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I first started baking pies about two and a half years ago, I’ve gone through a pile of different pasty recipes until I tried Stella Parks recipe in Bravetart cookbook.  I’ve mentioned this one before, but if you haven’t tried it you really need to.  It is the easiest to make, the one challenge for us bread bakers is not to knead.  Once I have a dough in my hands I automatically want to knead it, with pastry you really shouldn’t knead it.  In fact, I barely bring this together.

Like scorchia, Covid-19 led me to invest in a big bag of "ultra-unifine" bread flour from Azure. I've used it in place of white bread flour in a few recipes and decided it was time to let it shine in a classic-style sourdough.

For my first bake from Bryan Ford's beautiful new book, I was drawn to these "semitas de yema" for two reasons. First, their appearance - and, it turns out, the method - is similar to Asian "pineapple" buns, hitting the void that is within me, now that I am living far from the Asian bakeries of my home town. Second, I have previously experimented with using sourdough in enriched doughs but never seen a professionally written recipe that relies entirely on wild yeasts.

I freeze my sourdough discard. I defrosted 50g of it overnight then the next day added it to 250g wholegrain flour (home milled), 250g bread flour, 375g water and 10g salt after a 30 min autolyse.

For gluten development I performed one stretch and fold, lamination and 3 coil folds then left to bulk ferment at 28 celcius.

The total bulk fermentation time was 11 hours from when I added the starter to the autolyse. After the last coil fold I waited for the dough to rise 25%.

OK still on a miso kick, not my homemade as that will take sometime yet, but red miso again.  I was happy with my previous bake of miso with furikake, but decided to change it up just a bit by adding toasted black and white sesame seeds.  Since I love sesame seeds and have baked a previous black and white sesame seed bread I thought that it would be great with the flavour of miso.

Bread flour 352 g

Sprouted Whole Wheat 97 g

Water 320 g

Levain 115 g 100% hydration Sprouted whole wheat 

MTloaf touted this bread to me recently and while I didn't immediately get on the stick, I kept it off the back burner.  So here goes.

MT was right.  This is a fantastic tasting bread.  As I hand mix, it was a bit of a fight to perform French Folds, adding  two Letter folds at 50 & 100 min of a total of 150 min BF.  

First time trying 100% semolina bread using yeast water for leavening. I used a basic recipe with semolina, yeast water levain, salt and water. Because semolina is a bit coarse and hard, I decided to autolyse it for 12 hrs with added salt. This was the same time it took for the levain to mature. At the end of the autolyse the semolina was soft and held to its structure.

Levain (12 hours to mature)

40 g semolina

40 g yeast water (grapes)

Autolyse

282 g semolina

187 g water

5 g salt

After my go at the Red Miso Furikake Sourdough bake, Cedarmountain gave me the idea to make my own miso.  I actually use a lot of miso in my cooking and now I’m also gradually using it in my baking.  So why not make my own miso?  The first hurdle was to source koji rice.  I was able to find some here in Toronto as we have a local sake producer called Izumi and they sold me some koji rice.  Well the ingredient list for a simple miso is even shorter than bread, Koji rice, soy beans, salt and water.  OK perhaps it is the same as for bread.

I’ve been participating the baguette CB and realized that I hadn’t documented any of the baguette bakes in my blog.  I find it can be nice to go back and see how my baking has progressed with its various ups and downs.

The formula I’ve settled on to hone my baguette craft with is Abel’s Baguette au Levain.  This is the formula I’ve been following.

For three baguettes about 280 g (to account for aliquot jar)