JonJ's blog

Have never made a bad olive bread. And the same is also true for breads made with blueberries! And when blueberry is in the dough the bread gets a beautiful painterly effect.

Joy Ride coffee has a YouTube channel with what, for me, are quintessential quarantine videos. Videos often have a transporting sound track, and the visuals usually include beautiful tracking shots of Romanian scenery which have transported me out of lockdown. His quest for lacy crumb has been quite 'infectious', if you'll excuse the covid pun.

So, I was inspired by Dan's post to try a new drug, errr... ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in my baking. And I also did a little bit of reading up on this site and saw that Doc. Dough recommended a much lower amount than was used in Dan's original post - 20-30 ppm of ascorbic acid.

I'm loving making breads with this interesting wholemeal - Eureka Wholemeal. It has bits of whole kernels, or I guess you would say cracked kernels, in addition to the usual bran (and germ!). I think it behaves more like a white bread flour in my baking, the dough has nice strength and doesn't seem to be hampered by the bran and tastes very nice.

So, there was this thing that Don said the other day in a TFL blog post that really got me thinking. Think it was a quote from Jennifer Lathams about tweaks to the Tartine bakery method, and the thing that was said was "[...] longer includes the leaven in the autolyse and salt is not added until enough water has been incorporated to make a very extensible dough."

I think I've been doing bassinage wrong! I usually try it after the salt is already in the dough.

The last few loaves have been an experiment in varying the flour that is used together with a white bread flour base. All of these breads are 80% white bread flour; the experiment is in varying the remaining 20% to be either chakki atta (Indian stoneground wholewheat), unsifted wholewheat (without germ), wholegrain spelt, semolina or rye.

Like many bakers here I've been strongly influenced by Full Proof baking. The basic open crumb recipe has worked very well for me in the past, and the detail described in Kristen's method has allowed me to get a feel for where to push the envelope with the breads that I make, although, of course this method is not for a lazy baker!

The community bake provided the excuse to bake a simple ciabatta recipe that a friend has been baking for years.

It is the exact opposite of my recent sourdough breads in almost every dimension: instant yeast, has no autolyse, uses sugar, is super rapid, no wholewheat, etc etc. Even for an instant recipe it is fairly minimalist eschewing the biga or couche or anything that would complicate the life of the home baker for whom the original recipe was intended.

Sometimes it is fun to try something radically different, and it reminded me of what was possible in bread baking.

Eva, of Bake Street has got an effusively charming recipe for a sourdough coconut bread that includes both coconut water and fresh (or rehydrated) coconut in the dough. It makes an excellent, and interesting bread. Having just made it, I can see why she says it is a bread to return to again and again.