Blog posts

After my self imposed hiatus of three months away, I decided to kick off the "new baking season" with a run of the Hamelman Vermont SD, again using AP instead of bread flour and using a rye levain instead of white flour - thus the "alfanso style" moniker.  Fortunately it looks as though I haven't lost a beat.  Funny thing is that my final blog entry before I left in June was for the same bread.  

There were a few things going on here this week, so I figured on keeping my bake pretty simple and straight-forward.  The only “extra” that was in the plan was to build up a bunch of both my rye and durum starters and get them spread out and dried to store as back-up, and to give to some family members who asked for some.

https://goodcookingfortheheartandsoul.blogspot.com/2017/09/roasted-delicata-squash-pie.html

Just in case anyone has relied in lepicerie.com for the flour needs you may have recently discovered their website has mysteriously gone offline with little explanation of why what and when. For me this was a massive disappointment as they have have been about the only source of quality T55 and T65 flours in USA and so having depleted my own supply a few weeks ago panicked and found some alternative sources for T55. The only other brand that appears to be available is francine which is more a supermarket brand. So today I completed a bake and thought I would share the results.

https://goodcookingfortheheartandsoul.blogspot.com/

For this bake I wanted to use the Bob's Red Mill hot cereal mix that I had in the freezer.  Inspiration from Danni3113  who has made some great porridge mix breads.

8 am mix

Hot cereal mix  117 gm 

170 gm boiling water.

Cover and leave on bench until I got home 

2 pm autolyse 1 hour

466 gm bread flour

203 gm water - too dry so added another 50 gm, total 253 gm

Edit: include cereal mix in autolyse

3 pm

Add 12 gm salt and 

 262 gm 100% hydration rye levain and knead. 

      This is a new version of a recipe I made a while ago.  I replaced around 30% of the high gluten flour with fresh milled and sifted whole wheat flour and used First Clear flour instead of High Gluten flour.  I added some cheese on top of some of them just to make it interesting.  I also added some extra water which the thirsty whole wheat gobbled up.

For the water in the main dough I used ice water.

Thanks to the influence of Isand66 and danni3ll3 and dabrownman (among others), I seem to have become somewhat hooked on the textures and flavours created by adding a cooked porridge made with toasted grains.  Since I wasn't sure how my "challenge" rolls would taste, I still wanted a moist and flavourful loaf for our sandwiches, and went with one of my favourite techniques:

A couple of weeks back, leslieruf posted another gorgeous bake http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/387329#comment-387329 , and in the conversation about it issued a challenge for a one-day bake – to see whether “good” flavour could be built that quickly. 

100% whole wheat Irish soda bread

Hello, friends,

My interpretation, is a hybrid of the white flour soda bread I make and Ms. Masons formula. The following are some of the extras I added.