Happy π Day 3.14159. The year of our Lord 2024.
The tale of the tape.
For the cracker Jack crew at Banner imaging Mesa
1. NY street slice pie
1. Queen Margarita of Savoy
Results of my first round of Colomba testing.
I think that results were satisfactory, but I learned several things:
1. Recipe: Colomba is not the same as panettone. I used my current panettone recipe, and the results were almost too soft and airy; Colomba is a long, flat cake, and so it needs a bit of structural integrity to be physically stable. Make sure your recipe isn't extreme in any direction.
If you think about it, the spicing used in falafels (cumin & coriander, garlic, cardamom...) is like a recipe for a bread spice. The thing is though, how would you put a falafel into a bread. Home made falafel mixture, with freshly minced chickpeas, fava beans or lentils? Even better still why not use a box mix which has already been dehydrated and they've done part of the work for you already!
It's been a while since I made a bread using eggs. I wanted to make something using fresh milled durum as well and included some freshly milled Stardust whole wheat from Barton Springs Mill.
I love cherries so I added some dried cherries that I soaked in water to rehydrate them and used the water in the main dough. I've recently read on a Facebook post that using freeze-dried fruit is actually the best way to go. I will definitely have to try that soon. In any case I should have doubled the amount of cherries as it wasn't nearly enough.
To be honest, posting more in order to use the above tabloid-type title rather than to share some new bread breakthrough, but here goes anyway. Apologies for overdoing the biga theme in the process.
My latest bake was a 50% white spelt 50% strong white wheat flour loaf with 5% golden flaxseeds (pre-full hydration). All the spelt went into the 'shaggy' biga.
Still working on my sandwich bread (bake in a Pullman pan) that isn’t enriched with fat. I decided to add a touch of honey to balance the sour notes since I didn’t use a stiff sweet levain for this bake. I may switch to a stiff sweet levain next time to reduce the sour notes, we’ll see how I feel when that next time comes up.
I have to stop eating gluten for a while, so why not to learn how to bake stuff without it.
My no recipe approach does not work anymore. I produced a hideous monster of a loaf ans it is going to enrich my compost pile today. I thought: it cannot be any more complicated than a rye bread. Well, it can.
Anyway, I found this beautiful recipe on YouTube and this bread is just lovely. The dough was very pleasant to work with and the result actually exceeded my expectations. Slices great, makes a lovely toast.
Hands on laboratory practice.
Day #1 begin the three step leivin build
Day #2 complete leivin fortification, main dough build/fermentation, and cold retard
Day #3 The end game (Bake).
After some discussion in recent threads, I decided that it's high time I tried out shorter bulk ferments. My guiding principle has been that the longer the flour is hydrated, and the longer it's fermented, the better the flavor. So I usually let bulk ferment go on to more than double, sometimes triple, the original size. This usually gives me a fine, fairly uniform crumb, which may have large pores or smaller ones depending on hydration, grains, all these sorts of things.
Following on from some posts on the Big(a) controversy thread, here are a couple more recent wholegrain wheat loaves I baked with a 50% 'shaggy' SD biga.
The first was a very simple control bake with nothing else apart from 100% UK wholemeal wheat bread flour.
