Blog posts

For those of you who have followed bwraith’s adventures in artisan milling – and I commend them to all – let me say that I am nowhere near his level of attention to detail and analytics. I just thought I might post as I’ve taken an approach that is more accessible to the average home miller.

I am milling on a Diamant 525 which is hand powered and uses metal grinding plates. I hand sift using plastic sieves. Here is a picture:

This is from yesterday's baking session using the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes recipes -- an epi and 2 small loaves of olive bread using some totally delicious kalamata olives I had to scour the city to find. What's wrong with these grocers? The dough for the olive bread was 11 days old. Great oven spring!

In order to fine tune my milling and sifting process, I ran a series of tests at different mill coarseness settings to see which setting might result in the best separation of bran from endosperm. I then ran a successive reduction multi-pass milling and sifting process at what appeared to be the best first pass settings and sent samples of all these tests to CII Labs to see what some of the ash content, protein content, and dough rheology might be.

K.A. Rustic Country Boule-1

K.A. Rustic Country Boule-2: Interior

I made a basic loaf of white bread and finally figured out my problem. I've been using way to little flour while kneading. This last time, I used a lot of flour and the dough turned out wonderful. I think I finally taken a step forward in my skills.

Well it's been since I first found TheFreshLoaf in 2006 that I posted to my bread blog. Up until recently I hadn't had much time or energy to do much baking. Couple that with my love of crusty breads and whole wheat and my wife likes non-crusty, white breads and all the married folk can understand how this variable can decrease the amount of bread time for Jason. Well I had the time recently and wanted something to challenge me and get me back in the swing of baking so I scanned the site and decided on Floyd's Pain sur Poolish recipe.

Silesian Light Rye 1

Leader's "Local Bread" has three formulas for Polish ryes. I have made the Silesian Dark Rye once and the Polish Cottaqe Rye many times. Today, I made the Silesian Light Rye for the first time.

I found this photo in my camera. This was a straight up French bread, like a 65-2-1 combo. It had a 3 hour poolish, with wasn't enough to make a big difference, but it tasted pretty good.

Yesterday, we were heading out for the day and we were also out of bread. I decided to throw together some dough and stick it in the fridge until today.

So, I put 4 cuops of sifted wholewheat (14%protein) and about 2cups of water and 1/2 cup milk (its thirsty flour) added some oil and salt also. I only put 1 teaspoon of yeast and everything was quite cool. I then let it sit for 20 mins to align the gluten while I got ready, then kneaded it for about 2 mins,,,,,not even that really....and threw it in the fridge.