Blog posts

Another Italian style bake using my DIY multi-cereal flour blend, as developed for my recent Pagnotta Multicereali bake.

It comprises 85% Dallagiovanna Manitoba flour with the balance being an equal parts mix of wheat, rye, barley, oats and rice grain all freshly milled together.

I've never had much luck with naturally leavened ciabatta - mine tend to be tough as old boots and with small alveoli, so I used fresh yeast in a 45% hydration biga. 100% of the flour is in the biga.

Nigella seeds add so much savoury depth to bread and works really well with sourdough. For anyone in Toronto, Blackbird Baking has a seeded loaf which uses a mixture that includes nigella seeds. Their seeded loaf was a staple for me many years ago. The defining feature of the loaf, I think, is definitely the addition of nigella seeds! Recipe here.

I was looking through the Community Bake on ciabatta, and I didn't see that anyone had tried using the original recipe of the inventor, Arnaldo Cavallari.  It's available on line as a photo of the recipe (in Italian) in his bakery, and there is a faithful translation available, too (I know because I transcribed the recipe from the photo by hand, and translated it with Google Translate). I'll post the links later.  The recipe is very different from what us home bakers typically do, and also from most ciabatta recipes I have seen.

Following my recent post about posts (!), I thought I had better put my money where my mouth was and submit one of my recent bakes to the forum. 

This bake has a bit of a quirky origin: SueVT recently posted about several baking books in Italian and posted a photo of a random recipe showing the effectiveness of smartphone camera translation.

I continue to tweak my bakes even if the formula largely stays the same.  In the case of my SD baguettes, I have gradually (very slowly since I don’t bake baguettes all that often) been working on the idea that with greater gluten development I can allow more fermentation.  When we did the baguette community bake ages ago we came to the conclusion that less gluten development and less overall fermentation gave us a great baguette with open crumb and good ears/grigne.

I had just enough potato flakes to use at 12% so decided to use it up for this bake.  Once again, I didn’t make a tangzhong by cooking the potato flakes with milk, but in theory, you do not need to do that when using these dehydrated flakes.  Although the potatoes are dehydrated, the starches in them are already gelatinized so once they hydrate should give you the benefits of a tangzhong without the extra step.  I did find this to be the case as this bread is very soft and keeps from getting stale quite a while.

Caramel apple panettone made with sweet lievito madre.

I have been developing my sweet LM for a while now, initially to help with making sourdough shokupan, but now also to use with SD brioche and panettone. I am still adding a small amount of regular LM "just in case", but as you can see, the sweet LM rises very well. The flavor of the panettone is outstanding.

Hi!

 Can I use 14% protein all purpose flour for my ciabatta?

I have 80% hydration and use an active sourdough starter. 
‘Tnks!

Some more Lupin and Linseed with a dash of home milled pre fermented red wheat Lupin content was 20% made up with soaked splits and some Lupin Flour Linseed was 10%, Red Wheat was from refrigerated s/d excess. This dough was bigger than the last one and it wasn't till i weighed up the soaked lupin splits that i realised i was short on for the Lupin component so i decided id add Lupin Flour and also add more water for that too. I was very pleased worked like clockwork 2 hour bulk fermentation using Fresh compressed yeast @ 2% loaves weighed off at 515g each and baked in round pans

For those of you who are interested in Italian baking, particularly the Italian brioches, these books from Italian Gourmet are worth noting:

Un Panettone Mondiale (with English text): "The stars and all the recipes of the first international national competition on the beloved Italian delicacy".