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It has been a while since I last posted here on TFL. I have been quite busy, and there was much in my life to take care of, that I hadn’t had spare time to follow the wonderful bread adventures of TFL members.

As some of you may remember, I had missed my chocolate class back in January this year, and planned for a makeup class in order to complete my amateur pastry course. Yes, I’ve finally done it. Enjoyable, could have been. Messy?, you bet, but it is over now. One more theoretical exam in baked goods, and I’ll be officially done.

Since last summer when I first tried making pizza on my outdoor grill using unglazed quarry tiles, I have been itching to try again.  This time I decided to do a simple Margherita pizza so the crust would be the star of the show.  Homemade tomato sauce, bocconcini, basil.  Crust had organic stone ground whole wheat with a touch of rye.  The two medium sized pizza's turned out nicely, with a nice sweet tone in the crust due to the whole wheat flour.  I tend to like thin crust pizzas, with a larger cornicione (outer edge crust).

A good friend of mine got a chance to work with a very reputable baker and brought me this formula for PDC as he called it.  It was his favorite of the loaves there and I had to give it a go.  Let's start with the fact that I misread my formula and came up short 600 g of H20.  I noticed the dough could take some more hydro and got 200 g in at the mix time but after re-reading the formula I noticed my botch.  So the dough should have been 82% hydration but ended at 73% which is a ways off the mark.  

In my never ending crusade to figure out how to open up my crumb, I have tinkered with every formula, mixing, folding, and shaping variable, with some moderate success, but never consistent.  Yesterday I tried something new: I put my stone on the bottom of the oven, above the flame, where I normally put it for pizza, at 490 degrees, and voilá! 

I have been wanting to try Khlaid's recipe for some time. This is a fantastic and fun bread to make.   I baked one loaf yesterday, with some modifications. I made just a few changes, most notably the inclusion of cous cous rather than the coarse semolina in his original recipe.  (The link to his original recipe is below).   I also reduced the rye by 50 grams in the final dough and increased the bread flour, added a bit more water and used course rather than fine corn meal.

This levain was originally made to have pizza on Friday night but it was put off until Saturday so it spent an unplanned day in the fridge. It didn’t seem to mind much though.  This YW levain was different in that Lucy added a pinch of ADY to it and some of the left over 15% sifted out portion from the Plotziade bake on Friday.

The wife's more plain pie.

I based my formula on Reinhart's. I used a Biga and let it proof in the fridge for 20 hours then mixed by hand. S&F every 30 min for 2 hours, bench rest for 30 minutes then shape and bench proofed for one hour.

Baked on pizza stone with steam at 480F

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Lucy was really depressed this week.  It was the first time in along time my Baking Apprentice 2nd Class couldn’t come up with her own recipe for the Friday Bake.  She was also more than a little surprised that the Plotziade Olympic Bread was not the full flavored pumpernickel of her Black Forest youth .

While I'm raising my first sourdough starter, it won't be ready for another week or so,

I thought I'd try a loaf with a little Rye and Whole wheat.

My "formula" was:

40g Rye flour

40g Whole Wheat flour

420g KA Bread flour

350g water

10g salt

1/4 tsp dry active yeast

-Autolyse for 30 min