Blog posts

 It is really difficult to buy fine ground semolina (durum) flour here in NZ. I found a supplier who could remill it and today tried the above for the first time. 

Sponge: 

140 g durum

140 g bread flour

195 g water

yeast 3 g IDY and 13.9 g sugar.

mixed and left to mature 2 hours.

Added 237 g water and 34.8 g olive oil and mixed well before adding 209 g durum, 209 g bread four and 12.5 g salt.

Pain Rustique as a batard and baguettes.  I've seen a few pain rustique posts come through recently.  Well maybe one, maybe more.  And it occurred to me that I hadn't made this before.  Being poolish based, it is a rare bake these days where I don't use a levain as my pre-ferment.

      This was my first bake after being back from a long 2 week business trip to Asia.  Being away is hard on my wife but my dogs really get upset when I don't come home at the end of the day :(.  With that said, I made this one in Lexi and Max's honor.  A nice porridge bread made with fresh milled durum flour and KAF French style flour.  The potatoes really made this one nice and soft and extra moist and the Greek Yogurt didn't hurt either.

All in all this one came out very tasty with a nice open and moist crumb.

Any pics at this stage would look just like last week's batch, so I'll hold off until it comes out of the oven. Using whole wheat because my wife is officially retiring on her next birthday, and I realized I have about 10 weeks to use up a LOT of whole wheat flour before we leave town and head for Mexico. Wish me luck!...

[UPDATE: late edit, catching up on photos since changing online image sources :) ]

can you add honey to a sour dough starter? What's the out come?

This has got to be the most beautiful loaf I've ever baked yet. After working on this recipe for weeks, I've produced 3 beautiful and tasty loaves so far. But this one's special. This is my first loaf baked in my turbo broiler that had actual oven spring! I've never had oven spring baking loaves in it before.

Covering the top of the loaf with aluminium foil for the first 25 minutes of baking seems to do the trick. Next time, I'm going to attempt another loaf, but scored. Let's see how that fares.

Mothers day here in Australia tomorrow  so I made a batch of dinner rolls by request from my daughter for tomorrow's celebration. I know its not mothers day  all over, and my mum used to think it was great as she lived in England and ended up having two mothers days. Sadly she is no longer with us, but I do have a super mother in law so to her  and  any of the Aussie mums  out there I do hope you enjoy your very special day.

I’ve been experimenting with sprouted whole wheat flour (KA flour, not the home milled varieties) wondering what’s the upper limit I can deploy, without compromising the decent open crumb texture. Started with 30% and then increased it to 50%, a few days ago. Mistakenly I put in 100 grams more water than intended. I had no choice but to add a little more sprouted flour. Unfortunately, at the stage after autolyze, the dough won’t be agreeable with that much more flour. Gritted my teeth and, reluctantly, I had to deal with a much wetter dough than I’m comfortable with.

This is my first attempt at this which is similar to one which my swiss sister-in-law used to make.  The recipe came from www.swissmilk.ch/rezepte and is in german. I used IDY instead of fresh. 

A long time ago, before I had ever baked so much as a crumb I had a sudden urge to make a loaf of bread, so equipped with the unshakeable confidence of the totally inexperienced, I bought a pack of whole-wheat flour. I read the instructions on the paper bag and followed them meticulously and baked a .................brick!