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Despite the fact that growing up challah was my favourite bread, since I’ve been baking bread for the past three years I’ve only made challah once. My first challah was Maggie Glezer’s sourdough challah which I blogged about last year. I made some changes to her recipe in order to add some whole grain. I also love an eggy challah so also increased the egg. I reduced both the water and the oil to compensate for the contribution of both by the additional egg. This is what I came up with for my test bake.

May 12, 2022.  5" pizza.

My take on Adam Ragusea's cast iron pan pizza from his video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYxB4QBlrx4

Dough, enough for 4 pizza crusts, 5" mini-personal size, cooked in a 6.5" Lodge cast iron skillet.  Dough is divided into 4 portions of about 50 grams each.

This is Benny's 100% WW Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Bread. (The link points to his 2.0 version and I'm not positive whether I made that one or another variant.) Anyway, I attempted this bread back in January but got no rise to speak of, undoubtedly because I did not a thing to prepare my rye sour for a sweet levain and enriched dough. I baked it anyway and while it rose a couple inches in the oven, it barely filled half the pan.

Time to try to make a raisin bread...and might as well go to the Whole Grain version....and might as well do sprouted grain as well. To that end I took the recipe from the book and tweaked it a bit and this is the result. 

RECIPE AND CALCULATIONS HERE

It's been a long time coming, but I finally got around to doing a side-by-side comparison of a bake with and without raisin yeast water.  One caveat...  any of you that have followed my posts may remember when my yeast water that I made with honey and raisins went sour and noticeably acetic.  I thought it was the new batch of raisins I had purchased, but it happened again with a brand new YW with new organic raisins.

 Added crumb shot. A tiny compressed place at top where lid caught when I peaked at before putting in oven😩 have to stop peaking! Taste and fragrance are rich and a deep almost chocolate fragrance. Eating it with butter. Could use a bit more salt. Crumb is like a moist cake very pleasant and not gummy at all. No sour present. Very pleased. 

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/70103/13%E2%80%9D-pullman-rye-yw-levains

previous bake 86% rye

May 7th, 2022. 91st bake.

500 grams of flour, 425 grams water, and 9 grams salt was hand mixed and left to soak for 1 hour.

I used scales to weigh the above, but did not take note of weight of each type of flour.

I wasn't sure how much water would be needed, so I started with 375 grams, then added 25, mixed, and then added 25 more, and that felt right.

I recently read a book on 19th century yeoman farmers in the Georgia upcountry.  As porridge loaves sound rather peasant-like, I decided to make one with a Georgia palate- oats, rye, and whole wheat flower (all typical crops of 19th century subsistence farmers in Georgia), peanut flour (because it sounds very Georgian even if no one was making peanut flour in the 19th cen.), barley (just because I enjoyed the sweet rich flavor in the loaf I made a couple weeks ago).

Bread specs. 2 loaves

Total flour 1000g

Central Milling bread flour- 635g (65%)

The first time I baked brioche I did a test bake baking them as buns.  For today’s bake I decided that I’d plait my brioche dough and bake it in a pullman pan for fun.  I reduced the butter because I ended up not having enough for 50% so decided to go ahead and make adjustments and make it at 25% butter, poor man’s brioche LOL.

I realized that I hadn’t baked a crumble topped pie in at least 3 years so I decided it was time to do a crumble pie again.  I’m using Kenji Lopez-Alt’s pastry recipe again because it is now my go to recipe.  It is a reliable way of baking a buttery yet tender pie crust every time.  Rather than cutting in butter, you make a  butter flour paste with ⅔ of the flour.  This essentially coats ⅔ of the flour with butter.  So later when water is added that flour encapsulated in butter cannot form gluten and guarantees a tender buttery crust.