Blog posts

I was reading how UK bakers, especially in Scotland and Ireland, used to bake their batch loaves in wooden frames. That's right - the wooden frame goes INTO the oven! Originally, the bakers didn't even use a frame - it was just lengths of heavy timber inserted into the oven defining a rectangle with the dough pieces inside the rectangle. Interestingly, these lengths of wood were called "upsets".

A Yudane Demi-Baguette

I was curious about yudane, a scalding method whereby you take 20% of the flour of your bread and treat it to equal weight of the water from your recipe at boiling temperature and let it gelatinize overnight.

This blog describes my experience doing it. I was very pleased with the results of using a freshly-milled whole wheat kernel yudane in a sourdough baguette. Crispy crust, fluffy crumb, creamy almost buttered flavour and texture with a mellow wheat flavour.

Recipe Source

Oct. 15, 2021.

Goal: 90% WW, no Sharbati this time, 3/8 tsp ADY, 90+ g old dough.

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A: 9:15 am, mixed 108 g Patel SG WW durum, 81 g H2O, 93 g old dough from previous batch.

B: 10:25 am, mixed 252 g BRM SG WW, 189 g H2O.

108 + 252 = 360 g WW

C: 10:31 am, mixed/kneaded-together A + B.

11:35 am: mixed 50 g H2O + 6 g powdered milk, and kneaded it into C.

Kneaded in 3/8 tsp active dry yeast.

11:50 am: kneaded in 8 g salt, then kneaded in 40 g organic AP flour (Arrowhead Mills.)

Gosh. Kicking myself that I hadn't tried out parmesan in my breads before. This bread had a great combination of inclusions: 41g of parmesan cheese, grated from a frozen block. Fresh zest of one lemon, about 3 tsp worth. 2 tsp of dried origanum (marjoram). And 45g of Kalamata olives (13 ea). Incredible smell when it was out of the oven. I couldn't wait the two hours for it to cool. Was cutting into it after 40 minutes, sometimes it is the guilty pleasure of hot steamy crusty bread that is the most enjoyable.

10/12/2021.  62nd  bake/batch.

The changes here, from the previous bake, are a slight increase in the Sharbati, decreasing the white flour, and less old dough; and I ran out of fresh milk, so I had to use some powdered milk.

Lots of firsts in this loaf, so not sure any conclusions can be drawn from any one part of it, but overall, the combination produced a really nice loaf (for me anyway).

- New recipe

- New shaping technique

- New DIY baking steel

- New starter (not really done yet, but I got impatient)

Recipe

My starters are usually fed a variety of flours depending on what I fancy. During rye+ap week, I made these orange-y loaves with the last of the flours I had.

So made the Forkish Walnut Levain bread which produces two loaves but now want to substitute cranberries for the walnuts. The recipe calls for 225g of walnuts. What about the cranberry amount and is there anything I need to do to the cranberries before adding them to the final mix. The image posted is of the walnut levain. Not bad but would like to try cranberries or something else. 

Paul 

This is the same recipe as the recently posted 50% whole wheat Hokkaido sourdough milk bread except that the total dough weight was reduced to make 8 buns in a 9” cake pan. These are going to my sister’s house for our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner tonight, the first time having a family dinner since the pandemic started.

 8 rolls in a 9” round pan or

9 rolls in a 8” square pan

Ingredients

Sweet Stiff Starter