Blog posts

Made a decent and straight forward white wheat sourdough today. Never had a crust crackle as loud and as long as this one did once pulled from the oven. It's went well with oil and balsamic.

So, as a college student, it's oftentimes hard to bake consistently. Especially considering I pretty much only bake long-fermented sourdough breads. Things have been pretty busy, so I hadn't baked for a while.

I decided I'd like to try tweaking around my timing to see if I can possibly fit in baking easier to my schedule. I'd bought a jar of olives to snack on, and saw my starter as I was putting it into my fridge -- an idea formed in my mind.

Since my previous post I've taken a number of steps to clean up the site and reduce the amount of personal information stored here. Most notably, just by removing accounts that never activated or activated but never posted and haven't logged in in years, I was able to shrink the user database by over 75% (!).

This is my second attempt at both barley flour and sprouted white wheat flour. I’ve wanted to retry working with barley flour since my failed first try. After Ian posted his Guinness Rye Barley Wild Rice Bread, I decided that I’d be brave and incorporate barley into my bread again.

30/30 Freshly Milled Barley/Sprouted White Wheat Sourdough

Dough flour:

90g       30%      Freshly milled pearl barley flour (since I can’t get whole)

We know how much Lucy loves her Mexican food so she went all in to make a bread that would hold up to our planned Red Pork Enchiladas.  I have to admit she relay came up with a Duesy this time.  It is way different than her normal bran levain, some portion whole sprouted fare.

Another batch of Vermont SD, ho-hum.  However this time I decided to score these differently as well as some pre-shaping changes and a more gentle final shaping.  Which I'll attribute to the shorter and slightly stubbier look of these 

In the spirit of Abel's Ziggy scoring, which I've done  few times now - I decided to try a cross cut, "x's" all down the length of the dough.  And wound up with two distinct looks.

I figured out that I’ve only shared my pumpkin pancake recipe on this site. Not that I like it any less but I don’t always want pumpkin pancakes nor have the mood to roast and mash a pumpkin. This base recipe is the one I turn to most often when I’m craving pancakes. It’s my proud no-fail formula that I’ve took at least 40 times to perfect.

 This is the version following suggestion 2 below.

You might have noticed you've been getting a ton of emails recently from companies that "care about your privacy". That is because there are new data privacy regulations coming into effect in less than a month that impact anyone doing business with EU citizens. I'm still getting a handle on what they mean and whether what TFL does constitutes "doing business" with anyone, but at the least it is a good time for some housecleaning here.

Ha, Ha....this time I created a 100% leaven from my 60% stiff starter and used it after 5 hours...didn't float and not rise that much and expected a flop but rise it did!!!

So...next experiment will be to up the hydration a bit more and to see whether my flour and my handling can cope!