Blog posts

Whole Wheat Sourdough

David Snyder

3/19/2023

Back in 2016, I was on a quest for a whole wheat sourdough bread I liked enough to want to bake often. I baked breads from a number of my favorite bread cookbooks, and none were bad. This bread was of my own formulation, and, as I recall, it was the one I liked the best. In spite of my good intentions at the time, I have not baked it again since. I think it just got forgotten. Flipping through my Sourdough Bread looseleaf recipe binder, I came across the formula and decided to make it again.

I’ve always loved the appearance of a fougasse but had never baked one.  Since Mr. And Mrs. Alfanso are going to be our guests tonight and I know how Alan loves crust, I decided it was time to bake a fougasse.  We love Kalamata olives so decided that my fougasse would have chopped Kalamata olives and oregano in it.  I found this recipe in Maurizio Leo’s new book The Perfect Loaf and got it into a spreadsheet.  I also made modifications to the method based on what I thought would work well.

We are hosting Alfanso (Alan) and Mrs. Alfanso tonight for dinner for the first time at our apartment here in Fort Lauderdale.  I wanted to bake a nice sunny pie and had this one saved for sometime that I hadn’t made.  I have seen both grapefruit and lemon lime variations of this pie in the past and since I had some limes still decided upon the lemon lime version.  I believe one of the aspects of this pie that make it an Atlantic Beach pie is the choice of crust.  I’ve seen both saltine and Ritz Cracker crusts for these pies and chose the Ritz Cracker version.

Although I’ve been baking quite a bit of bread down here in Florida, I hadn’t baked any sandwich bread in some weeks so we were out.  I wanted to use up some of my King Arthur Whole Wheat flour, I had purchased a bag in the fall but haven’t used that much of it yet so decided to make a 100% WW sandwich loaf.  For this bake of my Hokkaido milk bread I have increased the tangzhong to 20% and kept the hydration of it at 200% using milk of course. The rest of the formula was adjusted to keep the hydration and other ingredients the same.

Today's bake: GOST Borodinsky -  Borodinskiy Chelb GOST (Russia)

Source: The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg

Note: Changed TDW from 1.591kg to 2.784kg, replaced dark molasses for blackstrap molasses due to availability.

Discussion:

March 14 is Pie Day!

How I wish I used a π (3.14) design for the top crust. Really missed the opportunity there! :)

So I made some chicken pot pie with a local twist. The filling was made with jicama, mixed vegetables (carrots, corn, and peas), and celery with tender chicken chunks marinated in oyster sauce and fish sauce in a rich cream sauce.

 I recently picked up a can of coconut milk at Trader Joe’s and wanted to try using it in a bread.  I wish I had bought 2 cans so I could have made some Thai style soup to go with the bread.

I wasn’t expecting the coconut milk to be so solidified and had to microwave it for about 20 seconds and then stir it up so it became more liquid like.

I’ve been making mostly all white flour breads while down here this visit in Florida.  That has been because most of the baking has been for dinner parties and I never know if guests will appreciate whole grains in their bread. So for this bake I decided to sneak a bit of KA WW into the dough, 20%.  This shouldn’t affect the softness of the rolls significantly and with the cheddar cheese both in and on the rolls I figured that they wouldn’t be able to taste the WW much at all.  I decided to put 6 g of shredded cheddar cheese inside each roll.

Back in the day, many twists and turns ago, there was a member of this forum who was quite generous with his time and knowledge. His name was Eric, aka ehanner. 

Some of us knew him personally as a friend and communicated with him through this forum, emails and phone calls.  

During that time period, the most popular post on this forum was his own, in which he shared his recipe for a Jewish/deli rye, known as "Eric's favorite rye". I think everyone active on this forum tried it at least once.

We had another dinner party for a few of our friends last evening.  For dessert I decided to make another graham crust pie since the last one turned out so well.  I reduced the sugar in the graham crust recipe down from 50 g to 20 g.  I had read somewhere that the sugar was necessary for the structure of the crust so I was hesitant to eliminate it completely.  Having now tried only 20 g I think I could eliminate this additional sugar completely.