Blog posts

Since I started my explorations of German style mixed flour ( rye/wheat ) breads I was using caraway seeds.

I kept with using a small amount of commercial yeast,   mainly because the scheduling is very simple that way.

And I stuck to using wholegrain rye flour for the rye part - because I like the taste and texture.

Recently I started experimenting with using sourdough only, and using light rye as well as wholegrain rye.

I was in the mood for nutella so i started googling what i could do with the stuff and i ran accross this

Steamy Kitchen Article

But i am tring to not use the NK bread as much anymore so i used the BBA recepit for Challah. the only thing i didnt do was let the  4 strand loaf proof for 90 minutes. its getting late and i didnt want to wait. i got some decent oven spring(gas oven, no steam). For a rookie who doesnt really follow the "rules" im really happy with the result.

After baking several white, or nearly so, YW and SD breads in French styles, I wanted to go back to my favorite breads to make and eat (and re-stock the freezer) - rye based multi grain SD breads that were at least 50% whole grains with rye sprouts,  rye scald (with red rye malt), some Borodinski altus, some caraway, flax and pepitas (pumpkin) seeds.

This lunch was made with the 20% whole grain baggies.  After a busy weekend doing nothing much, it was nice to have some ready made sammy materials to use for lunch.  This YW bread was made for flavor as opposed for holes.  It came out of the freezer in good shape.

Had some left over grilled Japanese eggplant to go with leftover Holiday Ham, last nights salad, half a tomato, last of the brie cheese, home made Dijon mustard and some mayo.

With a lot of baguette dough and a home oven.

Lately I have been working with ever larger batches of dough.  This is good training as it helps develop one’s eye in terms of dividing, does a little hand skill training on wrangling a larger volume, and because I have a tiny kitchen, ups the bar on mise en place and other organizational skills.

Yeah. French makes everything seem fancier. Anyway, today I made three kinds of bread from the San Francisco-style Sourdough dough I've been playing with for the past couple months.

The dough was basically version 6. I put my stock starter through 3 builds of 75% AP and 25% WW at 50% hydration. The builds were fed at approximately 12 hour intervals, and the third build was cold retarded for about 14 hours then fermented at 85 dF for 3 hours before mixing the dough to make 2 kg. After dividing and shaping, all products were cold retarded again before final proofing and baking.

Every once in a while, things don't go exactly as planned, but the result is really good anyway.  This is one of those times - a happy accident.

A bakery re-born

Hi and welcome to my first blog and my first tentative steps into the bakery business.

Hi everyone,

It's been a long time since I've been able to contribute anything to the community here at TFL. Clinic and hospital visits (as a patient) most weekends, some overtime work at my main job and a lot of editing work up until the end of the fiscal year here in Japan have kept me too busy to post anything.