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  Tangzhong is the technique of heating a portion of the flour and liquid in your recipe to approximately 65C to make a paste (roux).  At this temperature the flour undergoes a change and gelatinizes.  By adding this roux to your final dough it will help create a soft, fluffy, moist open crumb.  It is also supposed to help prevent the bread from going stale.

After years of practice and changing steps to make the process simpler, I think I finally have the classic sourdough loaf down.

Yesterday’s bake 

Had a few experimental mishaps (couldn't generate enough surface tension to get good oven spring, etc) so I needed a win. Made this pumpernickel using the recipe on KAF's website...can't wait to crack into it (my son's already planning to make rubens tomorrow).

took advantage of the cooler weather in New Jersey today and baked  olive rosemary loaves. Smell wonderful 

Here is a simple method for processing leftover starter into a versatile ingredient that can favorably increase the complexity of a bread's flavor profile.  It's a "toadie" in dabrownman's parlance. Perhaps a “cheat” in yours. Ok, it's not strictly altus. It had aspirations to become bread but never got the call.  Hence “Alt”. Here’s the...

What for

Recently, I read some comments on an old discussion topic here about the length of proofing time required for whole grain sourdough bread. Dabrownman mentioned that it is easy to over-proof whole grain bread because of the high bacterial, yeast and enzymatic activities. I wonder if I was letting my bread to proof for too long sometimes such that the oven spring was minimal at times, so I deliberately cut the proofing period by 20 minutes this time to see what its effect would be.

The holiday is over.  It was an awesome 3 week trip to our South Island incorporating a 7 day adventure of 4WD in back country, catching up with relations and exploring parts of the country I had never seen before. 

Fellow Bakers,

I had the opportunity to get some special flour named Ruchmehl, which is used to make a darker bread in Switzerland. It is some sort of half-half wheat flour that provides a darker color to the crumb and nutty flavor. This flour is widely used in Switzerland for their daily bread.

The process was quite standard.

Levain:

10 g starter

50 g Ruchmhel

50 g water

Matured for about 18 hrs, which produced some sour notes to the bread flavor.

Dough:

All levain

245 g Ruchmehl

One of my favorite books on bread is Lionel Vatinet's A Passion for Bread. Ciabatta is a favorite of mine so it only seemed natural to try my hand at his version. I also wanted to see how well my hands would handle this wet dough.