Blog posts

I've been too busy to cook myself dinner recently, let alone do much baking, but managed to find some time over the past week!

I think something that's nice about sakadane is that it is quick to set up and maintain - less than a week to get a starter that's usable, you only need to feed it once a week, and it's usable right out of the fridge. The only downside is needing koji rice. But it just feels so forgiving (when used with white flour, anyway).

I awoke from uneasy dreams this morning at six to mess up another rye.

Past midnight last night, tired but too spaced to sleep, I mixed a preferment -- 11g of rye sourdough to 300g of whole rye flour (an inoculation rate of 3.6%) and 240g of water. I also stirred up a malt scald -- 10g of rye malt to 50g of hot water.

This is an earthy, delicious and easy loaf to make. Flour composition is: 22% whole red spelt, 22% wholegrain, 20% whole barley, 16% whole teff and 20% white bread flour. Hydration is 75%.

I began the night before by making a biga with the 22% spelt and 22% wholegrain. The biga was 45% hydration and consisted of 10% of my standard rye starter. I left this to ferment for 15 hours at around 15 degrees.

Here is yet another Danish Rugbrod for those who like rye bread.  This recipe came from a website named makebread and is very simple.

Late one evening I mixed some sourdough starter (100 g), rye flour (300 g), pumpkin seeds (95 g), sunflower seeds (95 g), flaxseeds (50 g), molasses (40 g), and water (650 g) in a large bowl.  Not knowing what to expect, I opted for a 4-quart Pyrex bowl with a lid, and that turned out to be a good choice, especially when adding the final dough ingredients.

Just for fun, I made panettone with three forms of strawberry - candied, freeze-dried and pastry base. It is fragrant with definite strawberry notes in the crumb, which is light, moist and shreddy.

I used 400g in 7” hearts and 745g in 750g paper pans.  

Process notes:

For a change a 100% wholemeal rye bread. Before and after the bake. The final proofing was probably a tiny bit too long. Got distracted and almost forgot about it.

When I still lived in Singapore I greatly enjoyed a specific soft swirl milk bread from a Japanese bakery. It had an amazingly delicious but soft, thick crust, and the crumb was very light, with some uneven holes, but had what I thought was depth of flavour - really the taste of wheat, rather than sugar or butter. This wasn't a typical fast fermented milk bread. I've been wanting to recreate it. 

Managed this time to keep the panettone in one piece 💪 very shreddy, oven spring is still work in progress. Open crumb is far away ...

Considering that the PM was maybe a tiny bit too lactic (and I couldn't wait longer for the next try), I'm pretty happy with the structure. And again I learned a lot. Panettone must be an endless learning process.

After some time in the oven (10min???) ...

A bit of an experimental ciabatta. I intended to make a 90% biga ciabatta but thought - what if I used a levain to make the biga, rather than my starter+water? The idea was that I could develop a more complex flavour profile by making a higher temp spelt-rye levain from my basic starter (5 hour fermentation, 22 degrees), and then use that to form the 45% hydration of the cool biga (16 hour fermentation, 14 degrees).