Blog posts

My wife was going through the cabinets last week and hauled out two packets of dried starter.  One was a survivor from our move from South Africa to the US, dating back to October 2011.  So, just a couple of months away from being 14 years old.  Mind you, this has received no special treatment, having been tucked away in one cabinet or another at room temperature.  It has also survived a second move in 2020 when I retired and we moved from Kansas back to Michigan.

When you are fortunate enough to find something like this out in the wild (and they are legally accessible):

you do this:

which can lead to this:

The extraordinary heat and humidity of the past few weeks in NYC has meant that I haven't been baking.

After baking only whole rye bread for quite a while, I decided to try something I didn't bake before. Nothing spectacular. I just replaced half of the flour with Ruchmehl (afaik first clear is the closest match in the US) and used a stiff preferment. Half of the whole rye flour is fermented in the preferment. The other half, together with the Ruchmehl, goes into the main dough.
A bit of sourdough for the preferment, 76% hydration, 2% salt, that’s it.
Hand mixed, 2 S&F, fold and roll for the final shaping, baked at 230ºC on a baking steel.

Had a good friend coming over for a run and lunch today, but I was lazy and woke up too late! I don't usually like to make any yeasted product in less than three hours, but today was such a day and I was determined to make the best of it. 

The other day I was so loving the feel of my dough for pizza (those Italian pizza flours are something special) that I was wondering how it would turn out as one of the components in a bread.

These somewhat whimsical breads are a result of that. A mashup of two quite different doughs!

The one component is a pizza dough made with a poolish and a small amount of instant yeast and produced in the fridge over 48 hours (24 hours for the poolish and 24 for the final dough) with a couple of warm hours here and there to let it puff up.

I hadn’t baked a Hokkaido Milk Bread in a long time since I’ve been playing around with high pff loaves which have been largely lean doughs.  We have guests staying with us a few days so wanted to baked something delicious and pretty.  I decided to bake a 100% organic stoneground whole wheat black sesame sourdough Hokkaido milk bread using ground black sesame seeds.  This is the first time I’ve used flowers on a milk bread, I wasn’t sure how the flowers would do with an egg wash, but they did well.

Today's planned experiment was adding vital wheat gluten (hoping for more rise and softer crumb). The unplanned one was baking the double batch of dough as one huge loaf. i don't know what I was thinking. 

It was over 2kg of dough. The largest loaf I've attempted. Almost a miche? Ok, maybe it doesn't qualify cos it's oval and has too many ingredients. It had to be oval to fit in my oven. (Sigh. One day. Everyone has a Grail Loaf, right?)

I mainly use chakki atta flour because it's inexpensive and easy to get. In 10kg bags too. And the mill is almost local to where I live. My bread is slowly improving in spite of my lack of skills - by changing just one thing each time I bake. In this version I added olive oil. I'm hoping for fluffy-ish. One day.

800g water

1000g chakki atta flour (Gingin Flour Mill)

0.5 tsp diastatic malt 

1.5 tsp salt

200g starter

2 tbsp olive oil 

0.5 cup mixed oats and seeds

This year I have been baking a great deal more Whole Grain bread, and I have been intrigued especially by the work of danni3ll3.  I have several bakes from her blog in my bookmarks.  This is based fairly closely on one of them.  There are some variations though:  I had no Spelt grain or flour, so I left it out and made up the weight in the Red Fife.  I used low fat yogurt since that is what I had.