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And an experiment in scoring.

Having fallen in love with the taste of this loaf and avidly read all the accounts of the different experiences with this bake, I was ready to take another shot at it. Abe had suggested in passing that I try baking three loaves, each with different scoring.

Sure, why not?

I decided this time, too, to try doing the whole procedure from mix to bake in the same day, rather than overnight retarding.

Monday night

• fed my rye levain 1:2:2 for the first build

Tuesday morning

I have made a few iterations of a naturally leavened whole wheat loaf with nuts and seeds. This loaf was inspired by Maurizio's 50/50 loaf (theperfectloaf.com) but I took the liberty of adding some seeds. As for the flavor, I can't get enough of it. I will find any excuse to eat a slice; whether it's a seed butter and jelly sandwich, a soup accompaniment, or with avocado and egg, it's a real treat. Despite the high proportion of whole wheat, the crumb opened up wonderful for a light and airy loaf.

 It’s Chinese New Year again! Traditional celebration food is usually either heavy in sugar or fat… Why not celebrate it with healthy Chinese-New-Year-inspired SD bread instead? :)

Triple Red Grains Sourdough

Dough flour (all freshly milled):

90g       30%       Whole red fife wheat flour

I recently chanced upon an interesting recipe in the excellent Baecker Suepke's blog.

It is for a Black Forest chocolate cherry sourdough bread. The Modernist Bread version springs to mind, but the Black Forest one is different - not sweet, apart from the cherries - and it has toasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I also added some non-salted pistachio seed, which gave a rather nice contrasting green colour.

The full text of the recipe is here: https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/

But, in summary: 

Dan has organized another community extravaganza and already, there are some beautiful loaves posted.

First build Thursday night; had lots of 100% hydration rye starter, so used that, which most certainly affected the finished loaves. Fed 12g at 1:2:2.

Friday morning, realized that I was out of bulgur/buckwheat, which I'd meant to use in place of the cracked rye, which I can't find here (matter of fact, finding "cracked" anything is a bit of a challenge). So did the second build (1:1:1) and retarded it until I could get the marketing done.

the good and the U-G-L-Y my alibi is that the batard banneton didn't have a liner and the dough had mucho

Image

I was in a big-box food-service warehouse, and picked up a big bag of Grain Craft Power Flour ($11/25 lb). It is a commercial pizza flour, and I was aiming to increase the amount of whole grain flour/meal in my PdC without compromising volume. Another option would have been to add vital wheat gluten, but the pizza flour is easier, and we sometimes like commercial style pizza and bagels.

The purpose of this post is to reinforce that folks shouldn't just assume one levain will act like all, or even any other differing hydration or composition levain.