Blog posts

Sourdough Bread: March 22, 2019

David Snyder

This bake is a kind of hybrid (high bread?). It utilizes elements of the formula and method shared by Mike Giraudo on Facebook, Peter Reinhart's James Beard Award-winning “San Francisco Sourdough,” as presented in his book, “Crust and Crumb” and various techniques I have adopted over the years, such as autolyse.

Things are going monstrous on the bread front. I have recently gotten into yeast breads (not as much an art as a science, and you better hurry!) and even explored the fun-handling of rye flour and making rye breads. 

Being an old New Jersey native, I like a good lip smacking jaw-dropping sour rye and I think I found one here 

jewish-rye-bread-recipe at King Arthur Flour

In honor of the holiday of Purim, I tried making triangular rolls with a "filling" in the middle -- halved cherry tomatoes and cracked olives. I cut the dough (Pain à l'Ancienne) roughly into triangles, and then did my best to stretch/massage them to a nice shape. They aren't very clean or uniform at all, but I'm generally pretty happy with them. It definitely feels like they are in the spirit of the day! Instead of hamantaschen, I call them hamanbroten :)

A friend asked for some help with a recipe for a Portuguese corn bread known as broa, and the formula she had been given was not working for her and was producing hockey pucks.  So, having not made any corn bread for a long time I decided to try and figure out what it should be.

It turned out to be one of those on-line formulas that was probably never tested as written and was destined to produce pretty good hockey pucks if you followed it.  But it did give some history and I found some photos that were helpful but nothing that seemed to be really authoritative.

Don't trust me if I tell you the statement because I'm just a novice rye baker; but if Rus says so, it's probably true! 

Dear Bakers, 
Hello from Toronto. 

I am new to this Forum, so I hope I am not inventing a bicycle here. But even so, it's really fun. And it's a great and useful site. 

I want to share my "recipe" of sourdough sweet (challah-type) buns. They do not look/taste much like sourdough, but they in fact are. Very soft, delicate crust and great taste/flavour. 

San Francisco Sourdough has always been a sort of holy grail for me, based entirely on its reputation. I have only previously tasted my own few attempts to bake it, drawn from the many SFSD recipes available online and in books and I have judged the results  to have varied between "OK" and "not too bad", so I was delighted to see David Snyder's blog entry on 7th March 2019 and his SFSD formula which is fairly closely derived from that of the original bakers. I had to try it.

Yesterday was one of our favorite days of the year- St Paddy’s Day.  Even though part of my family came from Cork - the home of Beamish Beer and where Jameson’s rule, everyone can be Irish for a day.  They say that God created Guinness so that the Irish wouldn’t take over the world but for one day they do!  I hope all of you enjoyed the day as an Irishman won the Player’s Golf Championship – Rory MclIroy.  If an Irish American couldn’t win it, at least an Irishman did …… he is only 29 years old and going into the golf hall of fame for sure!

OK… Can we all forget about the crust and focus on the crumb instead? I was hoping that the weak dough would gain some strength itself with time… Yet it didn’t. Oops…

50/50 Red Fife & Spelt Walnuts SD

Dough flour (all freshly milled):

150g      50%       Whole red fife flour

I tried Mike Giraudo's recipe, posted by dmsnyder.  It was as follows

• 250g starter (60% hydration)
• 600g water
• 1000g flour
• 20g salt

Makes two 875g loafs

 Mix all ingredients 2 minutes on low speed until mixed, then mix 9 more minutes on next level speed. Then a quick stretch and fold, rest dough 30 mins, then stretch and fold one more time. 

 Then cover and let dough rest for about 8 hours at room temp.