Blog posts

I set myself the target whether I can produce a really good example of a 'Fool's crumb' with all the

features that Trevor describes in his book.

Not really - I tried an experiment with Champlains to use extended cold bulk fermentation in my wine cooler overnight, shape in the morning and totally misjudged the 2nd proof!

But, rather than only share the good, here you also get the 'ugly' and this might be useful for someone learning. Certainly when I started off, I did not know what underproofed loaves looked in comparism to overproofed etc.

Hello friends - 

This weekend, I revisited my seeded SD. The recipe is very similar to the last version except:

• I changed the seed blend a bit, added some pumpkin seeds and upped the total amount of seeds from 19% to 23% and
• I adjusted the flour blend, less white (79% is now 71%), more whole wheat (19% is now 24%) and more rye (2% is now 5%). 

Formula: 

This s take off from out our normal Banana bread cupcakes that we like because they are iced with sprinkles bt Lucy was not having the least bit of interest tn more work on a busy Saturday and said in the pan it goes.

I was on a walnut kick recently. This gave rise to these three walnut bread formulas. Turns out the simplest and most low-maintenance formula of the three, the sourdough with sprouted flour and mixed grains, is still my favourite.

Walnut Sourdough with 20% Rye and 30% Sprouted Red Wheat

Dough flour:

On a recent trip to the US, I discovered Trader Joe’s. Wow! Lots of cool new things to check out. One of them was unsulfured dried apple rings. Of course , I had to grab a couple of packages. 

Stole a recipe out of "The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book". Fresh Milk Bread. Milk, Butter, Water, Yeast, 100% whole wheat. The bread turned out beautifully and sliced easily. I was much more confident today deciding when the dough was fully proofed and everything worked out quite well. On the first loaf, my scoring was too hesitant, on the second loaf I just went for it and got a clean score right off the bat, even though the score should have been a bit deeper. I feel like I am getting better every loaf!

I joined The Fresh Loaf a week or two ago when I realized I was going to need help to achieve more open crumb. What a wealth of knowledge on this site!

Current Goals

This one is a keeper.  The depth of flavor added by the Guinness,coupled with the grilled onions and freshly ground rye is amazing.  The added freshly made yogurt provided a nice soft crumb as well.  All in all, this one is worth trying.  It's the perfect grilled bread as well as sandwich bread.

It's been abnormally hot in Deepest Lancashire (as with most of the UK) these past couple of months. So much so that my normal 900g batardes are going stale before we finish them. The obvious solution was to make something a bit smaller, so I split my usual dough quantity, based on 1kg flour, into three loaves, each around 670g unbaked weight.

I'm also currently exploring retarded bulk fermentation, so I incorporated that into this bake.

Flour mix

During the Champlain community bake I abandoned Trevor's premix method as it degraded my UK flours too much and I ended with soup...

Thinking a bit more about temperatures I thought what would happen if I were to do the 'premix' method but keep the dough 'cooler' rather than into fridge and then get to room temp. I used the 304g amount of water for 70% hydration as in his formula.