Blog posts

My original plan was to test bake a bread raised by sakadane, however, that didn’t get bubbly enough to raise anything.  So plan B was baked instead.  I have a small amount of einkorn that I haven’t touched recently and thought that it would be perfect to use as a tangzhong.  It has poor gluten so gelatinizing it in a tangzhong is a perfect way to add it to a bread.  I also enjoyed a test bake of buttermilk bread that I did recently so decided on a buttermilk bread.

Thick slices of Cabot cheddar , buttered Challah and a 100 yr old iron skillet. Nothing could surpass the flavor and fragrance. 

Same old same old. Only new thing is using sweetened 1/2 and 1/2 on the dough pre bake. I love the flavor rather than the egg yolk wash. 

I started my first yeast water culture last weekend with a mix of dried fruit (raisins, dates and apricots...mostly raisins).  I didn't really know what to expect.  After four days, it looked like most of the fruit was floating and I had good fizz.  Some of the larger pieces of apricots and dates were still on the bottom but I had read that was to be expected (and made sense).  The 'test' starter was mixed up that evening and left in the cold oven with the light on over night.  It had nice activity by morning, having nearly tripled, so I mixed up a full le

Recently after starting to go to work every day I don't have much time to bake during the week, so we completely ran out of bread by the weekend, and I wanted to quickly bake some nice bread. So I turned to CLAS in combination with IDY.

Made two seeded breads in my small bread pans. Toasted 30 g sunflower and 50 g pumpkin seeds. Soaked 30 g crystal rye malt with boiling water, together with those toasted seeds, and also added 30 g crushed linseeds. Used together with the soaking water in the dough. I wanted to try using altus in this bread, but forgot!

Ala Agnes Varda

So with the success of my first vinegar a rose wine vinegar I decided I’d try making a fruit vinegar.  Raspberries were on sale recently and raspberry vinaigrettes are delicious so that made my decision easy.  Because I recently refreshed my 1.5 year old grape yeast water I decided I’d speed the first fermentation up by inoculating the raspberries with some about 2 tbsp of the grape yeast water.  So into a jar went the two containers of raspberries.  In a ratio of 500 g of fruit to 66 g of sugar, added sugar and enough water to cover the fruit.

launchpad pre-bake-off systems (ingredient) check off.

Faiccos Italian specialties (Bleecker street Greenwich Village) homemade sweet & hot Sopresatta

Imported sharp Provolone

Imported Sicilian Caciocavallo

No name low moisture mozzarella, I saw some sandwich-ready slices of the mozzarella on the counter. I asked, Boars head? He replied, no. I asked for a pound. He came out with an unmarked loaf about 2/3 the size of a Grande loaf of whole milk. Don't you know, with my big mouth was embarrassed to ask the brand! Grrr.

Saw the making of this bread on a tv culture special. Had never seen this technique before.  The dough is very wet and turned out onto a heavily floured bench after a rest from final mixer mixing.  (Any mixer can handle this white rye goo.) With heavily floured hands, the dough is portioned, pulled from the mass and shapped into balls or floured globs and rested on a floured tray with plenty of spacing.  Then after a rest, dough is geschüttelt or shaken until it flattens out into a large, for want of word, cracker resembling a pizza slipping and sliding across the peel.

Was inspired by Martadella's recent rye breads, and the somewhat recent community bake to make bread similar to the Danish rugbrod. I was short on rye, so I did include some whole wheat. Must try this again when I replenish my stock of rye.

Ingredients:

300 gr whole rye flour

150 gr whole wheat flour

150 gr last night's belgian beer (completely flat and most of the alcohol had evaporated)

200 gr water

80 gr 100% hydration rye starter (recently refreshed)

70 gr old ww bread, soaked with an unknown amount of water and then wrung out

I’ve had orange poppyseed in the back of my mind for quite some time and finally got around to trying it in this 100% whole stoneground spelt sourdough bread.

Whole stoneground spelt 453 g sifted yielding
47 g of bran scalded with 94 g of boiling water and left overnight in the fridge.
VWG 23.55 g
Water 341 g water and 15 g for bassinage
Salt 10.47 g
50 g of poppyseeds
Zest of 1 small-med orange

Overnight levain
16 g starter + 16 g brown sugar + 25 g water + 47 g whole spelt