Blog posts

My wife is off to a Dragon Boat race this weekend.  I won't describe what it is, you can look it up if you have the mind to.  The three main things they do there are 1) race, 2) spend a lot of downtime between races and 3) eat and nap during the downtime.  I thought that I'd add to the groaning table by baking a rather, um, large golden raisin-pecan WW bread for them.

This is a 50% wholewheat loaf at 83% hydration!

I rolled the final dough after shaping into a bowl of sesame and poppy seeds so the loaf has a uniform crust all over.

226g bread flour

210g wholewheat flour

355g water

55g wholewheat starter at around 100% hydration

9g salt 

Directions:

Mix all the ingredients minus the salt and starter in a bowl until all the flour is dry. Leave to hydrate for a few hours. Sometimes I let autolyse overnight in the fridge.

 Last week I finally got my larva rocks so this week decided to have a go.  I made 3 batches of 2 loaves, 3 different breads that I often make, so nothing new there.  Made dough yesterday and did the final proof overnight in the fridge.   Preheated the oven for about 1 hour with larva rocks and DO. 15 minutes before I baked added container of steaming towells.  So first to bake was my version of Field Blend #2, one batard in DO the other on the baking stone.

It's been a while! Over the past month I have been baking on a regular schedule and trying out a new recipe every bake and just having tons of fun. Let's see if I can quickly recap some breads—all 100% whole wheat sourdough of varying hydrations. 

85% WW Jalapeno Cheddar and Sun Dried Tomato SD!

This bread was so much fun, and awesome tasting. Spicy when you got a pepper!

Early in my bread career I would get up at midnight or 3 am to take the dough out or put it in or mix it or whatever I thought the baker needed to be doing. Have not done that in many years.  Nice and easy now. Proceeding at the speed of yeast.

I use the unwashed container that held my last dough ball to kick off my next starter as it is "infected" with the wild yeast and gets the next batch going no problem. 

So last weekend I made two loaves, one for us and one for the daughter. The daughter's looked better, but smallish. Ours was way too heavy on the whole wheat, came out short and dense, but all still tasty.

This holiday weekend's batch is a hopefully more balanced bread/ww flour blend. The dough rose very much overnight!

Started like this:

Apologies to, and inspiration by, Carole King.

After the success of my "Monster Multigrain Miche", I went on to develop sourdough rye breads. Again. Failing repeatedly across the span of 2 years, I finally achieved what I call "Strong Rye".

Another baguette attempt, this time using Trevor Wilson's easy SD baguette recipe.  I doubled the recipe and made 4 x 350 g baguettes and a small boule with remaining dough.   It was a bit cool and dough was slow, I got hung up on time so I think I did not bulk ferment enough. Still, baguettes are a big improvement on last lot, I used my new larva rocks so although my steam technique still needs improvement I think there was definitely more steam in the oven.  The boule didn't fare so well and although I scored the top, I obviously didn't score suffiently.

I baked a batch of six Sunflower Flaxseed Levains from Tartine 3 this morning. I made the dough last night and let it sit in the basement (my version of 'cellar temperature') overnight, then shaped it and proofed in baskets this morning. It proofs a lot more quickly than the five hours Robertson recommends so I had to have the oven and the cast iron pots hot and ready. The dough was quite sticky this morning but stretchy, and it shaped well into boules. These were 750 grams (wet dough weight) boules, baked in 3 quart pots. Turned out very nice!