Blog posts

This post is about sourdough made of whole-milled grains which are grown locally. 

Today I baked 4 loaves, 2 light rye and 2 pain rustique from JH 'Bread'.  After seeing Franko's lovely bake of the Pain Rustique, it sounded and looked so good, what a perfect bread to have on hand. The flavor is delicious and the crust sang.  I left the caraway out of the light rye.  The bread is very good, but I prefer more of a rye flavor. We were up late last night and so it was about 2am I put together my poolish and sourdough..tired as I was today, I baked the breads and made a rotisserie chicken for dinner.

Recipe found at What's Cooking America

http://whatscookingamerica.net/Bread/CinnamonRollsFantastic.htm

WARNING - This post contains some disturbing bread images!

First of all - I trust my liquid rye starter. He hasn't got a name yet, but I trust him.

Last Sunday we were having some friends over, some with wheat intolerance, and I decided to make the 100% russian rye (from Bread Matters), that always works, I thought.

And I had made a few nice batches of Hamelman's levain with wholewheat, and somehow the Polish Rye we made on the baking course I recently visited felt not so far from that, and I could make it with my rye starter.

Today was a much needed day off from work. I love the new job, but we're pushing out about 650# of dough per day with an average of 3.4 bakers, and as our production is increasing we're going from comfortably busy to close to overwhelmed.

Anyway, a day to sleep in and generally relax, and of course, do some baking.

This is a formula from “Bread” by Jeffrey Hamelman, a lot of people have made it with good results. I won't duplicate the formula here, see this link for a scaled down version, or better yet, get the book. A few notes:

1 I made the full recipe, got 2 huge 1.5lb breads;

I'm not too picky about flour. In general, I pick the lowest cost unbleached bread flour I can find (for what it's worth, this is almost always White Lilly High Protein Bread Flour, which runs about $0.50/pound). If I can find King Arthur Flour for a reasonable price, I will buy it. In my area, most stores have it for around $0.80/pound -- not too shabby.