Blog posts

my journey into flour milling started after stumbling upon a video of Michael Pollan lamenting about commercial flours inferiority. 

(Above image is pre-cooked, shortly after mixing.)

Sep 15, 2020.

This is the rolled oats and seed loaf, called "Adventure Bread", from "Josey Baker Bread."

http://www.amazon.com/Josey-Baker-Bread-Baking-Awesome-ebook/dp/B00GOJT6LU?tag=froglallabout-20

I try to keep my loaves around the 50% whole grain level for health reasons and decided I should just bite the bullet and go for 100% this time.

Ingredients:

• 350g home milled hard red winter wheat (Redeemer)
• 75g home milled spelt
• 85g starter at 100% hydration (my starter did contain some KABF so technically the loaf is more like 95% whole grain)
• 360g water
• 10g salt

Process:

This is my first loaf bake in six months. I have been making small flatbreads in the meantime.

I milled seven pounds of flour on Friday the 11th -- 3 pounds of Prairie Gold hard white spring wheat, 2 pounds of Kamut, and 2 pounds of hard red winter wheat.

The goal here was to re-do the previous bake, #19: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/62664/19th-bake-3202020-18-tsp-instant-yeast

with a longer autolyse, and a shorter ferment. 

Issue

My liquid white flour starter gets gradually weaker over time, although was created from rye flour. My regimen was to feed my culture a couple of times a week and refrigerate after the starter had ripened on the bench. The culture is 125% hydration and is fed with white bread flour.

The culture was initially strong with good rising power. After about three weeks it becomes weak and has a reduced ability to give a good rise and volume to the loaves. I have to occasionally freshen the starter with stone-ground rye to return its vitality and power.

Well I couldn’t resist because I love kamut & durum bread. I often add spelt but not this time. And obviously not a baguette

I made sure my starter was really active before I started. 
Bread flour 62.2%
kamut flour 40%
durum 7.8% (all I had left)

water 80%
salt 1,8%

This is Cedar Mountain’s Grass bread with a few minor tweaks. The last time I made this, my notes has several comments about how wet this dough was so I cut the water back by 25 g and the yogurt by 10. Initially the dough seemed pretty stiff but it loosened up when I added the add-ins and as it fermented. I was also careful to cook the porridge until it was very thick. This time I ended up with a beautiful elastic dough. It resulted in nice well sprung loaves. 

Recipe

Makes 3 loaves. 

Add-ins

In recent times I have been baking exclusively with durum wheat and the results have got progressively better with each bake. I wanted to explore the typical traditional process whereby an old-dough technique is employed although in real terms I applied the method in my own way.

Continuous old-dough process:

Old-dough (sourdough) (60% hydration and 2% salt).
refreshed 1:1 (old-dough:flour) + enough water to make a firm dough.

Make bread using refreshed old dough at 20%, reserve a piece.