Blog posts

That's the saying.  But I was already home and wanted to go big anyway.

My wife was off to an early morning flight to Tobago for a Pan-Am Dragon Boating competition.  She asked if I'd bake a WW fig-raisin-pecan levain bread as some boarding gate breakfast for the troops traveling together.  Made two, sliced 'em, and packed them off with some butter and cream cheese.  These are designed to bake dark and craggy, the left with traditional baguette scoring, the right with a criss-cross design.

I baked this one several weeks ago but have not had a chance to post.  This is a 70% Whole Wheat bread made with freshly ground whole wheat with no sifting.  I watched a video on how to adjust the stones in my MockMill II and ended up with a super-fine flour, no sifting necessary.  I think for the next bake I will sift courser and still sift once and then re-grind at the fine level.

This one turned out a little denser than I would have liked, but it had a nice tang to it and made great toast.

While searching for ideas on what to include in my next batch of 12 loaves, I came across this: http://www.25bestbakers.com/recipes.html?ID=12. I had all the ingredients on hand so with a few minor tweaks in ingredients from the recipe and using my usual procedure, here it is:

Recipe 

Makes 3 loaves of ~870 g raw weight each

Sprouts

75 g quinoa (I used half red, half white quinoa)

75 g kamut berries

Water, enough to soak

Dough

This week I was inspired by some of the cool recipes on this site that mix cooked potatoes into the dough, so I thought I'd try it. I made rolls and bagel squares, inspired by PalwithnoovenP's recipe on this site. My bagel squares turned out quite misshapen and ugly, but taste great. I am not sure why I can't get the surface smooth. Rather than pan-frying them like in the recipe, I baked them. I also omitted the onions, so effectively its a 50:50 potato and flour bagel dough. 

Since the facility to accept text from Word documents is not yet implemented here, the text of this post can be found at this link.  The figure below is notional but while it does not reflect lab measurements, it should be thought of as an aid to thinking about the underlying issues.

For every bread with sprouted kamut or durum I baked, I find its sweetness a tad overly dominating. This time, I paired Earl Grey with these sweet sprouted grains in the hope that the resulting flavour would be more balanced.

Earl Grey 30% Sprouted Kamut SD

Dough flour:

120g      40%       Freshly milled whole white wheat flour

Sourdough Bread: March 22, 2019

David Snyder

This bake is a kind of hybrid (high bread?). It utilizes elements of the formula and method shared by Mike Giraudo on Facebook, Peter Reinhart's James Beard Award-winning “San Francisco Sourdough,” as presented in his book, “Crust and Crumb” and various techniques I have adopted over the years, such as autolyse.

Things are going monstrous on the bread front. I have recently gotten into yeast breads (not as much an art as a science, and you better hurry!) and even explored the fun-handling of rye flour and making rye breads. 

Being an old New Jersey native, I like a good lip smacking jaw-dropping sour rye and I think I found one here 

jewish-rye-bread-recipe at King Arthur Flour

In honor of the holiday of Purim, I tried making triangular rolls with a "filling" in the middle -- halved cherry tomatoes and cracked olives. I cut the dough (Pain à l'Ancienne) roughly into triangles, and then did my best to stretch/massage them to a nice shape. They aren't very clean or uniform at all, but I'm generally pretty happy with them. It definitely feels like they are in the spirit of the day! Instead of hamantaschen, I call them hamanbroten :)

A friend asked for some help with a recipe for a Portuguese corn bread known as broa, and the formula she had been given was not working for her and was producing hockey pucks.  So, having not made any corn bread for a long time I decided to try and figure out what it should be.

It turned out to be one of those on-line formulas that was probably never tested as written and was destined to produce pretty good hockey pucks if you followed it.  But it did give some history and I found some photos that were helpful but nothing that seemed to be really authoritative.