[DELETED BY AUTHOR]
I have been baking for about 2 years now. A check of my history shows that I have been on the road to enlightenment for 1 year and 23 weeks at TFL. I started with the BBA by Peter Reinhart and then his Whole Grain Breads. A few other books have caught my interest along the way and I noticed that Hamelman's "Bread" always got high marks but some thought he was really talking to the pro audience. I started to notice that many of the breads I liked had references to Jeffrey Hamelman so I thought I would take the plunge and see if I could keep up.
Recently I have been trying to find breads that deliver great flavor with a nutty after taste and also look good. After I found Mark Sinclair's Back Home Bakery recipe for Multi Grain bread I have come to appreciate his experience and sense for selecting grains and methods. I have made 5 or 6 batches of the Multi Grain and it is just so full of flavor I can't get over it.
Here are some pictures of a batch of Hamelman's light rye that I made using a couple of dutch ovens simultaneously. I did the entire mixing/kneading process by hand just to be able to get a good feel for the dough. I doubled Hamelman's recipe and made 2 three pound loaves using 2 dutch ovens.
3 loaves
Sponge
512 gram AP
608 gram water
68 gram honey
4.5 gram active dry yeast (1 tspn)
-combine all until very smooth
-ferment 1 hour at room temp, 8 to 24 chilled.
as some rather large cracks were forming last night, i decided to pull out the sand.
and it didn't collapse, explode or catch on fire.
i spent an hour or so patching the cracks and then put a pan of charcoal inside to help with the drying process. tonight i'll light a small fire.
here i am putting the mud layer over the sand form:
from gardener to baker:
up to the thermal layer on a new earth oven, and i hope to be baking bread by the end of july.
I built the base out of reclaimed concrete (a former backyard patio) and scavenged concrete blocks. with the sand, firebrick and tools i'm in this about $120 bucks. and, of course, about 2 grand in labor - but hey, that doesn't count, right?
this took about 3 months from the initial conception to this point, with about 5 good days of work. most of the time was spent collecting the materials.
