Blog posts

Italian bread with currents, fennel and pine nuts

May 6, 2017

David M. Snyder

When I started baking sourdough breads, Susan Tenny's “Wild Yeast Blog” was, along with The Fresh Loaf, a major source of inspiration. Susan was also very active on The Fresh Loaf as “susanfnp.” Well, sadly, Susan has not kept up her blog, but it does remain accessible and worth a visit.

This was a busy baking week (for me). I baked for two potluck dinners and for my wife and me.

Thursday, I had a committee meeting in the evening. I brought a San Joaquin Sourdough.

I bake a SJSD for home as well, but also a 90% rye bread, my currently preferred base for cream cheese and lox.

Weekends I mix 1200 grams of flour at 69-74% hydration, 2% salt.

Its fermented, all my bread is made without commercial yeast. The first dough goes in on sunday afternoon and the other part of the dough stays in the fridge till thursday when we make pizza or saturday when I make a loaf that ends up looking like this. Getting on in age it tastes so good. 

No flour is thrown away in my process, I use the same bowl the dough rises in to get the new starter going. Just add flour and water and keep the ball rolling.

On May 1st BreadBabies posted her SJSD batard twins.  And they were lovely.  But her post started off with a lament on her rye levain.  After being built and "ready" her resultant bake yielded the comment "Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough was more like a Vermont pancake". 

After about a year of my last post, I thought I share this one. I have been baking lots of bread past year. Average of 25 loaves a week. Trying to start up my own business from home.

This is the last of the series end up at with 100% sprouted grain bread.  We started at 30% then 40% than 50% and last week was 75%.  What we learned last week was that the dough was getting very fast and it over proofed in the fridge during a retarded final proof.  So we cut the pre-fermented flour in the bran levain to 10% hoping to slow the dough down but did retard the levian for 24 hours after it doubled after the 3rd stage.

Because ... that's what we have in the fridge. Dried cherries. :)

I started the levain last night, but it spent the night and most of today in the fridge in-between build stages. I'm not sure if this will be good or bad for it, guess we'll see...?

May or may not get the dough ready tonight. I would like to, just so I can bake in the morning. The last loaf is running low!

They say it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village - a village of Fresh Loafers - to raise my bread.

Things were going swimmingly until one day, my starter had an identity crisis. But it wasn't that simple, because it was a secret identity crisis. My starter culture, which consisted of purely rye, was rising beautifully after each refreshing...3.5x in 10 hours. It was so airy that beyond the water float test, it looked like it might fly.

I have not posted for a while but thought id share some bread that was made today , I was using up some stout that I had opened and I also used up the wholemeal flour that I had, it was intended to be 50% but it ended up a bit more than that. same goes for the stout where I used 420mls and 160ml s of water. I soaked the w/m in all the liquid and had chores to attend to. I weighed up the rest of the ingredients so that I could add them upon my return.