Blog posts

This is Benny's 100% WW Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Bread. (The link points to his 2.0 version and I'm not positive whether I made that one or another variant.) Anyway, I attempted this bread back in January but got no rise to speak of, undoubtedly because I did not a thing to prepare my rye sour for a sweet levain and enriched dough. I baked it anyway and while it rose a couple inches in the oven, it barely filled half the pan.

Time to try to make a raisin bread...and might as well go to the Whole Grain version....and might as well do sprouted grain as well. To that end I took the recipe from the book and tweaked it a bit and this is the result. 

RECIPE AND CALCULATIONS HERE

It's been a long time coming, but I finally got around to doing a side-by-side comparison of a bake with and without raisin yeast water.  One caveat...  any of you that have followed my posts may remember when my yeast water that I made with honey and raisins went sour and noticeably acetic.  I thought it was the new batch of raisins I had purchased, but it happened again with a brand new YW with new organic raisins.

 Added crumb shot. A tiny compressed place at top where lid caught when I peaked at before putting in oven😩 have to stop peaking! Taste and fragrance are rich and a deep almost chocolate fragrance. Eating it with butter. Could use a bit more salt. Crumb is like a moist cake very pleasant and not gummy at all. No sour present. Very pleased. 

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/70103/13%E2%80%9D-pullman-rye-yw-levains

previous bake 86% rye

May 7th, 2022. 91st bake.

500 grams of flour, 425 grams water, and 9 grams salt was hand mixed and left to soak for 1 hour.

I used scales to weigh the above, but did not take note of weight of each type of flour.

I wasn't sure how much water would be needed, so I started with 375 grams, then added 25, mixed, and then added 25 more, and that felt right.

I recently read a book on 19th century yeoman farmers in the Georgia upcountry.  As porridge loaves sound rather peasant-like, I decided to make one with a Georgia palate- oats, rye, and whole wheat flower (all typical crops of 19th century subsistence farmers in Georgia), peanut flour (because it sounds very Georgian even if no one was making peanut flour in the 19th cen.), barley (just because I enjoyed the sweet rich flavor in the loaf I made a couple weeks ago).

Bread specs. 2 loaves

Total flour 1000g

Central Milling bread flour- 635g (65%)

The first time I baked brioche I did a test bake baking them as buns.  For today’s bake I decided that I’d plait my brioche dough and bake it in a pullman pan for fun.  I reduced the butter because I ended up not having enough for 50% so decided to go ahead and make adjustments and make it at 25% butter, poor man’s brioche LOL.

I realized that I hadn’t baked a crumble topped pie in at least 3 years so I decided it was time to do a crumble pie again.  I’m using Kenji Lopez-Alt’s pastry recipe again because it is now my go to recipe.  It is a reliable way of baking a buttery yet tender pie crust every time.  Rather than cutting in butter, you make a  butter flour paste with ⅔ of the flour.  This essentially coats ⅔ of the flour with butter.  So later when water is added that flour encapsulated in butter cannot form gluten and guarantees a tender buttery crust.

Grandma style, but I will be making it again and measuring the ingredients. One apple is in the starter, another one as a part of hydration. Taste is very good, the structure of the crumb not too bad as well!

RECIPE AND CALCULATIONS HERE

It’s golden week in Japan which means we have a few national holidays in a row, which also means time to cook and bake. I knew that I wanted to make some crispy pork belly and turn it into a Perfect Bhan Mi Sandwich.