fermentation using just 1% compressed yeast, it did finish at the desired dough temperature but did loose a bit of temperature during BF but was quite happy Final proving in the back of the station wagon which was quite a bit warmer than the house! i am very pleased with the results from these longer fermented doughs.

Hi, my most-recent sourdough bake resulted in (with an apology to the real things) hockey pucks. The dough was clearly over proofed after a 10 hour or so overnight proof.

Followed the usual FWSY recipe for overnight 40% WW bread.

My kitchen's usually in the mid 60s F in the winter, and is now running in the mid 70s.

Should I use less leavain?

Colder water for the mix?

Thanks!

So my rye starter from almost 2 years ago is going strong. I did a 1:2:2 feeding and it doubled in 6 hours so I decided to bake a 1-2-3 loaf with it. The dough was super sticky, like octopus sticky (https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/60884/sticky-shaping-sticky-dough-or-when-it-too-sticky). I first tried wetting my hands, but that only worked a little bit, so then I had to just use flour, about 1/4 of a cup and it still stuck (like chewing gum, #3 on the link) to my Silpat.

TFL'er Wish List bake #6...  Followed this one pretty close with a couple small deviations and one addition.

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/68285/wild-blend-rice-sourdough-onions

I used a RYW and SD culture combination for the initial levain and then RYW instead of water in the 2nd levain build.  Other than that, the only change I made was adding some Vegemite.  Gave the bread kind of a French Onion soup smell while it was baking.

Made a couple of sandwich breads this week. I'm quite new to this style (mostly or all white flour with light enrichment with milk, a little butter and sugar). It seemed like an easy style to figure out, but interestingly both breads came out with (rather minor, but still) defects.

This recipe is from Jon (Golgi70). I changed the quantities to make 3 loaves and added honey upon his suggestion as well as my usual bit of yogurt to tenderize the crust. Original recipe is here: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/35320/farmers-market-week-17-raisin-levain

I changed a few things in the method and those are noted. 

To learn more about concentrated lactic acid sourdough (CLAS), please see here and here.