Blog posts

Lucy finally got back to her bread and butter with a high percent whole grain multi-grain bread.   It has been a while but this one may prove she hasn’t lost her touch - if she ever had one.

I'm always amazed how much the acid in the levain leaches out the color becoming almost white compared to the autolyse which has exactly the same grain in the same proportions at nearly the same hydration..

Organic Sourdough

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Baking a loaf of bread for a buddy, so he can have roast beef and swiss cheese sandwiches.  I thought a beer bread would be tasty.

Here is a picture of the final proof.

Formula:

500g bread flour

350g dark beer

50g water

13g salt

1/3 tsp dry active yeast

30 min autolyze

30 min stretch and fold, 4x

1 hr bulk rise

overnight cold ferment

come to room temp 2 hrs

shape boule

proof 1 hr

This weekend I went ahead and made some Einkorn loaves by adjusting K. Forkish's 50% WW Biga bread recipe. The results were fan-tas-tico! 

My first Einkorn loaf using 100% of this ancient grain turned out very nice, yet a little dense with not so much rise. I'm gonna work my way back to that loaf and try to perfect it, but first I wanted to play around with different blends.

I think my 17-day old starter is ready for prime time. I baked this San Francisco Country Sourdough using Glenn's formula.

In my opinion, the formula for 5-Grain Levain by itself fully justifies the price of Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread. This is just one of several formulas for multigrain breads in the book. I believe I have made all the levain-based ones, and I haven't found one that wasn't scrumptious. I think my very favorite is actually the one that uses a rye sour for leavening. 

   One of my good baking friends from "Brot & Bread" and The Fresh Loaf posted her version of the Plotziade challenge which is to use the same exact %'s of flour and salt to build a bread.  The kicker is you can use yeast, a starter, biga, etc. and any hydration you would like.  You can see Karin's amazing bread here,  Below is some more information I borrowed form Karin's post (I hope she won't sue me for plagiarism :))

Spelt, honey, and walnuts seem to like each other's company, as demonstrated very happily by this bake. It's true that the scoring leaves a lot to be desired and the loaves could have come out of the oven sooner. Regardless, the crumb was moist and the taste more delicate than the ingredients might suggest, just right for sandwiches in fact.

This loaf was made with Gold Medal white whole wheat flour. It was baked in an oversize loaf pan (10"x 5") with the final baked weight at 2 pounds. The dough was quite slack (78% absorption). In the past, I have had less oven spring with stone ground flour (being fairly coarse in nature), but lately the volume has improved. Re-mix time has been reduced to 3minutes 45 seconds, with good results. And the flavor of the stone ground flour is superior to fine ground (in my opinion).

Bob

Hello one and all.

Just thought i'd share some pictures of the bread i've been churning out of my home kitchen. 

Having a day job is annoyingly getting in the way of my new bakery venture. But I work for a college, so in the summer I'll hopefully be baking full time in a real oven in a premises. But until then, I'm like a micro bakery I suppose. Anyway, here are those pictures:

Mini 'Field loaf'

Field Loaf for deliveries.