Blog posts

Sourdough Italian Demi-Baguettes: Variations on a Theme 

David M. Snyder

May 3, 2015

1/1/2015 - New Years Eve Pizza

1/2/2015 - 50 % Whole Grain Sprouted 8 Grain SD/YW with Japanese Black Rice & Seeds

1/9/2015 - 50 Percent Whole Sprouted 16 Grain SD with Lake Havasu Desert Magic IPA

I haven't posted a lot as it seems I have been traveling all the time, but I have been baking, so I will share some of those photos.  When I found out that we were so close to the King Arthur Flour HQ during our New England trip, I just had to go visit there.  It was so much fun, and I wanted to buy everything.  Generally, carrying flour in one's suitcase does make it a lot heavier, and I am already at the limit!  I got a gift certificate for my birthday, so I will be ordering a lot of KAF goods when we aren't traveling so much.

Decided to give the pantry and the new mill a workout. List of ingredients:

5 variety rice mix

Quinoa

Flax seed

Steel cut oats

Wheat bran

Milk

Water

Amaranth

Chia seed

Sunflower seed

White wheat flour, high extraction

Semolina flour

Einkorn flour

Spelt flour

Barley flour

Buckwheat flour

Wild yeast starter

Sorghum syrup

Coconut oil

Salt

Pumpkin seed

Bread smells wonderful. Won't cut it till tomorrow. 

Stu

Today in addition to the Hamelman Challah, our rye starter was floating so we needed to put together bread.

Inspired by Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough with increased whole grains today's dough is really a 1.2.3 with an emphasis on pumpernickel...simply because I didn't feel like working at it.

384 grams of floating starter, 768 grams of water and @1100 grams of flour split:  200 Whole Wheat, 300 Pumpernickel and 600 KA Bread.  I actually dropped the bread flour a little because of the increased whole grain pumpernickel.

  Bread number two I baked this week incorporated some of my ever-growing collection of dried cherries along with a small amount of shredded cheddar cheese and a multitude of tasty flours.  I wanted to make a good healthy bread I could eat for breakfast and I think the end result fits the bill.

I used some of my freshly milled Durum flour in the stater and incorporated some KAF Oat flour, whole wheat, potato and European flour into the final dough.  Some cracked wheat and rye chops were added to round out the whole grain aspect of this one.

I wanted to make a fairly simple bread good for grilling now that the nice weather has finally arrived.  I decided to use up some of my fresh milled Durum and Sprouted Durum flours along with some European style KAF, cracked wheat and a little maple flavored balsamic vinegar to add a nice sweet after note.

I was actually surprised on how much I could taste the maple flavored balsamic as usually I barely notice it, but my taste testing panel at work didn't seem to mind or notice.

After seeing greedybread post the dark pumpernickel from ITJB.  I just knew that Lucy would want to make her version of this bread since she is nuts about pumpernickel and sometimes just plain nuts.  Here are 2  posts

 http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/42120/finally-dark-pumpernickel

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/42145/are-you-ready-part-2-pumpernickel

We usually have some Challah in the freezer and we like to make weekend french toast with...but we were all out.

My go-to recipe for Challah has been the Ciril Hitz recipe we were given in our October bread baking class.  I even used it for the Easter bread basket.  Since I bought Hamelman's Bread, I decided to use his recipe.

Last week we visited the friendly folks at Breadtopia,  it's only 60 miles away, to look at and eventually purchase a KoMo Fidibus 21 grain mill. Happy birthday to me finally got to replace the old noisy, heat producing, and hard to clean one. While there also got an oval brotform, Durum wheat berries ( pasta machine is on the way ), and some Kamut wheat berries.