Blog posts

How I lubed and adjusted my Chinese-made Shule (German) brand version of the Marcato Marga 3-roller hand-cranked grain mill.

No guarantees here. This blog is about my particular machine, my experience and observations.

I checked the Marcato Marga site, and externally it is identical to mine except for cosmetic differences. Be aware that the interior could be very different.

On this other person's  blog page: https://seedforsecurity.com/blog/79

I made two more 50% whole grain laminated loaves this weekend. One was filled with black and white sesame seeds and the other had raisins and toasted walnuts. I did a one hour autolyse for both doughs followed by a 3.5 hours bulk ferment (coil, laminate, 3x coil). These loaves had more spelt than I've done before because I was running low on whole wheat. Very happy with the taste of both loaves, but looking forward to being reunited with my dutch ovens, banneton, and lame to see if I am still capable of producing a decent looking loaf! 

I am just wondering if anybody knows why some alveoli are elongated and some are round? Does it have to do with oven spring? Or the folding technique? Any ideas would be great. 

This bread had a 6 hour levain build until doubled. 

2 hour autolyse

20% levain added followed by 30 min rest and then salt added and 10 min slap and fold. Bulk ferment was 5.25 hr with 4 stretch and folds, preshape, 25 min bench rest, final shape, 16 hour cold proof. 

Thanks

The detailed formula, complete with bake timing, can be found in the video description. 

I love adding sweet potatoes to bread.  I have to admit I thought I had roasted some purple sweet potatoes which I love to use to add that beautiful purple color to the bread.  As it turns out I had roasted some red purple potatoes which are actually much tastier to eat by themselves.  They don't add a lot of color but are do add a nice amount of moisture and spring to the crumb.

This is one of my very favourite breads. It is so creamy and delicious.

This recipe is very close to my take-2 on it. This time, I didn’t have to add extra water to the dough and I decided to do all coil folds instead of half regular folds and half coil folds. I’m curious to see how that will affect the crumb.

Recipe

Makes 3 loaves

Porridges: 

50 g large flake oats plus 100 g water

50 g coarse ground Khorasan  

Dough: 

I was inspired by alfanso making baguettes using Hamelman's Sourdough Seed Bread recipe. His results looked stunning with great crust colour and crumb. Today I made the same recipe into an oblong loaf. Reasonably happy, except I was expecting more volume and more open crumb. Still tasted great. 75% hydration, 25% seeds; sunflower, sesame and flax (linseed). Definitely will make this again, but will extend the final proof. I didn't retard the final proof but gave it 2 1/2 hours at 24C. Ideas welcome.

I first started baking pies about two and a half years ago, I’ve gone through a pile of different pasty recipes until I tried Stella Parks recipe in Bravetart cookbook.  I’ve mentioned this one before, but if you haven’t tried it you really need to.  It is the easiest to make, the one challenge for us bread bakers is not to knead.  Once I have a dough in my hands I automatically want to knead it, with pastry you really shouldn’t knead it.  In fact, I barely bring this together.

Like scorchia, Covid-19 led me to invest in a big bag of "ultra-unifine" bread flour from Azure. I've used it in place of white bread flour in a few recipes and decided it was time to let it shine in a classic-style sourdough.

For my first bake from Bryan Ford's beautiful new book, I was drawn to these "semitas de yema" for two reasons. First, their appearance - and, it turns out, the method - is similar to Asian "pineapple" buns, hitting the void that is within me, now that I am living far from the Asian bakeries of my home town. Second, I have previously experimented with using sourdough in enriched doughs but never seen a professionally written recipe that relies entirely on wild yeasts.