Blog posts

For this bake of my usual country sourdough I wanted to see how well the aliquot jar correlates with pH readings.  I have usually been shaping when the aliquot jar shows a 60% rise and now trying to push bulk wanted to cold retard when the rise is 110%.  This might be a bit overproofed but we’ll see.  From what I’ve seen shared from other bakers, they are shaping when pH reaches 4.4 and baking when pH is 4.1.

TFL'er Bake List Week #5...  Slowly but surely working on the list of bakes I saw on TFL and wanted to try.  This week's bake was based on Paul's Barley/Wheat Bread loaf.

05/27/2021.

One of the advantages of doing the same recipe back to back combined with having reasonably decent notes is it's easier to reproduce the last bake.

Tweaks for this bake: No steam (sprayed with water instead), and a foil tent for the second half of the bake. Otherwise, I did everything the same as bake #1 (same hydration, fermentation times, all of it). Oh and I followed minioven's advice and made sure the rim if the pan was in the center of the toaster oven.

Have never made a bad olive bread. And the same is also true for breads made with blueberries! And when blueberry is in the dough the bread gets a beautiful painterly effect.

Spent Grain was the dough that i have wanted to do for a while so having secured a quantity to try it got a run today i also took one of the loaves down to the brewery for them to try too. i used Caputo Classica flour and the spent grain from a Stout preparation. The dough was a 3 hour bulk fermentation . I used the home brew Miners Stout that i have brewed for next months bake day and i used that as the liquid component of the dough. The spent grain was at the rate of 25%.

To prevent unsightly pinhole crumbs caused by excessive hydration of whole wheat flour, before I bake, I test the flour's absorption capacity by autolyzing it under different hydration levels and observing its gluten development. The hydration at which the dough starts to slack/tear is the bottom line for me to stop adding water to the dough. 

Our kitchen has been completely out of commission for a partial remodel (cabinet refacing, which required every cabinet and drawer be emptied and packed out of harms way) for the last 2 weeks. Things are put back together enough now that I got to bake today. Still using the toaster oven outside for now, until I can put the new oven through a few trial runs to verify temps and learn how to work it. 

I haven't made a miche in a very long time. Last week, I got a bag of high extraction ("Type 80") flour from Central Milling and remembered that I had previously (like 11 years ago!) used this kind of flour for a miche based on the San Francisco Baking Institute formula that I liked a lot. We had made this bread for the Artisan II (Sourdough) workshop. Although we used white flour, our instructor told us that, ideally, it would be made with a high-extraction flour. My experience indicates this formula makes delicious bead either way.