Blog posts

Today was my traditional day out in Zurich with some of my sistersin law. Stadelhofen is where we meetup and luckily both bakeries I wished to visit were within a short distance of each other.  Kat suggested John  Baker and what an amazing shop. Tucked away in a little side street. would love to have been able to actually talk with bakers but they were very busy.  

Details are in the following thread: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57222/warm-bulk-cold-bulk-and-then-cold-retarding#comment-416196

Since Lucy and I didn’t die, or even get sick from our new wild and black rice starter we made last week we decoded to keep I around in the fridge for a while and see what we could do with this exotic culture.  Lucy said we need should make some SD noodles, something we haven’t done for a long time and it is too good not to do and so much better than most anything you can buy!

Details are in the following thread..http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57222/warm-bulk-cold-bulk-and-then-cold-retarding#comment-416196

I wanted to know whether a warm , cold bulk combined and then a cold retard would possibly get me a more open crumb as I noticed this with recent ciabatta and baguette bakes.

I love sticky rice! No matter it is cooked whole in a savory dish or made into rice cake or mochi. Fried, steamed, baked or boiled, it is so versatile. After coming across bread recipes that suggested using up leftover rice cake from Chinese New Year by stuffing it into bread, I decided to create my own version of rice cake bread.  

Purple Rice Cake Sourdough with 20% Millet and 20% Sprouted Durum

So.... I've been struggling with trying to let lift and good crumb from whole wheat.  I like 100% for it's health benefits. This is my third try and will post crumb shot later.

Formula (give or take)

250 gm whole wheat (sifted)

175 gm water

4 gm salt 

Autolyse above for several hours.  While doing that I fed my whole wheat starter and poured 60 gm of boiled water on the remaining 40 gm of the bran from sifting.

Final dough

autolysed dough (429 gm)

levain 48 gm

bran / water mix 100 gm

The video below is my step by step journey in baking Maurizio Leo’s Levain Baguettes.  It is self explanatory with almost all steps included.  However, I eliminated the levain build and final mixing of ingredients as I’ll take a guess that there are some somnambulists on TFL just looking for a good video to ease them into Dream Land.  Please watch and hopefully you will enjoy the video as well as the voiceover.

alan

5pm scald: 125 g bulgur, 210 g water, 3 g salt

6pm chill the scald

7pm autolyze: the scald, 270 g king arthur bread flour, 155 g water

9pm levain: 60 g 100% starter, 85 g bread flour, 85 g water

9pm refrigerate autolyze

7am take autolyze out of frige

8:30am knead levain and 8 g salt into autolyze

9am - 11:30am six sets of stretch and folds

3pm shape into banneton

6:30pm bake covered

6:50pm uncover

7:30pm done

Hello friends! 

Happy monday :) This is was my bake yesterday...

I've been working on this formula for a couple of months and I've almost settled on a flour blend that I really like. 70% white, 25% whole grain and 5% rye. I'm still working on what grain the 25% is. I'm not really spoiled for choice in terms of flour, but I've tried 25% spelt, and 25% whole wheat and a few variations in between. This one is 25% whole wheat. 

For anyone interested, I've been doing most of my progress tracking in instagram. You can find me at @leftcoastloaf

See you there!