Blog posts

Two functional bakes to fit into the routine and needs of the family.

Today's bake:   Big and Bubbly Focaccia

Source:   https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/big-and-bubbly-focaccia-recipe

Notes: 

• I ground 5 g of dried rosemary that was included in the dough and added some fresh rosemary sprigs to top.
• I resized the dough for 2 larger pans: 

From  TDW:705gr   Pan Size: 9x9x2 In / 22.86x22.86x5.08 CM  

It was more or less a "freestyle" recipe, a spontaneous decision to bake with flaxseeds.

80% white flour

5% spelt flour

15% whole wheat flour

25% whole rye sourdough

100% hydration

15% flaxseeds (soaked in the water the night before)

The flaxseeds are pretty "thirsty", the dough felt more like 70%-75% hydration

Well I’m impressed that it’s not a disaster and I learned a LOT along the way. 

Never change too many things with a bake at once. CHECK! ( ignored)

Never try to multitask to the point of complete forgetfulness. CHECK! ( ignored) 

Be grateful that even though everything went awry the bread is wonderful . CHECK!!!!

This is my very first true sourdough enriched bread ever HAHAHAHA (can't you tell how ecstatic I am? Oh, and not counting my potato loaves). It was a lot of trials and errors with my starter and fermentation schedule. Oh boy, glad I'm finally here.

Cariah Marey has settled on satisfactory ratio. She is 1:1:1:1 bran:skim-milk-powder:water:butter at the moment. Skim milk lends lactose to increase osmotic pressure, while butter is there as ankle weight. She had little tolerance toward butter. Putting butter in the starter allows her to adapt over time, and she already has.

Recently there was a TFL thread that linked back to txfarmer's post from long ago in pain-de-mie, or slightly enriched soft shreadable sandwich loaves. Here's the link:

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20669/sourdough-pan-de-mie-how-make-quotshreddablyquot-soft-bread

As promised, a delayed side-by-side assessment.

So on Monday I baked a Chleb Sandomierski

Dietmar Kappl of homebaking.at has recently written his first book entitled "Baking next level mit Roggen". Unfortunately it's only available in German and in printed format. Of course, no sensible baker publishes ebooks these days because they will be instantly pirated.

Haferflocken brötchen is one of the recipes in the book. I'm not going to publish it here to respect copyright, but if you go on the book publisher's website there is a small sample from the book with a few recipes - this is one of them.