Blog posts

It is a said that much of what we learn in fly fishing, is history we haven't read and I think that applies to baking bread as well. Lance AKA Albacore clued me into the use of fava bean flour in french baguettes and in my reading of the archives of TFL I have found mention of it's use by members of the Baguette Brigade Alfanso, KenDalm and also Abelbreadgallery.

Good evening,

After weeks of European-style baking, we were missing some much-loved Tang Zhong, that my son particularly likes to indulge in.  I searched the Forum and Voilà!, I found a recipe posted by Floyd a few years back:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32997/hokkaido-milk-bread-tangzhong

Floyd's recipe describes the process with turn-by-turn instructions and it was a straightforward process.  A few comments from my side:

New oven and equipment salvaged from the baking cocoon.  Will try and treat this guy with some love - so will start with croissants.  Dough mixing begins tonight ;) 

Hello all. This morning I baked guided by Maurizio Leo's Spelt, Rye and Whole Wheat Sourdough recipe, a 50 percent whole grain formula.

I've recently landed here at TFL on a quest to bake a bread made of one half or more home-milled grain that I really like - that I can't help but grind,  mix, rise, shape and bake over and over again. The whole grain in this bake is home-milled, made of organic spelt, rye and Yocora Rojo hard red spring wheat all sourced from Breadtopia.

I haven’t been feeling great about my baking lately, I’d been over proofing my bread and really disappointed in how they turned out.  I decided that I needed to go back to a recipe that I’d made many times when I first started to bake sourdough, so I went back to Maurizio’s Beginner Sourdough from The Perfect Loaf.  For some reason the flavour of this bread always speaks to me.  However, I decided I still wanted some sort of add in, but one that wouldn’t negatively affect the crumb too much, so since I love sesame seeds I went with black and white sesame seeds.

today I decided to do an experiment and take the hydration of my dough to 100%. it is a sourdough bread and it contains about 15% whole spelt flour. the rest is white flour. the dough was very wet and challenging but the bread turned out well. the flavor was good and the crumb was open (not an easy task considering the the bad quality of bread flour in my country).

This is a rye-wheat bread that is apparently popular in France.  I got the recipe from Bernd's Bakery, a blog that I found through the blog of Stanley Ginsberg, the author of The Rye Baker (which is a masterpiece of a cookbook).  

Bernd's original blog post can be found here.

My (slightly adapted) formula:

PAIN DE METEIL

Liquid Levain

10 g starter (I used a 100% hydration rye starter)

If you are new to SD baking and still having problems with high hydration and complicated doughs, don't get your knickers all in a knot.  Instead drop the hydration down and get a solid footing with lower hydration breads first.  Although these are baguettes, the dough can easily be adapted to batards or boules.  So...

Two easy formulas that I recommend for you to get that feeling of accomplishment and dough handling skills are:

This is another recipe from Full Proof Baking.  This is really simple just keep the butter cold and you’re golden.  Don’t throw away your discard, there are so many things to make with your discard.

I had not made Hokkaido-style dough for some time. For the fluffyness of it, I decided to have a run yesterday and was pretty happy with the rise and softness of loaf and buns. The levain was built in two stages throughout a combined 12-hour period, where the first stage was 100% hydration, and the second stage was a stiff 50% version. All ingredients are supermarket off-the-shelf, and I realize now that I am running out of AP flour!