Blog posts

Bake from a couple days ago...

Overall, bake turned out decent.  Made the loaf for a friend and they liked it, so I guess that’s all that matters.  Had to slice and check the crumb before giving it to them. ?

Levain build went well.  Starter was 2 weeks old, but levain was over doubled and very bubbly at 11 hours (72-74 deg).  Dough temp was right on target after mixing (as 75 deg).  However, as usual for me with high white flour recipes, my BF progressed very slowly.

Someone mentioned Joe Ortiz’ book The Village Baker . I remembered I met him I think at the Gilroy Garlic festival 20 yrs ago and had a signed copy ...as I wasn’t interested at the time in bread baking (just bread eating !) it sat on a shelf ..loaned to a friend ,..got it back yesterday and reading through it ..now it all starts to make sense ..it’s  a terrific resource...I just started my bread baking journey this January 1 ..recommended reading 

I’m learning each day ...this is one of the most satisfying adventures 

These 2 loaves started out the same shape, proofed in an oval bannetton but scored differently.

As part of a grain CSA I've recently been tasked with using unexpected flour. This was made with 100% Chiddam de Blanc de Mars. It's a pound cake with 100% substitution. I used a  Stella Parks recipe and am extremely pleased with the results:

The crumb is nice and light and the requests for more are endless (for now).

So, there was this thing that Don said the other day in a TFL blog post that really got me thinking. Think it was a quote from Jennifer Lathams about tweaks to the Tartine bakery method, and the thing that was said was "[...] longer includes the leaven in the autolyse and salt is not added until enough water has been incorporated to make a very extensible dough."

I think I've been doing bassinage wrong! I usually try it after the salt is already in the dough.

This was an end-of-week project to use up the bran from my tempering + bolting experiments with Yecora Rojo.  It is named after Phil Hartman's (RIP) Colon Blow cereal skit on SNL:

None of this was measured very precisely, but I wanted a classic moist carrot cake type bran muffin texture.  I was surprised how pleasant, moist and fluffy the bran can be as the main ingredient.

Great success once again with the flaked grains made into porridge. I used a white flour levain a whole wheat levain and Apple Yeast Water .  Flaked Einkorn was toasted  in my iron skillet in 3T butter till fragrant and golden. Cooked in a double boiler with 40g honey till water absorbed. Cooled to room temp and used my KA to fold it and the salt into the autolysed dough. A couple of bench folds and then a sunny window for bulk ferment. Overnight shaped retard , these are 1100g boules.

I actually baked this twice now because I thought I had severely overproofed my first loaf.  After shortening the bench final proof before cold retard on my second loaf to compensate the second loaf was more or less the same.  Unfortunately I believe that this flour is too soft for me to bake at 100% as a hearth loaf.  It is hard to believe the difference between this loaf and the one I very recently baked at 75% red fife.  If my belief that red fife is too lacking in gluten is incorrect please let me know, I’m interested in hearing your ideas.

I don’t remember the last time I made a cobbler, and I was looking at my final half bag of frozen rhubarb sitting in my freezer that a friend gave me last spring from his garden and thought time to make a cobbler.  Of course, also feeling lazy I decided to buy frozen strawberries instead of fresh.  Although that is the lazy route, the frozen ones are much better than the fresh I can get this time of year so this should be better than fresh.  I don’t recall where I found this recipe that I’ve had saved in my Notes app for some time so cannot give the author credit.

Today's bake was based on this method with really only a change in hydration to suit my flours.  That, and I made a sandwich loaf versus a boule.