Blog posts

After my sourdough boule disaster this past weekend, my bake with baguette a l'ancienne recipe boosted my confidience a smidgen...

and...

and also some crumb...

Last Friday and Saturday, I hopped over to San Mateo for the San Francisco Pen Show to indulge another of my addictions hobbies. We needed a fast breakfast to get an early start. So Thursday I baked ...

Cinnamon-Raisin-Walnut Bread from BBA

Returning Sunday, I activated my sourdough starter and mixed enough levain/biga for ...

These rolls are SD / YW, caramelized onion, sun dried tomato, bacon, parmesan cheese Emperor Rolls with Seeds so they are pretty much not Kaiser rolls or semmels any more.  We forgot to put in the basil but left it in the formula.

Yeah, those are the best two words to describe this weekend's sourdough boule. I prefer to embarrass myself on accident, hence no pictures. I guess every baker is entitled to a few mishaps here and there. I'll get to the points of where I went wrong.

Same recipe as before except:

For my second miche taste test I wanted to do two things: compare King Arthur High-Extraction flour against Central Milling Type 85 Malted, and experiment with a smaller loaf after the comment from one of my tasters that the first loaf was "gummy" (though he ended up liking that loaf the best.) Above is a closeup of the result, with the Central Milling loaf on the left.

I've been a little behind on my blogging; will try and fix that. In the meantime here's an olive levain. Pretty much Hamelman's formula.

On my last two bakes I’ve used the 3-stage Detmolder process from Hamelman’s Bread. I decided I would try to use it with a white sourdough.

3-stage build

Stage 1—Freshening

5 hours at ~78ºF. Room temperature in SW Florida.

For the most important years in a young boy’s life I had the good fortune of living next door to my grandparents—perched high on a hill at the very edge of town. I have so many fond memories of these years—watching storm clouds build in the west, a school holiday spent watercolour painting with my grandfather, piano lessons with my grandmother, summer days spent picking grapes, kippers on toast for breakfast, fig jam and fresh grapefruit.

This wonderful bread, pain au levain with mixed sourdough starters, from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread, brought me a first prize at the Sonoma County Harvest Fair.  This was the first time I ever entered anything in the fair.  I love this bread, and it has become a regular around our house.  It can't be beat for flavor.  My only tweak is to add a mix of seeds on the dough exterior before baking and to borrow 1 oz from the bread flour and give it to the whole wheat flour.

I have wanted to try my hand at a Challah made with a Yeast Water starter for a while so I decided to give it a try this weekend.  Naturally I needed to change it up a bit more and added some shredded coconut and used coconut water in place of the liquid.