Blog posts

After seeing David’s sourdough white bread post this week, poor Lucy got the willies for it worse than ever.  When you don’t eat much white bread, the ramifications of missing it can be dangerous when the White Bread Willies strike.  I tried to get Lucy back on her trans humanist project since the sun burns hotter every day and it won’t be long before the oceans boil away and we need to be permanently somewhere else – not that she isn’t most of the time anyway.

A few days ago David Snyder posted his version of the San Francisco Baking Institute's pain au levain (almost) all AP flour batard.  Seeing this as the equivalent of an open invitation, I decided it was time to strike quickly.  And I'm so glad I did.

Freshloafians,
Here are a couple of videos I made at my last two markets, one in Bozeman and the other two days ago in Big Sky, MT.  Enjoy ;)

-Mark

Having decided that I'm tired of trying to work with sloppy wet doughs, particularly in large batches, I've revised several of the recipes I use so that the overall dough hydration is in the range of 70% to 72%. This is my first experiment with the Harvest bread from FWSY, and it's a keeper!

Tartine Bread - After several pounds of failed dough, I finally was able to produce a loaf of Tartine Bread.

Well, I nearly ruined a large bake (eleven loaves) of my best deli-style rye bread today, simply by following the recipe instead of my own smarts. I've baked this bread many times (I've got two customers who absolutely love it and order large batches fairly regularly).

A relatively new TFL member recently asked how to make a sourdough bread. His description of the desired characteristics brought to mind a bread we made in the San Francisco Baking Institute Artisan II Workshop on sourdough baking. It was a decidedly French-style pain au levain with minimal acidic acid tanginess but a creamy, sweet complex flavor. It was the preferred bread of the SFBI faculty. The special features of this white bread were a liquid levain fed every 12 hours that made up about 30% of the total flour in the final dough.

I couldn't wait another day to order Tartine 3, and when I went to buy it, I found a "used like new" copy for under $12.  Must have been my day.  I made the first recipe using starter I had on hand, feeding twice daily preceding the bake, and used a young levain.  I'm not sure why the recipe calls for twice as much levain to be made as the recipe calls for.  Also, dutch ovens always burn the bottoms.

What's not to love ? I had to clean out the freezer since we are going away for a year. I found 2 boxes of roasted pumpkin that I had put up last Fall. Enter this bread. What an amazing dough to work with. The key is to drain the heck out of the pumpkin. The rest of the procedure was like working with silk. The rapidity of the rise is accounted for by the AYW. More and more it is giving me results that are really impressive as far as texture and rise time. 

240 gm levain ( 100% hydration mixed rye/white)

600g water and AYW - 300g each

700g bread flour

This weeks bake features sesame seeds. I hadn't tried them in a loaf yet so i decided to give it a go. I really wanted to try black sesame seeds (mainly because i think they would have looked really cool in the crumb) but i couldn't find them :( So i went ahead with regular white sesame seeds, because i like the taste :)

Formula: