Blog posts

Some of my customers asked if I was making buns for Thanksgiving dinner, so I said I'd give it a go. Sweet Potato buns seem to be just the thing. I did a sweep of this site and the internet in general to look at recipes; none quite filled the bill (the recipe needs to be easily scalable to several dozen buns and the ingredients can't be too expensive or difficult to handle, or time-consuming to prepare). So I tested and tweaked, and came up with the following.

This is not a bagel, hahaa! It’s a 69% Swiss rye, shaped in a circular ring so that it can be hung from the ceiling during the long winter months from the Alpine region in Switzerland.

While I grew up eating white bread, making complex, robust and nutritious breads, have been my ultimate goal. My experience in making rye bread is limited. Therefore, I’ve turned to Stanley Ginsberg’s The Rye Baker for guidance and inspiration. He did not disappoint.

I can't believe I haven't tried this before - Tartine is indeed the tastiest simple country sourdough. 'Simple' not at all in a patronising way, after all sourdough can ALWAYS go wrong for no reason, at least in my experience. Simple in the way of the three basic ingredients: flour water and salt, without seeds or whole grains or malted flakes.

No pie dough savory pie! Blasphemy, I say! 

https://goodcookingfortheheartandsoul.blogspot.com/2017/09/nannys-cauliflower-pie.html

This bread is 25% wholewheat, the rest strong white flour, I added a small hanful of semolina & 60g of golden flaxseed (soaked in water). My flatmate had requested a softer bread so it also has a little milk, oil and honey. Not sure about the exact hydration because I'm terrible at following a plan and not getting 'creative'...

I think that this crumb shows how much I'm improving at handling dough, it's really much better than the last breads ive made!

Two challot for my family's rosh hashanah dinners, these had 3g of added yeast because I was nervous about them rising properly with only sourdough & the eggs, oil, honey that I used. Flour weight of each one was about 600g I think (I'd have to check back in my little book).

I made up this recipe using a true cooked porridge method rather than a soaker which is my usual method when using porridge grains. I followed the method outlined by Ian and Laurie. To be honest, I am not sure that the results are worth the extra pain in the neck especially when making 4 batches of this. The crumb seems to be softer and hold more moisture but I should try this as a soaker as well. Unfortunately, I don't have enough of the 12 grain cereal I used to repeat this using a soaker. Anyhow, on to the recipe:

After my self imposed hiatus of three months away, I decided to kick off the "new baking season" with a run of the Hamelman Vermont SD, again using AP instead of bread flour and using a rye levain instead of white flour - thus the "alfanso style" moniker.  Fortunately it looks as though I haven't lost a beat.  Funny thing is that my final blog entry before I left in June was for the same bread.  

There were a few things going on here this week, so I figured on keeping my bake pretty simple and straight-forward.  The only “extra” that was in the plan was to build up a bunch of both my rye and durum starters and get them spread out and dried to store as back-up, and to give to some family members who asked for some.