Blog posts

This post illustrates starter maintenance and an end-to-end bake of a whole wheat Desem loaf using home milled hard white spring wheat berries (Prairie Gold) using JMonkey's Desem post as a blueprint. It is relevant to some of the starter yeast-vs-LAB ratio discussions on TFL this past week.   It is fun to find such useful posts and discussions from the TFL "archives" back in 2009.  He summarizes the style succinctly, and helps dispel a lot of mystique around this style of bread:

Recently I was challenged by 2 nice members of this community to bake rye bread. Although Christmas time is a bit crazy for me in terms of preparations, I made a combination of Christmas with rye bread and here is the result that I share to the community bake:

 To learn more about concentrated lactic acid sourdough (CLAS), please see here and here. 

Merry Christmas and Happy upcoming New Year everyone!

Yeast vs LAB lag phase (may be relevant to Desem starter optimization)

• http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/83047#comment-83047
• http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/459976#comment-459976

Debra Wink writes:

and the temperature in Perth was 40 degrees  and i made bread for Christmas day at our daughter's home. I have been wanting to bake a curry bread, the inspiration was from Shiao Ping (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13018/curry-rustic-bread) and a bit like going back to visit Erics posts, was inspired to have a shot.

Abe recently posted about a bread he put together from some flour and seeds, and the combination appealed to me as a change of pace from the usual breads that I bake.  Here is my version (pretty much following his steps).

     The ingredients in my version of his bread are:

Spelt Flour -- 400 g

Whole Rye Flour -- 100 g

Salt -- 8 g

Pumpkin Seeds -- 15 g

Sunflower Seeds -- 20 g

Flaxseeds -- 10 g

Sesame Seeds (white) -- 15 g

Starter -- 23 g

Water -- 420 g

My San Joaquin Sourdough originated in Anis Bouabsa's baguettes which had won the prize for the best baguette in Paris in 2008. Bouabsa's baguettes departed from convention in utilizing a 21 hour retardation after bulk fermentation and before dividing and shaping. Jennifer Stewart (Janedo on TFL) and I initially modified Bouabsa's formula by adding a bit of rye flour and some sourdough starter for flavor. I then omitted the commercial yeast altogether and began using the modified formula to shape as bâtards.