Blog posts

Bagels are one of my most favorite things to eat.  They are so versatile, so forgiving; they go with anything — from smoked white fish to jam — and never complain.  You can eat them by themselves just fine or slather with butter or cream cheese, and you’ve got yourself a meal.

I find that spring cold fronts are very inspirational for my baking projects. One just blew in to the Front Range causing a rare full rainy day and another day of almost cold weather. So, since I was stuck at home waiting for various repair people, I thought of my long ago vow to try to make whole wheat croissants.

I decided to use the formula from “Advanced Bread and Pastry” (AB&P) for hand mixed croissants with poolish with the following modifications:

1. All of the final dough flour would be freshly ground white wheat flour,

I bought a large bucket of  Organic Hard Red Winter Wheat Berries from Honeyville, through Costco when they were on sale the other day. Since shipping was included, as well as the bucket and gamma seal lid, it came out to be a good buy.

I did not quite realize how large a bucket this was going to be, though I had a good idea that 40 pounds was going to give me a LOT of berries.

1/1/2014 - New Year’s Panettone - 2014

1/3/2014 - YW SD Spelt and White Whole Wheat Miche

1/5/2014 -  Saturday Night Pizza - 1/4/2014

This is the same dough we used for the Italian YW buns we will have tonight with put Italian hamburgers.  The only difference was this half of the dough was retarded overnight.  Here was the bun post if you want to know the method and recipe. 

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/38836/italian-yeast-water-buns

I bake 100% whole wheat pan loaves every week for my wife's lunchtime sandwiches.  The initial formula and process came from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads.  But the good Br. Juniper's cumbersome "epoxy" method and profligate CY habit begs for simplification.  My current alternative is soft, tasty, simple and seasonally robust enough to share with fellow Loafers.  My wife loves it.

We are having some Italian themed hamburgers tomorrow with some Italian sausage mixed with the beef, some gorgonzola cheese and green onion.  So we needed am Italian themed bun to go with it.

I've been in a porridge bread mood lately. The thing to note with porridge breads is that the water in the porridge can lead to a very wet and slack dough that can be hard to handle. Two months ago I tried to make an oat porridge bread. The dough was so wet that I wasn't able to shape it. After struggling with it I finally just scooped the dough into the brotform. After cold proofing, the dough stuck and I had to scrape it out of the form. The resulting baked loaf was very flat and very sad.

I was going to make Pain au Levain in the tartine style, 12% Prefermented flour, warm water in the levain, fermented for 8 hours, 1 hour autolyze. My target hydration was 81%. I poured the (warm) water for the autolyze and realized it felt... runny, not just wet (I routinely do bread in the 80-85% hydration range, but really wet. I looked at my paper where I had made the scaling calculations to make 3 boules and I found, upon double checking, that my dough was 100 percent hydration! 

Still in the process of fine tuning formulas we liked from last years markets.  This was from Week 9.  The only change made was to use a 3 build levain opposed to a 12 hour overnight levain.  I almost added some honey as well but opted to keep to fewer changes.  Next time honey will be added and the cracked wheat increased.  Then I think it'll go to the final formula books.