Usually Lucy comes up with a recipe and tells me what to do and then I do my best to execute her recipe wishes as closely as possible or risk having my ankles savaged by a wild beast, small in leg length. Then I tell you all about it. This time was a bit different.
Some may remember that I put out a call for interns to visit my bakery Bread Obsession this summer. I am sad to say that no interns applied. First, we got a lovely visit from exceedingly accomplished baker, Pat Roth, which she wrote about so eloquently here.
It's been a while since I baked with a Yeast Water starter and I now that cherries are in season and inexpensive I figured it was time to build one again.
It took a few days to bring the YW to life with a handful of cherries, water and a little honey. Once it was ready to use I built up a levain in 2 stages and used a nice combination of flours including freshly milled whole wheat and durum flour.
Naturally I needed to add some cherries to the main dough and figured some walnuts would make this a winner.
I was reading how knowledge has become ubiquitous. The shear mass of information makes knowing factual information not that valuable. The reason I was thinking about this topic is because I thought I had discovered something completely new. But the problem with new ideas is that they are doubted, so after thinking I decided to use the ideas to make something. Now I have a little thing called Recipe Genius that is the only recipe calculator that actually tells you the recipe you entered.
Decided to try out a new stone in the grill. First test, of course, bread.
Made a simple dough for safety, about 30% rye and tossed it on. Always need to re-learn the technique every year, but I think this stone is going to work just fine.
Ru007's post on her Sourdough with Polenta, Sunflower seeds and Pepitas motivated me to try her recipe since it looked amazing! I didn't have any Polenta but thought that cornmeal might be close enough and with her encouragement, I went ahead and used cornmeal.
The plan was to double her recipe and be done but my starter was 100% hydration as opposed to 80% like hers and my math got wonky when I started using the baker's percentages instead of the actual weights after I had soaked my cornmeal. No matter, I am really happy how it turned out.
Procedure:
I originally planned to enter this for BBD #83 for a bread with special flour but I'm pressed for time and did not make it to the deadline so maybe it was really meant for BBD #84. Thanks to Susanne for a great theme of sandwich bread for this month: https://magentratzerl.net/2016/06/06/bread-baking-day-84-sandwichbrot/ and to Zorra for coming up with this great monthly challenge: http://www.kochtopf.me/bbd-breadbakingday.
I have been working on my standard bread recipe for about 2 years now, every week changing one parameter, I posted a question about different flours and milling techniques here and a response required me to write out my recipe and method, so i figured I would post it here too, as my first blog post
I am focusing on using local grains as much as possible, and i am lucky to have a great Bakery close by that mill their own flour that i can use
Wifely complement of the week: "What do you call this bread … so I know how to ask you to make it again?" Well, I couldn’t think of what to call it. I have made it before … sort of. It is based on Forkish’s “Pain de Campagne” from FWSY, except with a different flour mix, no commercial yeast and a different fermentation schedule. I’ve generally called such breads “in the spirt of …” whatever my starting point was.
Anyway, it is awfully good bread - very moist, wheaty and only mildly sour.
I had about 500g extra of my 100% hydration WW start (90% hard red winter wheat, 10% rye), and needed to bake a loaf for some friends, plus some for us. I wanted a bit more rise than I've been getting with 100% WW, so I used AP for half the flour bill (Reinhart's basic sourdough recipe). I'm really happy with how it came out.
edit: Crumb Shot
