Yesterday's bake was a dry run to see what's what. Today corrections were made, and hopefully for the better. This time I used a spring pan which had a slightly wider base than the Angel Food pan, and also employed a small bowl in the center in order to enlarge the hole in the crown.
So, there I was last Thursday with two fine loaves for all of the sandwiches that I'd need for a busy weekend out of town, a container of "issues" in the fridge, and a lot of questioning on the strength of my poor old NMNF starter. Well - the husband managed to do some neck damage, which cancelled the plans for the weekend (and cancelled the need for so many sandwiches!), and left me with some actual time on my hands.
It's been "one of those days" for the past couple of weeks, for weather (barometric pressure and temps all over the place), for scheduling, and for baking.
But since it is "Italian bread", let's go with sesame semolina corona. This is the Jeffrey Hamelman semolina dough with my 125% hydration rye liquid levain in lieu of his 125% bread flour liquid levain.
Many of you will be familiar with different versions of Peter Reinhart's Struan, a multigrain sandwich bread that he seems to have a version of in each of his books. I have often made the version from "Artisan Breads Every Day" and my customers (and I!) find it very tasty. I make it quite a bit.
Greetings friends, I haven't been posting much lately, as I haven't been baking much.
Super happy with my FoodSaver for storing fresh food and particularly bread. I baked a batch of soft pull apart dinner rolls April 26th. By vacuum sealing, freezing and taken out as needed. My last roll is as fresh today, 3 weeks later as it was when fresh from the oven! Take out a roll, re-vacuum and re-seal, then back in the fridge.
As a single ski bum I have either had to give bread away or double bag it in zip locks to freeze which never gave me a good re-heated product.
My future SIL had a bachelor party in SF over the weekend and he was kind enough bring me a boule f the closest thing that Acme makes to traditional SFSD. It was a bit more than day old by the time I got it. Here is the website - they just call it Sourdough - http://acmebread.com/bread
This post has no pictures and is not going to interest a lot of readers since I did it to help my own understanding of what is going on in the oven. Writing it down forced me to explain more when I didn't understand why and fix apparent inconsistencies. If it is too much technobabble, just jump out and find something interesting.
I made 4 small batards with a 1 hour autolyse and a fairly quick fermentation period quite pleased with the result especially the flavour
It is really difficult to buy fine ground semolina (durum) flour here in NZ. I found a supplier who could remill it and today tried the above for the first time.
Sponge:
140 g durum
140 g bread flour
195 g water
yeast 3 g IDY and 13.9 g sugar.
mixed and left to mature 2 hours.
Added 237 g water and 34.8 g olive oil and mixed well before adding 209 g durum, 209 g bread four and 12.5 g salt.
