Blog posts

Torta depending on where you are in the Philippines can mean different things. Up to the day when I was just aware of one type, the only torta that I know is a savory dish made with eggplant and eggs that I often eat with ketchup. I do not know any other form of torta when actually, there are.

I  was commenting to another Australian baker Dell about soft wheat grains and flours and was mentioning the Caputo Manitoba Ora type O that i have recently found for sale in Western Australia in 5 kg bags and have been  using.

My wife was extolling the virtues of a Current Walnut and Fennel loaf that she had recently purchased and enjoyed, so i decided i would make a similar loaf using the Italian flour Australian Sultanas and Fennel seeds in a conventional dough and here it is i baked it in a recently acquired Sassafras clay baker.

I baked a :

100g Spelt

100g Caputo Durum Rimacinata

300g Stong Canadian White

420g water

72g starter - 80% hydration - from the night before

10g salt

I had a shorter AL this time 2 hours as I wanted to use the stiffer starter from the night before. I found that because I used the spelt and durum that I almost got a windowpane just within that shorter AL time.

Otherwise my usual process of adding leaven, wait 30 min and then add salt and a bit more water.

That's the saying.  But I was already home and wanted to go big anyway.

My wife was off to an early morning flight to Tobago for a Pan-Am Dragon Boating competition.  She asked if I'd bake a WW fig-raisin-pecan levain bread as some boarding gate breakfast for the troops traveling together.  Made two, sliced 'em, and packed them off with some butter and cream cheese.  These are designed to bake dark and craggy, the left with traditional baguette scoring, the right with a criss-cross design.

I baked this one several weeks ago but have not had a chance to post.  This is a 70% Whole Wheat bread made with freshly ground whole wheat with no sifting.  I watched a video on how to adjust the stones in my MockMill II and ended up with a super-fine flour, no sifting necessary.  I think for the next bake I will sift courser and still sift once and then re-grind at the fine level.

This one turned out a little denser than I would have liked, but it had a nice tang to it and made great toast.

While searching for ideas on what to include in my next batch of 12 loaves, I came across this: http://www.25bestbakers.com/recipes.html?ID=12. I had all the ingredients on hand so with a few minor tweaks in ingredients from the recipe and using my usual procedure, here it is:

Recipe 

Makes 3 loaves of ~870 g raw weight each

Sprouts

75 g quinoa (I used half red, half white quinoa)

75 g kamut berries

Water, enough to soak

Dough

This week I was inspired by some of the cool recipes on this site that mix cooked potatoes into the dough, so I thought I'd try it. I made rolls and bagel squares, inspired by PalwithnoovenP's recipe on this site. My bagel squares turned out quite misshapen and ugly, but taste great. I am not sure why I can't get the surface smooth. Rather than pan-frying them like in the recipe, I baked them. I also omitted the onions, so effectively its a 50:50 potato and flour bagel dough. 

Since the facility to accept text from Word documents is not yet implemented here, the text of this post can be found at this link.  The figure below is notional but while it does not reflect lab measurements, it should be thought of as an aid to thinking about the underlying issues.

For every bread with sprouted kamut or durum I baked, I find its sweetness a tad overly dominating. This time, I paired Earl Grey with these sweet sprouted grains in the hope that the resulting flavour would be more balanced.

Earl Grey 30% Sprouted Kamut SD

Dough flour:

120g      40%       Freshly milled whole white wheat flour

Sourdough Bread: March 22, 2019

David Snyder

This bake is a kind of hybrid (high bread?). It utilizes elements of the formula and method shared by Mike Giraudo on Facebook, Peter Reinhart's James Beard Award-winning “San Francisco Sourdough,” as presented in his book, “Crust and Crumb” and various techniques I have adopted over the years, such as autolyse.