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Pane Valle Maggia, ver. 2

March 7 , 2014

Last month, I made Pane Valle Maggia, inspired by Josh's “Pain Maggiore.” It was a very good bread, but I wanted to make it again using freshly milled whole wheat flour. Also, I thought it would be improved by pre-fermenting the rye component. So, I made both changes for today's bake. The Total Dough ingredients were basically unchanged.

For a long time I was scared of using yeast. Although I am still a novice at bread making, the fear has subsided. In addition to learning bread making, I've always wanted to tackle laminated and enriched doughs. Viennoserie is like a happy place where cakes and bread meet. For some strange reason I find Viennoserie less scary than bread. With bread, there is no place to hide my mistakes. It's flour and water (and salt and yeast). With Viennoiserie, mistakes are still noticeable, but the butter, sugar, eggs and milk make those mistakes more palatable.

The girls really liked this week’s YW Italian bread we baked using a take in the poolish calzone recipe by replacing the poolish with YW.  That will be a tough bread to beat but We though we would give it a go at using nearly the same recipe and replacing the YW with SD this time. 

Both these loaves are based on the basic formula and technique from Tartine Bread.  The formula for both:

500 grams unbleached white flour

375 grams water

100 grams leaven (100% hydration, white flour)

10 grams salt

From left to right, top to bottom

Here's a yeasted white bread, my basic white loaf bread, I added one cup roasted white onions, 1/4 cup scallions, green parts only sliced thin, one tablespoon parsley, and a half teaspoon dried dill weed.

This recipe makes one standard loaf, put once again I quartered it for four mini boules, two to bake now, two wrapped in plastic for later use.

Proofed, egg washed, scored and saltd

With this kind of salt

Here they are, straight out of the oven

Here's the close up shot

Here's the crumb shot

Baked another Tartine loaf with increased hydration, looking for the perfect crumb (which, of course, can never be achieved!)  We had this loaf for lunch with my husband's sister and her husband, Bob the baker from England.  They leave today, so we enjoyed lunch outside in the California sun.  Bob gave the bread passing marks. They return to Liverpool (and a bit of rain) this afternoon.  They did have rain here and in Las Vegas during their visit.

This is a 100% whole wheat sourdough bread with lots of nuts and seeds mixed in (walnuts, almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds).

I have recently taken a personal chef type endeavor, not like a gourmet chef, where I show up with wonderful ingredients and fix a 5 course meal. It's more of a I show up in your kitchen and fix dinner out of whatever I find in your kitchen. It's a hey everybody, grandma's going to come and fix us dinner kind of a thing.

Having benefited from the collective wisdom of other Fresh Loafers for a while, I thought it was time to make a contribution. This bread is a sourdough adaptation of a straight-dough whole-wheat multigrain loaf with honey and dried malt that my much-loved late father-in-law used to make with a bread machine.

Okay, I couldn't resist, I know its corny.

I've now baked twice the Black Hamster Bread recipe from Ketex, to me this is a Schwarzbrot or black bread.

The first attempt was problematic -

Too much yeast, this coupled with the starter and the bread began rising too quickly

Hydration level was way overboard - as I cut into the bread the knife had streams (yuck!)

I wasn't happy with the high/fast bake time, I felt this contributed to the wet doughy first trial

It seems ever since Sylvia posted her fine calzones we haven’t had pizza night but have calzone night instead.  We like both my daughter loves seasoned ricotta and that is a calzone ingredient if there ever was one.  You could say that our calzones are a cross between lasagna and pizza.