Blog posts

This I the latest iteration of a fine bread that Lucy puts together for her other master that treats her even worse than I do…if that were possible.  When ever my wife gets low on bread for her daily lunch smoked turkey sandwich that she carts off to work every day, Lucy gets right to work crafting a new version that my wife says she might like.

I decided the time had come for a little experiment to try and shed some light on the dark art of bulk fermentation and the influence different percentage volume increases might have on the final loaf.

I started with a pretty standard dough recipe as follows:

The following easy meat recipes cater for a wide variety of tastes and skills. The meat-roll (essentially a meatloaf) and the lover loaf is really easy. The stuffed leg of lamb may require a little more skill from the cook. When we get to the Mexican pork chops and the baked pork chops we are back to very easy. All of these easy meat recipes are very tasty and suitable for entertaining as well as every day cooking. Spoil your family with something a little different.

Meat-roll with Apricot filling

Ingredients:

San Francisco Sourdough from Larraburu Brothers

as described in

https://www.aaccnet.org/publications/cc/backissues/1978/Documents/chem55_461.pdf

as interpreted by

David Snyder

February, 2019

Table of Contents for my BLOG 

I made these loaves based on the San Joaquin recipe by dmsnyder, but I upped the whole grain content to 50% (mostly wheat, but also a significant amount of rye), and raised the hydration (by an unmeasured amount, but it ended up feeling higher than I had intended). I only cut one of the loaves so far, but as you can see, the crumb was pretty irregular. Is this a sign of a particular part of the process I can improve on? Proofing? Something else? Or is it just normal variation? It seems a little too drastic for that last option.

Since I started my new job in the big city I have not had a lot of time to bake.  Last weekend I found enough time to whip this one together.  I used mostly freshed milled and sifted flours for this bake and added a little KAF Bread flour for some extra strength.  I have grown to love adding cooked rice to the bread.  You don't taste the actual rice but it adds a great texture to the crumb and helps promote softness as well.  The ricotta cheese also helps create a soft and moist crumb which this one certainly had.

I decided to bake Hamelman's 5 Grain Levain in a tin and mix in some AYW.  This was in an attempt to get more oven spring, and prevent sagging sides.  I used 20% AYW of total water, and shaped (somewhat unsuccessfully) for a tin.  The result was quite pleasing, but I suspect the tin resulted in a slightly gummy crumb, so next time I will remove the loaf and bake free-form for the final 10 minutes.  I also used baking spray on the loaf top to prevent the plastic bag from sticking during retard.  This resulted in a very dark top crus

Lovely recipe by Stanley Ginsburg from his site theryebaker.com

Stage 1 sponge (day one, morning):

• wholgrain rye flour 63g
• warm water 63g
• whole rye starter @ 100% hydration 7g

Left to mature for 10-12 hours.

Stage 2 sponge (day one, evening):