Blog posts

Day 1: 08/07/2019

10:00 A,M. Eastern Daylight Saving Time (GMT -4)

1. I decided on the dried fruit I will be using. I had some dried dates on hand and I picked up a package of one ingredient, organically grown raisins. 
2. using 120 Degree F. domestic hot water and a new sponge I washed the containers.
3. The containers are left to air dry.

I decided that I wanted to change things up a bit this week, after falling into a rut making the same bread every week for a while.  Looking back through some of my favorite breads from the past, I decided that I would bake a rye sourdough with a nod to PiP's 40% rye.

Formula

343g AP

254g Dark Rye (Bob's Red Mill)

38g WW (fresh milled, hard red spring)

120g mature levain (100% hydration, fed WW flour)

385g Water

13g Salt

After an epic failure Saturday (I decided to create my own porridge sourdough recipe and it was pancake batter), I decided to try the Sarah Owens recipe for Seeded Turmeric and Leek Sourdough from her book Sourdough. I made some slight modifications. I did 1.5x the recipe since her loaves are on the small side. 

I started this at the same as my post with  champlain leavened with yeast water, but this one fermented as expected.

Using Hamelmans swiss farmhouse as a recipe building starting point, I used 10% yeast water to start my levain.

For 4 dough balls of 230 grams for a total of 920 grams

Build 1 :

81 grams 5 stagione tipo 00

51 grams apple yeast water

Fermented for about 6 hours at RT where it tripled in size and had a nice dome

Build 2 :

120 grams 5 stagione tipo 00

76 grams regular water

137 first build

I thought this would be a good bread to test out my yeast water. Problem is, I weighed and mixed it while a crisis was unfolding and I must have weighed my water wrong. The dough was a sloppy mess and fermented so fast I didn't think I could do anything with it. I threw it into the fridge to try and reign in the out of control fermenting going on. It was 2 hours in bulk and already very proofy and I had only done 1 fold and it was just spiraling out of control. In the fridge after 1 hour it was still growing and growing, so I decided to just throw in the towel and shape and bake.

A-Lot-Of-Teff... 40% teff, 20% wholewheat, 40% bread flour

My old bakes were 20/20/60.

Crumb is a lot denser this time, which is fine and expected, I like dense bread too. But shaping was a nightmare and the flavor didn't really change that much. Conclusion:20% teff is ideal, 40% is not worth the trade off of bloom and especially VERY difficult shaping.

By: The Roadside Pie King The original plan called for candied ginger and candied rosemary. Well don't you know I brought basil by mistake? I decided to go with the flow. Please mind your eye on photos one through three, candied basil. The next step called for pealing the fresh, frozen at the peak of flavor peaches. The skins were to be discarded however they smelled so darn good I decided to pulverize them with the sugars. The still partially frozen peaches are de-stoned and sliced. By this time the candied basil has dried.

This was a change from my usual routine as I made only one batch of dough! It’s a long weekend and I got orders for only 2 loaves. This turned out to be a good thing since my daughter ran her trial half marathon and I biked behind her to keep her company. Some celebrating and having to go back to the starting point ate up more time than planned as did a side trip to the Farmers Market. Therefore bread making was quite delayed. Making one batch was a nice change. 

Recently I encounter someone attempting to make a beet infused bread. It was greatly disappointing for the baker to discover that the beautiful color of beets did not survive the baking process. 

A version of Trevor Wilson's Champlain bread.

Thank you to the community bake thread for this bread for a lot of good advice.

Process

Ambient temperature was 80--82F throughout.

Two days before:take starter from fridge, leave out on counter, feed at 1:3:3 around midnight