Blog posts

Last week, I went to a steak house with some work colleagues. This was not an ideal situation for me, only because I’m a vegetarian. The meatless main course options were severely limited. There was literally one choice, a roast vegetable dish.

It was a really delicious mix of roasted sweet potato, butternut squash, walnuts and pumpkin seeds topped with a generous amount of goat’s cheese, rocket and a sundried tomato vinaigrette/sauce/puree. To make it all even better, there was really great sourdough bread on the table!

Every autumn we have abundance of pumpkins in our garden. Most of them are Hokkaido pumpkins which have an orange skin and more yellowish meat. I usually use Hokkaido pumpkins for preparing pumpkin soup or pumpkin gnocchi with brown butter and sage leaves (one of the recent recipes is published here with a nice video), but this year I decided to make Hokkaido pumpkin bread with SD and sage yeast water combo.

Back to basics. No improvisation this time. 75% freshly home ground wheat was used. Retarded overnight for 12 hours and baked directly from the fridge in a DO.

didnt do a good job transferring the dough into the DO. Otherwise i think oven spring could be better but mind you this is 75% whole wheat, so no complaints. Happy with the crumb

I had a small quantity of sprouted wholewheat that I found in the pantry.  Looking back through my notes I found that I had sprouted the wheat in September 2015! Other things took precedence in my life after that with things getting back to normality (or what passes as normality) recently.  I wanted to make this Potato water SD recipe from NE Sourdough again, it's my favourite white loaf and always turns out well.  So I ground the wheat in my coffee grinder and included this sprouted wheat flour in the recipe.  I also upped the hydration a little.  

    This is another version of the Pain au levain I made a few weeks ago but I changed up the flours using some spelt and high gluten flour.  I made 1 batard with about half of the dough and 2 baguettes with the remainder.

I didn't include any photos of the baguettes this time since they are still a work in progress and even though it's almost Halloween I didn't want to scare everyone.  The crumb and taste was perfect but my scoring and the color was not pretty.

All I can say is, I am hooked.When I decided to make this bread I had so many worries in my head, Was my starter ready? could I Develop the dough? was I degassing it to much?

 Sadly, all the pictured I took of this bake were taken at the wrong steting resulting in files that were too large to upload - so we make do with a few crumb shots

After 3 weeks of white SD combinations to formulate a modern SFSD, Lucy has gone back to her darker side that she calls ‘Sweetness in Life’ we went back to exploring a 100% sprouted multi-grain bread.  100% sprouted breads are difficult to make and have then come out looking half decent…. without over fermenting and or over proofing.

The photo on the left is after I sliced off a 1/4" heel. The on on the right is a center slice.

Whilst I admire the skills of bakers to produce such a wide range of different breads I would venture to suggest that these breads should not form part of the daily diet.  By all means produce them for added pleasure.

Long time reader, first time poster.

I've made bread on and off for over forty years, from necessity in college, to fiscal sanity nowadays. My wife and I work from home, and when I bake during the day, she claims the aroma creates a "hostile work environment".