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Having returned from holiday with a spare pre-mixed Ziploc bag of Abe’s VSSD loaf ingredients, I decided to use them with Anis Bouabsa’s baguette method to see what they produced.  Main changes were upping VSSD’s hydration to +78% and, as the baguette’s 24-hour retard method yielded no dough expansion, I added a further 12-hour, overnight ferment at room temperature (the norm for VSSD), which only offered a meagre ~10% increase in volume.  The VSSD stiff starter was about 3 weeks old.

This is Hamelman’s Five-Grain Levain. I used the same grains as per the formula; cracked rye, flaxseeds (sold here as linseed), Sunflower seeds and oats. I made the cracked rye by milling the rye very coarsely, then sifting with a 40# mesh sieve.

I recalculated for a 750-gram dough (to suit my banneton) and have included the formula below.

I mixed the final build of the levain about 5 pm the day before and made the soaker at the same time. The levain and at its peak by 7 am the next morning.

In order to bring out much more miso flavour I used my red miso and increased it to 10%.

Total Flour 494 g 

Bread Flour 88.5% 437 g

Whole Wheat 11.5% 57 g all in levain 

Total Water 387.5 g 78.5% hydration 

Levain 115 g

Miso 49 g 10% 

Salt 7.5 g 

Overnight Levain build 1:6:6 

The holidays are playing all kinds of tricks with my baking schedule and thinking, so here is another salvaged near-flop.

My girlfriend's brother has been staying with us over the holidays, and when he was leaving yesterday I wanted to gift him a loaf of bread to take with him. But of course I didn't manage to plan it properly, and only could set up the very simple sourdough dough the night before, and spend minimal amount of hands-on time on it yesterday during the day.

I decided to make one of my favorite Community Bake recipes again and made two of the Hamelman Five Grain loaves using cracked rye, oats, sesame seeds, pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I used a mix of bread flour, hard red winter wheat, and rye. I also upped the hydration a bit. I tried to develop the gluten before adding the soaker, but then the large volume of soaker made it hard to I corporate.

Maggie Glezer's book, "A Blessing of Bread," is a wonderful collection of Jewish baking from around the world along with a sort of ethnography of baking in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. This book has, by my count, about 40 recipes for challah, the bread particularly associated with the Jewish sabbath. But the author also identifies the challah recipe she makes for her own family. As with most of her recipes, she provides both a commercially yeasted and a sourdough version (without saying which her family prefers).

I did a lot of holiday baking this year, and part of that was gifting out bread. I made milk bread and potato bread.

This is the most even my milk bread has looked. I always weight each section, but this time, I was more careful about shaping the dough into rectangles before rolling them up, and that really helped.

I recently discovered a fantastic Youtube Channel called Tasting History, in which the host presents recipes from across history. In one such video, linked here, he describes the Sally Lunn Bun, a traditional bun made in Bath, England.

After seeing the video, I decided to try them for myself. The recipe is very straightforward. The only part that takes some extra attention is warming the milk and combining in the sugar and butter.

Ingredients:

This summer, while social distancing in our cabin, I purchased a small wood fired pizza oven where I practiced applying my sourdough starter to making sourdough pizza.  At temperatures between 900F and 1000F (the later being "Hi" or my IR gun) the challenge is to continuously rotate the pizza to keep things from burning while ensuring the top and bottom cook evenly in 1 or 2 minutes.  In addition, chopping lots of tiny hardwood pieces of the precise size needed to keep the little firebox roaring adds to the list of chores.  Our felled locust burns very hot and works exception