Blog posts

      As I mentioned in my last post, I sprouted some whole wheat and rye and ground them in my mill a couple of weeks ago.  I wanted to make a mostly sprouted whole wheat bread since there is nothing like the flavor sprouted whole wheat imparts on a bread.

I added a little rye and some French Style flour from KAF to round out the bread and through in some cracked wheat as well.

In a recent post David Snyder mentioned that his Hamelman pain au levain would qualify for a final four if he had only one bread he could make/eat.  I suggested a few other qualifiers, including his marvelous Gosselin baguettes with an SD twist added for good measure, not to mention good flavor!

On one of the darkest days in American history; 9/11, Lucy went deep in her bag of tricks to come up with a new very dark bread indeed.  In the past year, her 2 favorite dark breads were the Really Dark Old School Sprouted Pumpernickel – In memory of Barbra, another dark day for Fresh Lofians and Lucy’s Take on Adri’s Westphalian Rye

I went through a spell of baking scones last year, but stopped when everyone in my family seemed to have their fill of them. Lately though, they have been asking for scones. I have been having really good success with my sourdough biscuits, so I decided to try my hand at sourdough scones. I have always used volume measurements for my biscuits and scones, so I'm comfortable using that method for this recipe. The starter is leftover starter straight out of my fridge. The scones turned out fluffy and flaky. Might of been even more fluffy if I had used starter that was more active.

This quick bread was made with ground dried sweetcorn. It is a typical cornbread mix using 1.5 cups corn meal, 1.5 cup AP, milk curdled with lemon juice, melted butter, baking powder, baking soda and salt somehow I forgot  the usual egg. No sweetener was added because the ground sweetcorn was already sweet enough when tasted raw. It was cooked on the grill as we're the brats to go with it. 

I made a ricotta and rosemary bread pudding by using some Tartine country loaves I've just made. What I did not expect was how the humble bread can be transformed into an elegant light meal that I thoroughly enjoyed. The dish was large enough to serve a small crowd. The bread that keeps on giving!

Happy Labor Day!

http://flourishen.blogspot.com/2015/09/ricotta-and-rosemary-bread-pudding.html

So here it is, Sunday's white sourdough bread, with a nice open crumb.

For the leaven

• 1 tbsp mature starter
• 25g type 00 flour
• 25g strong white flour
• 50g water

For the dough

Hello everyone:  I am back in the U.S. after over a month in the UK, where I did quite a bit of baking, but have really spotty internet, so I wasn't able to post very much or keep up on your wonderful bakes.  Lots of catching up to do!

The good news is I think I am getting somewhere with David's Italian baguettes.  The bad news is, I had so many baking mishaps I felt like a hapless beginner again.  You name it, it happened during this trip:

--Overproofing as I wanted the bread to fit my schedule, not the over way around!

Lucy couldn’t remember the last time we made pizza…. especially one made with YW.  We made this one plain as could be with 20% pre-fermented flour and an equal amount of YW in this case 80g each. 320 g of LaFama AP dough flour, 203 g of dough water and 2% salt.

Decided to put a dent , albeit a small one, in the pear harvest. This bread has two pears that were chopped and partially dehydrated to remove part but not all the moisture added to it. The rest of the loaf is freshly ground sprouted wheat, Einkorn, and white wheat all sifted to just get out the biggest bits along with some AP, starter, salt, and water. The dough was not retarded, didn't want a sour element, but between primary fermentation and proofing it took about six hours to be ready to bake this was at 80F.