Blog posts

My guru Abe, suggested I post this here.  I am new to sour dough but am hooked after just 4 bakes. I followed Hamelman's recipe, though with a much higher hydration %age (though he does say, "adjust the hydration"). 

Made 2 loaves: one the same day as mix, the 2nd after overnight in the fridge.  I should've refrigerated #2 right away, but we went out to dinner and I left it out a bit before over-nighting it and it over-proofed a bit. Was easier to score tho. Pics below. The nice topshot is of the 2nd loaf, the first pics of the same day bake.

Wanted to try something new.My mom had gotten a beer that she didn't like so we had 3 bottles that weren't going to be drank. I thought, why not soak some oats in it. The beer was River Horse oatmeal milk stout

Phew. I've baked for a number of friends over the last few days! Many of them just wanted or needed a very generalized designation of "bread" for events, so I was able to experiment a bit with sourdough baking.

Disclaimer: All ciabatte described are "pre-dabrownman-flip-recommendation," so don't judge me too harshly...I still haven't acquired a second pastry scraper, so all ciabatta experiments are on a temporary hold...

Saturday, I baked some whole wheat ciabatte and a few small simple batards.

I apologize, these posts must be getting pretty boring, but if I can't document my baguette obsession here, I don't know where else to turn. :)

Today's are 40% w/w straight same-day dough (my starter is being a bit ornery).

Last week's 10% Einkorn, 40% Hard White Wheat was deliciously encouraging.  Egged on by Josh, I wanted to explore this mix more by "pushing" both the Einkorn and the overall wholegrain level this week.  I also wanted to add a sharper accent with some red wheat.  Easy as 1-2-3:  10% Hard Red Wheat, 20% Einkorn and 30% Hard White Wheat.  I also upped the overall hydration to 84% (again, taking a page from Josh's nice post), to

there was a bread on the homepage a week or two go that had a beautiful loaf made with yeast and oatmeal. I bookmarked it but somehow it got lost. Can anyone provide a link?

thanks in advance

My father and my next door neighbor have both confirmed that Field Blend No.2 from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast is the best bread they've ever eaten.  I happen to enjoy it a lot.  To date, it has consistently produced the best tasting loaf for me.

Certainly understanding why folks get obsessed with the chase for baguette perfection. I think the last round were better shaped, these had better positioning of slashes (more parallel with the loaf than before), but I need to work on consistent depth of cuts. 

Taste was better as this was an overnight dough, and I'm quite happy with the crumb. Hoping to try a levain batch soon, but my starter seems to be losing vigor :( Might have to try the pineapple juice if I need to start again.

    This was supposed to be a Sprouted Durum loaf but I have not had time to do any sprouting lately.  I pulled out my mill and in went the durum berries and out came fresh Durum flour.  My mill does have its limitation so I have not been doing any sifting therefore the flour in this case was not as fine as store bought.

I decided to add some barley flour to try and get a little more nutty flavor and some egg yolks and butter to soften the crumb a bit.

 I have not had much time to post lately since I returned to work full time a two months ago, so this one is from a couple of weeks ago.

I wanted to make a hearty loaf and I decided to use some of the Angry Orchard Hard Cider I had on hand.  Normally I would create a soaker with the grains but this particular mix from KAF is fine to just add to the main dough ingredients as is.  The Harvest Grain mix contains whole oat berries, millet, rye flakes, sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds.