Blog posts

Hello! This is my first post on TFL, after a year of following along as I've begun bread baking. I'm looking forward to participating occasionally and enjoying this wonderful community! 

I started a liquid levain on January 1st, and named him Munchkin. He's contributed to a number of sourdough loaf experiments with darker flours. Both loafs pictured were from a "pain de campagne" recipe I adapted and had great flavour!  

Nothing beats the aroma of breads baking in the oven, especially in blistery cold winter days, when going out is an adventure to be avoided. Smell of these breads would surely bring excitement and anticipation in the kitchen. That's before you taste the breads. Another big flavor bread I like, besides the caramelized onion bread, is the carrot walnut bread from Jeffrey Hamelman. Moistened crumb and specks of carrot brighten any wintery day. What are your favorite aromatic breads? Feel free to weigh in on this.

Well, I am excited. For the first time I created a recipe from scratch, not from a published recipe or modified from anyone else's recipe. I created it in a spreadsheet based on my own experience gained over the last year of intensive baking (knowledge of hydration, percentages, flour performance, etc.) and then went ahead and mixed. I only made one small change during mixing and the whole thing was a great success!

So here it is - The Lazy Loafer's Barley Apple bread:

Starter:

Here are a couple of the loaves baked for the Valentines weekend.

Bread flour, spelt, rye and levain. Pretty basic formula. The challenge was in the shaping and still getting a good oven spring. Worked out well they were a hit. Hope everyone had a nice day.

Alright, so this is Hamelman's Country Bread (50% preferment).

To me these two loaves look really over shaped. The cross sections would be far rounder than I think is appropriate. Also, the scoring to me looks as if it needs to be far deeper (I was trying to get ears and boy this is far from that!).

Can you help me diagnose what went wrong here?

Hamelman's 5-Grain Levain is always a delight with a crunchy crust and moist crumb full of seedy goodness. Highly recommended. Specifically, take the no-added-yeast/cold retard overnight option. It truly does make an enormous difference in flavor - for the better.

The exuberant oven spring and bloom is characteristic of this bread.

I changed the hydration and because the starter had been refreshed two days prior, I used 60g rather than 50. The holes are just too darned big! It makes a decent sandwich loaf, but not quite what I was looking for. I searched some youtube videos and unlike Peter Reinhart, Ciril Hitz degasses his ciabattas and does not fold and his crumb structure is more even. I like the shape Peter's letter fold gives, but next bake of this loaf I will de-gas gently before folding to see if I can get a more uniform crumb structure.

Last couple of times I made bread there was little gluten development despite using a combo of french folds and stretch and folds. The doughs just collapsed  into an unstructured mass of glop. I tried baking in pans which was my original intent anyway since I was trying to make pain de mie but had no spring and a gummy interior. The doughs were naturally leavened so I thought it might either be my starter or maybe the kitchen had become infected by those insidious strings that mini oven has had trouble with.

Well with ski season full on, I have been living on Norm's onion rolls, pulla and Floyd's blueberry, cream cheese braid variations for three months now. This ciabatta is the first plain, lean loaf I have baked in some time. Sometimes you just get a taste for things.

This loaf was baked using 350g strong bread flour @ 78% hydration and using 50g newly refreshed liquid levain, 7g salt and 1TBs EVOO. I used vigorous mixing in the bowl followed by four sets of S&F's with 10 minutes rest and after 2 hours of bulk rise, then gently shaped as described by Peter Reinhart in ABED.

Today was my first attempt at a rye loaf! I decided to start cautiously so I went with Peter Reinhart’s “Transitional rye sandwich loaf”. It definitely didn’t disappoint.

I wasn't sure what i was supposed to expect in terms of the crumb, i know that rye tends to yield fairly dense loaves, but this is a lot lighter than i thought, probably due to the fact that there is only about 41% rye flour.