Blog posts

Rus Brot's blog post about red rye malt, and Rus Brot's Youtube instructions 

My fellow baker and good friend A.K.A. "Yippee" from The Fresh Loaf site has been gracious enough to mail me several loaves of her awesome bread as well as some other goodies.  It was high time I shared some of my bread with her.  It's taken me longer than it should have, but I needed to figure out how to get the bread to the post office since I leave my house to go into the city every day very early.

This loaf is destined for my living longer living stronger  keep fit class tomorrow morning. My wife gave me some rosemarie  sprigs that she broke off whilst re potting her Gallipoli Rosemarie, i was to see if i could get them to strike.I had a fair few leaves from the preparation that i subsequently chopped up and decided to add them to a loaf,  and this is the result. Its a dried yeast loaf with 10% potato 5 % carrot and 1% Chopped Rosemarie.

Right, so I've just gotten out of my baby stages of baking.  I personally had several questions throughout my learning process.  You probably have some too if you're looking at this forum.  I thought it would be helpful for newer bakers to get some quick answers from a person who has had to ask the same questions they may have.  This is a simple, no frills post.  This is for United States, and it does not attempt to retread old ground that has likely been covered before with other guides.  I'm not going to tell you what scale to get, or what book will

 My wife and I like porridge for breakfast.  The porridge always includes oats, nuts, and fruit but otherwise it is not really constrained, and I am always looking for ideas. Recently I picked-up  Bob’s Red Mill 10-grain Breakfast cereal, but it was not really a winner – we did not really like the texture, so I ground it into flour for my Pain de Campania series.

It made a surprisingly good addition to my Pain de Campania.  It was worth thinking deeply about.

I saw this beautiful image of a Pain Fendu from a very inspired baker http://picdeer.com/media/2004093069051294434_3455206222 and this was the over ambitious and a bit impromptu attempt to recreate something similar.

I basically mixed a  80% Champlain and rolled it out in the middle, degassing the dough quite a bit and then with the split at the bottom put it into a banneton. 

This is my attempt as David's lovely formula and I am glad that today a friend who has often been to San Francisco sampled the bread for me and said that indeed it reminds him of San Francisco on a sunny day in the UK! He very gladly took also a loaf home with him too....

I decided a few days ago to bake dmsnyder's SF Sourdough loaf take 4, which was marked "the best version" on his list of recipes.

I followed his recipe exactly.  Except that I had to make a few changes.  And I made a few more changes because they just made sense to me.

Firstly, I mixed by hand.  I don't have a machine.

Second, instead of whole wheat flour, I substituted whole rye flour.  This, I think, at least doubled the sourness factor.

Sourdough Bread: March 30, 2019

David Snyder

This is another hybrid bread. It differs from my last bake in the following ways:

1. I have increased the whole grain flour to a total of 30% of the total flour by adding 10% Kamut.

2. I have increased the final dough hydration to 75%.

I've commented on this in the past, but it's remarkable how much neglect a starter can go through and still be able to rise well after a few feeds. I fed my starter Friday morning, then Friday night and again Saturday morning. Admittedly I used my proofer box after the Saturday morning feed. It hadn't been fed in a few weeks. I used all the starter from the previous feeds to build up volume and had no discard. My first feed was 1:3:3 and went 12 hours, my second was the same and went for about 14 hours, my third was 1:2:3 and went for about 6 hours to a triple in volume.