Blog posts

I plan to make a barley risotto with lemon ricotta, sun dried tomatoes and spinach for dinner and wanted a bread to go along with it.  It has been a long time since I made a plain old country sourdough so decided that would go well with dinner. I made small changes to my usual country sourdough recipe for this bake.  I went back to using a liquid levain instead of a stiff levain just because I hadn’t done a liquid levain in a long long time.

I've only made this a couple times.  It's a Finnish bread and a favorite in the local bakeries.  It makes great French Toast!  Traditionally, it's a 3-strand braid, but this is my second attempt making it with a 5-strand.

Makes two braids...

Levain
114g    AP Flour
74g     Water
0.5g    Active Dry Yeast
1)  Dissolve yeast in water.  Combine all ingredients and ferment at 70 deg F for 12-14 hours.

I just prepared my rye starter for an 8 week holiday. I took 10-gram of my ripe stiff rye culture and crumbed it using 100-gram whole rye. Air dried for a couple of days and stored in a clean old sock. It's now laid to rest in the cupboard.

When I get home in November, I'll rehydrate it into a paste and feed for a couple of days. Should be good to go :)

Cheers,

Gavin

We have friends staying over tomorrow night.  I am planning on baking a strata for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Because the strata requires an egg bread I decided that I couldn’t possibly just buy a grocery store challah for our friends’ breakfast.  So the decision was made to bake a delicious 50% WW SD Challah and push fermentation further.  This time I pushed the fermentation until the aliquot jar showed a full 190% rise at the time of baking.  At this point the poke test showed that the dough just slightly sprung back.

We just moved from sunny AZ to Cheyenne, WY. My starter seems to have made the move just fine, bubbling up nicely when fed. Unpacking is progressing, and I am starting to find kitchen things bit by bit.

I threw together a sandwich loaf yesterday just so we could have something, and wasn't sure how things would turn out. This was a no recipe/no notes concoction, put together after discovering my loaf pans. 🎉

Adapted from Schvartzapel's recipe in Chambelland.

I've added candied strawberries, Valrhona caramel chocolate, and caramel chunks, 

I may be starting a new career in an Italian Restaurant working for a man named Matt H. Please keep fingers crossed for me!  Thank you,  john M.

I love Autumn in the UP...  Not only the colors that start popping on the maples, but Autumn means the tomatoes and peppers are ready to harvest!

Jalapenos

Fresno Chilis

It was a busy weekend and a busy weekend of baking!  Catching up on a few posts...

Have been trying a few recipes and techniques of other TFL'ers in my last couple bakes, and this weekend I tried trailrunner's holy trinity of equal parts honey, EVOO, and yogurt in place of some of the water.  I chose to try it on one of the whole grain recipes I've been wanting to bake again:  60 rye:40 spelt with toasted pumpkin seeds and flaxseed.

I still have a bag of whole buckwheat flour from Anita’s Mill that I am finding hard to use up. I decided to try it in a milk bread for something a bit different.  Then because buckwheat has no gluten I decided I’d use it in the tangzhong and also as half the flour in the levain.  Buckwheat is neither a grain nor a grass, in fact it is a flowering plant related to rhubarb and sorrel.  It is considered a pseudo cereal.  The seeds of buckwheat are what is used to make the flour and it is becoming in vogue at the moment in French bakeries for bread.