Blog posts

Yeast-less. Again??

To tell you the truth, I've been a bit low on the breadbaking front recently. My love of food and cooking have never been greater, however, and I don't think I've ever spent more time in the kitchen than I have during the last couple of months. The downtime in breadbaking means that I get the chance to broaden my other culinary horizons, and I thought I should put together some photos of what I've been up to this weekend.

The goal:  A simple, 100% wholegrain, sourdough bread that I can make on an after-work weeknight schedule. 

Hi all. It's been quite a while since I contributed to this site. Lots of changes in last 18 months: bought a farm, began raising grass-fed/grass-finished beef, sold house, now building farm house, started hosting an FM radio show about sustainable farming and its links to sustainable local economies and community. I've been relying on my bread machine for months, but I'm itching to get back to "real" bread baking. I've signed up for a Hamelman challenge to push me along. A secondary challenge is that my bread books are in storage while the farm house is under construction.

not your ordinary "Ciabatta".

(image not mine - found online via reddit - shared for your amusement)

I came across burghul (also known as bulghur) at the grocery section of Oasis Bakery. The name was really familiar and I remembered vaguely from the bread-making book that it was grain. So, I bought a one small tub hoping to try using it with the grain-bread, and the Jeffrey Hamelman's Five-Grain Levain is on my agenda. 

So last night I set off on my first Pita adventure using the TFL recipe. 

I like weight/percentages, so I weighed out the measured ingredients to develop a formula by weight. This is my conversion technique pretty much for all baking now.

The original recipe was much too sticky for me as well (worked out to ~68% total  hydration for me); had to add 50g more flour to get a manageable dough, and even then it was a tad bit wet. Overall hydration of 59-61% seems to be in the right ballpark for pita. 

The below recipe is ~60% overall hydration:

I've been thinking about the Yukon Gold Rush miner. You'll recall, to preserve his sourdough mother--he called her Maude, after the first girl he'd ever kissed--and caught in a Yukon white-out, miles from camp, weak from having not eaten for four days--he'd boiled the last of his dogs, King, six weeks earlier--he'd kissed Maude one last time, placed her next to his heart, curled his emaciated body around her, and lay down in the lee of a a twelve foot drift.

When Andy/ananda posted his student Faye's success at the "Young Baker of the Year" competition, he mentioned that Faye was inspired by my trials to re-create the taste of blue fenugreek (not available in the US) with nettle. In German that kind of flattery is called: "he brushed my tummy". I felt very much "tummy brushed" and admired the creativity of the young winner from Newcastle College. (By the way, Andy, how was the final competition in November?)

I've been talking to DrFugawe who has recently been baking a Nancy Silverton apple bread and this month I am going to bake the Hamelman Normandy Apple Bread.

I have come to realise, and it's probably been discussed here before, that cider in America is not the same thing as cider in England.