Blog posts

Last loaf of the day, haven't cut it to check the crumb, but will post pic when I do!

Buttered right out of the pan, love the flavor it adds.

Looking forward to a toasted slice of this to go with my oatmeal in the morning!

After two weeks of travel and eating out, it was super nice this weekend to be back in my kitchen and able to eat at home.  I celebrated by baking three batches of bread.

The first, pictured above, was a 60% whole wheat, 13% spelt sourdough (73% hydration).  It was good, though a bit grainier than what my family typically likes.  Still, we enjoyed it.

I also made a batch of Hokkaido Milk Bread.

I was gonna make a 50% wholewheat ciabatta with hybrid levin. After milking the soy bean,I thought I should added some of the soy pulps in my loaf. 

The calcuated hydration was at 80%, I guess the grains soak up a lot of water, so I ended up with a tacky dough instead of a ciabatta dough. 

The coming week would be a ciabatta challenge again! Hopefully no pulps will come in my way. 

For this pizza crust the girls wanted to go back to our Focaccia Romana  crust that has garlic rosemary and sun dried tomato.  I said OK but didn’t tell them that the dough would be SD instead of their favorite poolish one.

We had pinched 40 g of fully ripe 100% multi-grain levain from last Friday’s bake and then fed it 40 g each of AP and water making this the 5th feeding for this levain.  We let it sit on the counter for 2 hours and it easily doubled.

I've been teaching four hour bread classes to raise money for my daughter's school and for the food bank, and it's been amazingly fun. For each class we bake a pizza for lunch (with wine and beer if there are adults) and make a few breads. Usually a sourdough, and a couple of others as they request. I just did a class for four middle-school aged girls where we made two soudoughs, pizza, monkey bread and cinnamon rolls -- they were a fantastic group.

Anyway, tons of fun.

Yeast Water is alive and it's time to play.  A big thanks to dabrownman for his simple instructions to get this culture going and maintenance.  I highly suggest a post on this as was explained to me for those who might be interested in making their own culture.  Then it will be an archived easy approach to a natural levain.  My YW is being fed with currants/apples and has a lovely sweet hard cider smell to it.  Since it was so young I decided to do a hybrid with some White Starter as backup and to add a bit of the twang.  So I pre fermented 20% of the flour.

Great recipe, I didn't have the 5 or 7 grain meal he mentioned so I substituted a mixture of rye, oat and wheat flakes. Nice sour flavor. I also substituted bread starter in place of the yeast for the preferment.

The dough was really wet, thick. After two hours i had to use extra flour to get the outside dry enough to become workable. I left the dough in the refrigerator for a slow rise and worked great!

Here's the link to the recipe

http://ketex.de/blog/brotrezepte/steinhorster-schrotbrot

Yesterday I made a 95% hydration loaf in my pot using Jason's Coccodrillo chiabatta recipe, but using a sourdough starter boosted with yeast. 

I was a stunning loaf when it came out the oven with amazing oven spring but as it cooled it dropped. I understand that the escaping steam will drop the bread but this seemed a bit much. Why did the gluten not hold it's shape? Should it have cooked longer? The crumb is soft and spongy and totally delicious, so at the end of the day the taste is what counts and personally I don't mind that it dropped - I just want to know why........