Blog posts

My wife asked me to bake a loaf of bread for some neighbors who recently had a new baby. She made meatballs.

It was sort of last-minute and I had just picked up some el-cheapo store brand AP flour (we haven't yet made our St. Patty's day soda bread and I was planning on using AP like I always do) so I took out some ripe starter (that I had refreshed after my last bake 2 weeks earlier) and decided to try a different recipe ... Reinhart's Pain de Campagne.

• 527g BF 37%
• 385g AP 27%
• 200g Rye 14%
• 142g T85 10%
• 350g Levain (12% flour 12% water)
• 1022g Water 72%
• 28g Salt 2%

1 hr autolyse

2 min slap and fold

15 min rest

1 min slap and fold

3 hr bulk ferment with a set of stretch and folds every half hour for the first hour and a half

scale/preshape/shape 2+ hr proof

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

[URL=http://s1292.photobucket.com/user/Steelhead503/media/Baking/32714Bake1_zps1666efcf.jpg.html][/URL]

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.