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I've been in a porridge bread mood lately. The thing to note with porridge breads is that the water in the porridge can lead to a very wet and slack dough that can be hard to handle. Two months ago I tried to make an oat porridge bread. The dough was so wet that I wasn't able to shape it. After struggling with it I finally just scooped the dough into the brotform. After cold proofing, the dough stuck and I had to scrape it out of the form. The resulting baked loaf was very flat and very sad.

I was going to make Pain au Levain in the tartine style, 12% Prefermented flour, warm water in the levain, fermented for 8 hours, 1 hour autolyze. My target hydration was 81%. I poured the (warm) water for the autolyze and realized it felt... runny, not just wet (I routinely do bread in the 80-85% hydration range, but really wet. I looked at my paper where I had made the scaling calculations to make 3 boules and I found, upon double checking, that my dough was 100 percent hydration! 

Still in the process of fine tuning formulas we liked from last years markets.  This was from Week 9.  The only change made was to use a 3 build levain opposed to a 12 hour overnight levain.  I almost added some honey as well but opted to keep to fewer changes.  Next time honey will be added and the cracked wheat increased.  Then I think it'll go to the final formula books.  

Hi hi...

I baked yesterday for the first time in a looong time.  Had my ripe starter ready to go, only to discover that the battery in my scale had died.  So I completely winged it.

My best guess is that this ended up around 20% rye and a little lower that 70% hydration.

I know, I know!   I haven't posted for over 8 months.   I could say I've been very busy, which is true, but isn't everybody?   So, I have little in the way of excuses.   As you are about to read, however, I have recently moved into a proper unit and set up a bakery, so, any posts would really be about out-and-out commercial production, and that is really beyond what this great website seeks to offer.

   I'm really loving the whole porridge in bread thing.  Last week I adapted the original version to my own technique and it came out great, so now I figured it was time to get some more whole grain goodness into this formula.

I am a broke college student that loves to cook.  I have been experimenting with bread making for a few years, and it has become a great hobby!  I own a bread machine, but lately I have been venturing forth into the realm of non-bread machine artisan bread.  So far, I am having pretty good luck at everything I have attempted (I just made my first loaf of artisan bread in the oven the other day and it turned out great!)  I also started my own sourdough starter (I may have cheated a little bit since I started with this recipe

  I love these rolls which were inspired by a recipe adapted from Karin Hanseata's blog.  The first time I made them I changed a few things but mostly stuck to the original formula per this post.

This week the stiff rye sour has been in the fridge for 4 weeks, 672 hours at 36 F, and it is ready to make some sour bread.  The sour come not so much  Its not so much that it is cold but that it is cold for a very, very long time with plenty of food to eat allowing LAB to reproduce at 3 times the rate of yeast..

Many years ago, we lived for a while in a small town in France.  Every day I would walk to the bakery around the corner to buy our daily baguettes.  Could life be any better?   When it was my turn to order, I would conjure up my finest French: “Bonjour, Madam, je voudrais deux baguettes, s’il vous plait.”  To which Madam would reply “Combien”?  How many?  I would meekly raise two fingers.