Blog posts

Cranberry Feta Sourdough

The first time I tried Maurizio's 50-50 I added figs and pecans and had an unusual experience with: shaping as baguettes / retarding / unretarding / reshaping the three as one batard / and finally retarding again.  All documented here.  

She was back for yesterday’s bake and all seemed well enough until the dough went completely missing at the 1 ½ hour mark into the final counter proof.  It is a short story so I will tell it and it is all Lucy’s fault if you ask me. I’m looking at her right now and she looks very guilty to me.

My grandmother's iron skillets make the best pizza. They are from the 1800's. They are 12" across. We have family getting in later tonight so I made these up so they will have something yum when they get here. Crust is somewhat of a guess and by golly as my Mom used to say. I had a couple levains left in containers and decided to clear them out. They were full of bubbles...one durum and one ww.

Here it is the middle of the week and Lucy is nowhere to be found claiming she semi-retired and only works for the Friday bakes not Tuesday bakes.  I told her I was totally retired and would help her in a pinch and she wanted to know when was the last time I baked her any dog biscuits.

I totally freaked out with the new way to upload pictures on the site!  Now it is easy as pie and I could figure it out all by myself with no help from Lucy.  Way to go Floyd!  This is the best improvement in the last 6 years by far!

I have attempted to repeat my first bake for 2018 and do it better.  

Starter refresh Friday morning

mixed 10 g starter 20 g water 30 g flour and left on bench. Room temp was 23°c

8 pm took 7 g from this added 28 g water & 28 g flour mixed and left on bench overnight.

Saturday 9:30 am mixed up levain for

bake #1 1:2:3 with 20% freshly milled rye 10% freshly milled spelt

27 g starter 118 g water and 118 g flour. leave to mature 

 bake #2 1:2:3 with 20% new season yeast water (raspberry)

I've been meaning to buy a proofing box, but I figured it was too little for how much it cost. I needed a proofing box that would be able to have a normal size sheet pan fit in it so I would have enough room for proofing breads and, when needed, I can make my yogurt as well.

I made a quadruple batch of the Borodinsky for half-loaf Xmas gifts.  It was an ordeal that required the assistance of my wife.  Stressful as it was, nothing went wrong, and the results were about as good as my maiden attempt a few weeks earlier.  Scaling up is very difficult in a home kitchen, as the photos show in part.  The dough had to be spooned into the loaf pans, whereas when I made a single loaf I was able to scrape it in the pan neatly in one piece.  All in all, I won't be doing this again anytime soon, but I'm glad it was successful.

Anybody who's seen txfarmers sourdough croissants knows it doesn't get much better so having recently booted another round of stsryers and having a bit of an aversion to sourdough bread (just due to flavor) thought I'd give txfarmers formula a shot.  So far although nowhere near in the ballpark of txfarmer I'm pretty happy and think I may havw found a good challenge.  What I like about the sourdough formula is the added elasticity it seems to provide to dough.