Blog posts

I had such a good bake with my one previous turn at David's SFBI Pain au Levain (my way!) , a mostly all AP flour dough, that I knew I'd be returning to the scene of the crime soon enough.  Again using my 75% hydration levain and adding water to make up for the difference vs. a liquid levain, I also decided to add caraway seeds to the dough.  A good slather of cornstarch glaze before and after the bake.

Lucy isn’t known to be a died in the wool bread traditionalist and I am anything, and everything, a bit strange in an odd and slightly weird way since being born 2nd to my twin and losing the first race I ever ran.  Being a born loser can wear on you over time, if you let it, so you might tend to compensate by being a rebel and not give much, if any, respect to the establishment, rules and the status quo.

Well I haven't posted in more than a month, but have been busy baking different things. The dinner rolls are a take of P. Reinharts soft pull apart dinner rolls from ABED.  This batch of 325 grams total flour yielded 6 rolls at 104 grams each, so I thought why not bake them off in a muffin tin?

All of the my bakes are leavened with a refreshed liquid levain. Here is the formula for the rolls:

50 g levain

325 g bread flour

175 g milk, scalded

After waiting literally many years to bake my own bread I finally did it. Thank to Jim Lahey's no knead recipe which I followed to the letter this bread came out wonderful and was very tasty and delicious!

Nothing new and exciting baking here this week, except my wife's French Plum Crisp. I baked a couple of my go to breads. My version of Forkish's Pain de Campagne, very different from his, actually. I do use his baking procedure, although it's really Chad Robertson's. Oh, well. It makes really good, crusty bread.

  Fresh milled Spelt flour and Rye along with rye chops, cracked wheat and barley flakes were left to autolyse for 24 hours.  The resulting bread was an earthy, nutty wholesome bread perfect for sandwiches, grilled bread or just spread with some butter.

Well this was almost a bust! I am not sure what happened but my bread didn't rise very much at all. I thought it might have been that the alcohol in the cider killed the yeast but there are sourdough recipes out there done with hard cider. This was on top of messing up the hydration when I realized I was short 65 g of levain and took some of my stiff starter from the fridge and added water to it. So this is not a true 1-2-3 sourdough. This is what I did.

For the honey bread challenge, I got the inspiration from here: https://bakingfanatic.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/gorgonzola-and-pear-sourdough-loaves/

I had a piece of leftover Gorgonzola from making pizzas and some dried pears on hand and thought that honey would go great with them. I added an oat soaker because I love the texture it gives to bread.

This week’s bake is my third try (in a row) at oat porridge bread. The results of the first two tries were good, but i’ve been trying to get the feel of the dough right. First time was way to wet and, second time was a bit too stiff, third time was just right!

The flour blend is also a bit different from last week, I went with a 70:30 split instead of 60:40 (thanks CedarMountain for the tip).

Formula: