Blog posts

Going back to earlier on in the year we did some posting on Red wheat which is fairly scarce ihere in Australia, and following up on an article that JonJ  noticed in South Africa  managed to track down a local grower here in Western Australia who was very kind enough to gift us several sacks of two different red wheats that he was growing mainly as a crop in his rotation. We have posted some of the resulting breads and everyone has so far been quite impressed,

While bread dreaming about the pages of TFL, I came across a forum about a rye loaf with carrots.  I loved the idea and still had a few pounds of mini winter carrots needing to be used up, so I went for it.  I don't make rye heavy loaves often enough (though I should because I love them) to have a set recipe.  Rather than do the wise thing and research, I did the lazy, middle of the week thing and just made it up as I went along.

300g dark rye flour

300g water

some ground flax seed

some whole fennel seed

50(ish)g leaven

After a few years of consistently baking bread, I finally pushed myself to make an occasion to try making baguettes.  I've partly avoided it because I usually make bread once a week for toast and/or sandwiches during the week and because don't really work well with home baking equipment.  

When I was back home in February, I borrowed a baguette shaped pan from my mom.  With this sitting around, I finally conceded.

I still had some anko (red bean paste) in my freezer from over a year ago and decided it was time to use it up.  Since I hadn’t made mochi in so long I thought it was high time to make Daifuku Mochi again but this time with matcha.  So I followed the same recipe except this time added 5 g of matcha powder.  I forgot how dark the matcha becomes when water is added and would probably try only 3 g next time.  The trade off might be the matcha flavour though which was perfect with the 5 g.

My first attempt at a Gluten Free bread.  I used a recipe I found on the net, since I needed somewhere to start and wanted to bake a hearth loaf.  I think I had some success but overfermented a bit.  I would certainly reduce the IDY more than I did already to slow things down.  By the time the oven was ready, there were quite a few holes in top of the dough in the banneton.

Paul (pnguyen951) recently posted a recipe for a spelt loaf, and I decided to give it a try.

My list of things I’d like to bake keeps getting longer but today I finally struck this one off my list. For some time I’ve wanted to try adding polenta to my sourdough bread. Alfanso has shared Kingdom Bread Tampa’s recipe for polenta bread so I based my recipe on that with some minor alterations (thank you Alan). When there is a small amount of wholegrain in the dough I like to use it in the levain, that way the bran is fully hydrated. I increased the polenta and the percentage of salt I used is based on the flour and the polenta while theirs was based on the flour alone.

I've really been enjoying the experiments these past few months with adding things into my bread. Olives, Sunflower Seeds, Pumpkin Seeds, Miso ... The list goes on!  As I have explored the bread I have also been exploring this website more and more. One of the recipes that stuck out was this one for Flax and Sunflower Sourdough that was modified from the Tartine 3 book by Danni3ll3. See their ORIGINAL POST HERE and you will see immediately why this was an attractive bake. 

Building on my successful 50% WW SD Challah I baked last week I decided to bake a 100% WW version. I think based on the appearance that I was patient enough with the final proof and didn’t under ferment it this time. I didn’t want to take a chance with weak gluten so I did add VWG to this one since there is no strong flour.