Blog posts

This was an experiment to see what happens if Benny's 100% WW Hokkaido is done without dairy. The method was fairly faithful to the original recipe with a direct substitution of 'plant butter' for the butter and commercial almond milk in place of milk, even in the tangzhong.

Edited to add : I think my bread is trying to tell me something!!! Huge!!!  Unprecedented! Amazing! Ok enough. No egg wash. I can’t tolerate the smell after having Covid 😩😬. Fragrance and powerful growth . Same flour as I brought it with me as well as the YW so everything is the same. Will bake it probably one more time in 2 weeks. Keep ya posted. 

I recently read and enjoyed Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. I was pleasantly surprised as I was reading it that my method of baking sourdough is very similar to the process outlined in the book. With that in mind I figured it would be easy to pick up any of the recipes in the book and go to town with some very mild adjustments or experimentation. All of the variations of breads listed had my mouth watering and I was (and still am) keen to try some things beyond a standard sourdough. 

Last year Rus Brot posted a series of videos in an attempt to reproduce and demonstrate how bread was, or at least could have been baked, "in the old times" in Russian villages: https://youtu.be/meVg13NtnPw. "Yeast-less" refers to a fad in Russia about how using commercial yeast is bad for you, and sourdough bread is marketed as "yeast-less", which is of course absurd (and he's made fun of this multiple times on his channel).

We recently spent a week in Hawaii, and while I couldn't bring back any fresh fruit, I was able to bring back some good macadamia nuts (Sea Salt Roasted).  Wanted to use some of them in a bake and came up with the following idea.  I used the Sourdough Cinnamon Roll recipe from Breadtopia's Sourdough Cookbook for Beginners (Pg. 102) as the basis for the recipe and then developed my own filling using the macadamia nuts.  Gave a few to friends, and the early reviews are great!  

I like fresh stone ground flour. One issue is that the dough is not as extensible as commercial bread flours that contain citric acid. Good extensibility is important for good oven spring.  Certainly,  small amount (2%) of rye will improve extensibility, and long ferments generate acids that improve extensibility. 

I love pie, it is my favourite dessert.  The pie I made last week was great and the pastry was the best most tender all butter pastry for pie crust that I’ve ever used.  If you’re interested in that recipe I shared it here.  This recipe I’m making this week is from The Book on Pie by Erin McDowell.  If you haven’t seen her book yet, it is very good with lots of unique pie ideas.

I had some black sesame seeds that I had ground with some sugar 6:1 ratio a while back for a flavoured milk bread I had made. I felt like having a black sesame flavoured bread so decided to add the ground sesame seeds to my 100% whole wheat sourdough bread. The colour of the dough was fabulous a wonderful grey brown with some black spots from slightly larger bits of black sesame seeds. I unfortunately made a boo boo during the baked and baked at 500°F for 25 mins with steam forgetting to drop the oven temperature.

I have never made brioche before but was so inspired by Melissa’s brioche bubble buns that she shared with us Sourdough bubble top brioche. a while back so I decided since I am on a whole grain kick that I’d try to develop a recipe for sourdough brioche composed of 50% whole wheat. I loved her shaping of these buns so used her method shaping three small boules and baking them in a muffin pan. I used my now standard stiff sweet levain in order to avoid sour tang in the brioche.

Back in February, when @DanAyo posted about his experiences with an unexpected (by me, anyway) style of enriched sourdough posted by @txfarmer in 2011, I decided to give it a try.