While we all love a nice crusty loaf of bread. Pillow soft buns with nary any crust at all have a place too.
Friday night dinner.
Mississippi chicken on fresh, home made pillow soft buns.
This is my second loaf with fresh milled flour. Once again, I turned to Maurizio for inspiration and went with his Sourdough Spelt formula. My loaf used 30% fresh milled spelt, 30% fresh milled high extraction hard red spring wheat (Maurizio calls for Central Milling T85), and 40% Giusto's Artisan. I used a 40 mesh sieve to sift the whole grain red wheat down to high extraction (about 85%). This loaf was 85% hydration. It was proofed in the refrigerator in a linen-lined oblong banneton and baked in an oblong clay baker. The result:
Greetings Fresh Loaf friends. I continue to bake every week but have been negligent in posting my results. This is my weekly sandwich loaf:
I have been making this recipe for a year now and have it dialed. I am also fortunate to be able to buy the best bread flour from my local bakery. Boy does great flour EVER make a difference. I also use a sweet levain at 100% hydration. This is essentially a sourdough starter that isn't sour, hence sweet levain.
Here is the recipe:
After not baking bread for weeks – The Houston Miche
This one is a big boy. It went into the oven at 1,871 g and came out at 1,675 g losing 10.5% of its water weight as it baked. It turned out with the 3 B’s but we won’t cut into it till Thursday or Friday to see if it is OSM. We baked it to 208 F, 20 minutes under Mega Lava Steam at 450 F and 36 minutes at 425 F convection.
A new breakfast place just opened up in town and my wife took her Dad who is visiting with us to eat some brunch the other day. They went without me, so that will need to be remedied in the future :). They came home with some leftover cheesy grits which were screaming to be added to a some dough.
I had made a version of this bread a while ago and decided to change it up a bit using some fresh milled whole wheat and spelt. I used some roasted fingerling potatoes which added to the super soft and moist crumb.
I haven't baked bread in awhile. When I do, we eat way too much and I have a beach wedding coming up that I need to prepare for. So, why am I posting here? Because I have interior musings that nobody on any other site would be interested to hear. I'm here to gather with other bread nerds about something that has been occupying my mind for the past several weeks.
Objective: To see how the length of bench proof after shaping (before retardation) impacts on crumb.
So here is my formula & method for 2 kg dough (enough for 5 x 400g batards):
Levain: Refreshed yesterday, final build overnight.
34 g starter + 20 g wheat bran + 160 g water + 140 g flour
Today 11 am: Autolyse 45 minutes
662 g flour + 282 g wholewheat freshly ground + 26 g gluten + 654 g water
This is not my first baguette, but definitely the best effort. Used Hamelman’s Baguette with poolish. I have upped the hydration a bit to 72% and replaced a bit of flour with some soya flour 2% (after reading Abel’s comment I thought why not!) so here we go..
Last night mixed poolish and left overnight.
156 g flour + 156 g water + 0.3 g instant yeast
Today: Mid morning poolish looking good, mixed final dough ingredients together and added poolish.
301 g flour + 7 g gluten flour + 9 g soya flour + 9.5 g salt + 1.5g instant yeast.
