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Well, I did pose the question the other day about converting a Polish babka to sourdough (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/45314/converting-babka-recipe-sourdough)

Anyways, I took the plunge, tweaked the original yeasted recipe (upping the salt from a pinch to 2%) and here goes...

Ingredients:

Levain:

30g 100% hydration wholegrain rye starter

50g strong white bread flour

125ml whole milk

Dough:

All of the levain

This is the first try at hot cross buns. Followed the recipe at KAF website except for two things substituted about 25% WWW for the AP and ended up adding more flour because the dough was too sticky to form rolls with. For the  dried fruit a combo of raisins, cherries, blueberries, pineapple and our own apples were plumped in white wine.

I think they turned out pretty well for a first attempt but next will try using, at least partially, starter instead of commercial yeast and a different sweetener.

Happy Easter Everyone

Stu

Semolina Capriccioso

DMSnyder

March 25, 2016

This bread combines many streams of inspiration – my own Pugliese Capriccioso and San Joaquin Sourdough, Hamelman's Semolina Bread and Tom Cat's Semolina Filone, as described by Maggie Glezer in “Artisan Baking.”

The garden had volunteer daisies and Red Romaine lettuce growing side by side.

Lucy has been busy working on here new billion-dollar invention of bio-nanobots that you put into the flour after milling that would go to work as soon as you added water to mix for an autolyze and then tell you when to add the salt and leaven.  That sounded pretty good since I have forgotten to the salt before but she wasn’t done. 

  I've made a similar bread before and loved the way the dates add a natural sweetness to the bread.  This time I decided to add some more natural sweetness with some caramelized onions.

I made one large miche style loaf but you can easily make 2 loaves out of this formula.

The final bread as before came out great with a moderately open crumb and a nice dark chewy crust.  The dates really add such a unique pleasant flavor to the overall bread and that combined with the sweetness of the caramelized onions really make this a bread worth trying.

Today I baked a couple loaves of the Overnight Whole Grain Sourdough from the Handbook recipe section. It certainly looks good, and smells divine! I'll cut it later (or tomorrow) to check the crumb, but happy so far! Bulk fermented overnight, then shaped and proofed for 2-3 hours in baskets. Onto peels, slashed and baked with steam on the granite slabs. The whole wheat starter smelled fairly sour and there's a good dollop of rye flour in the loaf so I'm interested to taste it!

Mission accomplished!!!  Thank you all for your input!!!

The winner! 

  Made with wheat bran levain, inspired by Dabrownman's great idea...

I finally achieved a proper, (if off-center) ear on one of the loaves, so I'm overjoyed.  I thought I made deep enough cuts into the round loaf, but apparently not.  I really enjoyed incorporating a soaker, and this dough was quite easy to work with.  The crumb seems good to me, but I welcome any criticisms.  It felt like cheating using both levain and commercial yeast, but I love the recipe.  Changes made from previous Hamelman Vermont SD bake:

Foreground is cinnamon, sugar chocolate babka. I enjoyed the last one so much it was time to bake another. I used 2 x 300 gram balls of dough to roll out the babka. The remaining 253 grams of pulla dough was used to roll out the blueberry cream cheese bread front right.  In behind is a ciabatta style loaf with 20% durham semolina which resulted in a really nice snap to the crust!

Well, I was on my way to the ski hill and then it started raining.

Happy baking! Ski