Blog posts

Hi all

When my starter peaks but I'm not ready to mix my dough yet, can I put the starter in the fridge for about 8-10 hrs then mix my dough? Will I have to bring it back to room temp before I mix? 

thanks

LL

Hansjoakim was a regular contributor to thefreshloaf for a long time, He was a physics graduate student at the time, as I recall, and an amazingly adventurous and talented chef and baker. In September, 2009 he posted what he called his "favorite 70% rye." I asked him for the formula and baked it myself a week later. It was easy to see why it was a favorite. It was an easy dough to handle for a 70% rye, and it was delicious to eat.

Hi,

I find that most sandwich bread recipes include, butter or oil.  I would like to find a good basic recipe for sandwich bread that does not include butter or oil.  I need to  bake a lot of sandwich bread and I am looking to minimize ingredients.  Any suggestions?

I also added some fresh honey I picked up during our recent trip to Vermont to add a touch of sweetness.

For the topping I used some “The Works” Bread Topping from KAF which to be honest is a bit strong.  It has a bunch of different seeds, garlic, onion, paprika, tumeric and sea salt and spices.

Further explorations in porridge loaves.  I'm currently out of interesting flours, so it seemed a good time to try something new in the porridge category.  Oats are pretty much always at hand.

Spec.'s: (I think)

350g bread flour

75g white spelt

25g peanut flour

338g water (~75% hydration)

~1tbsp salt

---------------

180g quick oat porridge with ~tbsp lavender a dash of salt and a glug of cane syrup

Still working away at my panettone here in the VT wilderness. I've adopted a consistent twice-daily feeding process for my Lievito Madre, and have made other adjustments in dough handling, pH measurements, proofing temperature, and baking process.

I am now seeing significantly more alveolation in the loaves, so apparently all of these things are contributing factors. 

This is the Candied Strawberry Chocolate Caramel panettone.  Here is a side-by-side with my bake of two weeks ago, the new bake is the top row:

This has been a long time coming but a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to making a 50% Emmer loaf (thanks to Ted’s prompting 😊).  It’s been a crazy few weeks getting everything sorted for a much awaited trip back to Europe to visit family. so to bread…

Bread flour 210 g (49.5%)

Malted four 2 g (0.5%)

Emmer 212 g (50%)

water 305 g (72%)

salt 8 g (1.8%)

Levain refreshed and left over night to ripen - I used 133 g 100% hydration starter (part of total dough weights above)

Latest gluten nebula discovery by JWST in my kitchen  :-D

A new member’s here to join the ‘lyse’ family. Autolyse, fermentolyse, saltolyse and now sourlyse. All recipe’s flour, water and sourwort (up to 30% baker’s percentage) roughly incorporated  together and left in the fridge (4C) for 18-24hours. The acidity of sourwort and cold environment guarantee there’ll be very small chance of any unwanted spontaneous activity to occur. The sourlysed dough is then left at ambient temp for 3-4hours to warm up and standard steps followed till bake.

Making SD YW T65/Semola pizza crusts in my Detroit pans. Prep with sauce and parmigiana and then par bake and freeze. Better than Costco 😂😬. The little one on my 40 yr old steel pan ( can’t get it anywhere anymore) will be gone almost immediately after coming out of the oven fully topped. Let me know if you want the best crust formula. 1700 g of yum

And it’s only Tuesday  

par baked goodness ready for freezer when cool

A variation of previous bakes. More pleased than ever with shaping and scoring…thank you TFL . This iteration has home milled 300 g spelt, 300 g Yecora Rojo and 400 g AP Arrowhead Mills flour. 40 g  rye storage starter used to make 280 g YW  and home milled rye levain at 100% hydration. I do not feed my stored starter prior to bakes and my stored YW hasn’t been fed in weeks. Both present with rapid growth so I have let them be.