Blog posts

I think I've still got it!

Wisconsin's safer at home order has got me baking up a storm! Huge thanks to dabrownman for his NMNF starter method. 

I won't share the first loaf...we'll call that tasty (but ugly) practice.

My whole wheat w/ flax meal was an experiment very loosely based on a recipe from Tartine No. 3. It was my first whole wheat loaf and was a nightmare to shape, but it turned out great!

A TFL member sent me  a kind inquiry as to my welfare, since I hadn't posted any recent baking. Well, I am fine, thank you, except for some cabin fever. I feel great and not particularly vulnerable, considering my .... seniority. My hyper-prudent spouse is suppressing my daily urges to expose myself to nasty bugs, no doubt a good thing. <sigh>

I have been baking - probably a little more than usual, in fact. And I have tried a couple of new things. The photos are all from the past 3 weeks' baking.

Thanks to quarantine, I decided to get out my crusty (but trusty!) 7 years dormant starter and bake some sourdough bread again.  I was really excited to find that there are a number of overnight, mostly no-knead sourdough recipes available now and after trying out a couple of them, I finally settled on my own variation of High Hydration Sourdough from the book Artisan Sourdough Made Simple.

To celebrate the naming of my almost one year old starter John Dough, I decided to make biscuits for the first time.  Because I have just enough discard I am making the biscuits using John Dough’s discards.

I made small adjustments to a recipe from thekitchn.com.

Hello, Friends.

I hope this blog entry finds you all well and your kitchens stocked. This weekend we Falzons, had a zoom family reunion. I setup a prep station and baked while I reminisced. It was a true NYC emigrant extravaganza!  Ravioli brought to NYC by our southern Italian pisani. At the very same time Bialy the not so famous cousin to the well known bagel! Enjoy!

 Post script:

Just wanted to register the results using a stiff levain. I took some of my 100% hydration starter and built the levain in two steps. The first build was also 100% hydration while the second build was a stiff version with hydration around 50%. I think the results have been better than expected based on using AP flour, since it does not have very strong gluten. Let me walk you through the method used:

Ingredients

60 gr stiff levain @ 50% hydration (20 gr water; 40 gr flour)

30 gr whole wheat stone ground flour

30 gr rye

180 gr AP flour

My long time lurking here started with the Bouabsa baguettes that Alfanso just posted about and I was doing the exact same recipe on the same day in celebration of white flour returning to our local supermarkets I made a double batch of them with KAAP and Wheat Montana AP to test the difference. I have tried to make a sourdough version and they tasted good but did not have the characteristics I like in a baton. This is a versatile recipe that I use for pizza, ciabatta, and all things white and holey. The only change I made in yesterdays bake was the mixing and folding.

I baked this today, and it turned out great.  I forgot to add the walnuts though! :-(. The recipe contains some milk powder, sugar and a small amount of butter, and the crumb is like a brioche, very soft and with distinct sour notes.  The pumpkin accents the sour flavor, giving Your sourdough a twist.

Here’s the recipe (using a KA mixer):

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