We knew that 2020 would be a momentous year, long before we ever heard of COVID-19. We had no idea just how much the virus would affect our plans.
Fortunately for us, we have not had to endure any illness. Nor have we lost any family members or friends to the disease. We recognize that as a true blessing and are grateful.
Doing a dry run for the upcoming World Bread Day 2020 in a couple of weeks. This is a SD bread I shouldn't eat since it a 100% white bread with just 15 g of NMNF starter, but it does show that Focaccia is one bread where your artistic side can make you feel at least a bit Bohemian.
These are my first go at an all white flour 10% protein, in this case from Quebec, that is sourdough and no commercial yeast. After the good results I had with the sesame semolina sourdough baguettes without commercial yeast I decided I needed to give it a go again but with the Quebec white flour. These are essentially Abel’s baguettes au levain without the commercial yeast and hydration increased to 70% during bassinage and finally encrusted with poppy seeds. So I’ll just call them Yorkville Baguettes since that is the neighborhood that I live in ?
At the end of July I finally gave in to temptation and ordered a new oven. I settled on a 13 Function Bosch (not sure if I will ever use all of them!) and finally a week ago it was installed.
For this bake I just played around with some seeds - didn't want a heavy loaf so it was
Bread flour 80%, Wholewheat flour 15%, rye flour 5%, 80% hydration and salt at 2%. I adjusted the flour to include 0.05% diastatic malt. To this I added
Chia seed 4%, sesame seed 5%, flaxseed 5% sunflower seed 5% and pumpkin seed 5%.
Method:
This is a rare mid-week bake of a single batch that gives 3 loaves. What prompted this? James (aka Ciabatta) produced 12 loaves of 4 (Yes! Four!) different breads. His streamlined method piqued my interest so I decided to give it a shot since it I think it would shorten my dough making time significantly. So here goes:
Recipe
Makes 3 loaves
Porridge
100 g rolled oats
200 g water
45 g honey
40 g butter
Add-ins
25g raw Black Sesame seeds
45g raw Sunflower seeds
I've been taunting Benny for weeks now about trying out some Canadain T55 and decided to have two baguettes square up and have a face off for the TXX grand prix. For the record on the left is Canadian T55 blended 50/50 with French T65. This blend is done by recommendation of lepicerie.com seeing that this particular T55 is ancieny Khorasan grain. On the right is straight T65 from france. First impressions is that the Canadian blend turned out really much nicer than the French. The shaping and lead up was noticeably different in that the Canadian dough was a bit
This is another one of Cedar Mountain’s recipes. I definitely need more practice handling dough that has this much rye in it. The dough was super extensible but not very elastic. I managed to keep the stickiness down to a minimum by keeping my hands wet during the coil folds, and being liberal and quick during shaping. It felt quite heavy even after bulk even though the bulk was fast compared to my usual bulk times. I gave it at least an hour proof at room temperature before retardation in the hopes of lightening the crumb a bit.
Recipe
This was a request from a friend as this is her favourite bread.
Recipe
Makes 3 loaves
Add-ins:
75 g dry Wild Rice
150 g dried cranberries
Dough:
700 g strong bakers unbleached flour
200 g fresh milled Kamut
100 g fresh milled Einkorn
700 g water
30 g yogurt
35 g honey
22 g salt
250 g of 3 stage 100% hydration levain (procedure below)
Extra flour to feed levain.
