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I've not posted much, but I've still been baking, and I think my re-engagement with this site has encouraged me to try a few new things. Most recently, I made a variant of Jeffrey Hammelman's excellent Flaxseed Bread, which contains 60% rye. I've altered his recipe a bit, using whole rye instead of medium rye, increasing the hydration to 80% (to account for the extra absorbtion of whole rye) and used a rye starter at 100%, simply because that's how I keep mine. The recipe may be found in the handbook here.

Usually, I just let the sourdough do its thing, and don't add any commercial yeast. But, I was under some time pressure here, so I went ahead and added 3/4 tsp of instant yeast like Hammelman. Wow! I couldn't tell any difference in flavor, which was hearty with a good tang, but I got quite a bit more volume. As for the rise, Hammelman calls for 80 degrees. Well, it was about 64 in my house, so I just threw a cup of boiling water in the bottom of a cooler, stood the dough on an upturned bowl and closed it up. The bulk rise took about 45 minutes and the final rise was just over an hour (I intended to go just one hour, but got stuck on a conference call, as I work from home -- augggggh!).

Here's a picture. As you can see, I sprinkled sesame seeds on the top right after shaping.

Earlier in the week, I decided to give the Sullivan Street Potato Pizza from Glazer's Artisan Baking Across America a shot. You think you've worked with a wet dough? Trust me, until you've made the dough for the crust in this recipe, you've not worked with wet dough. The hydration on this puppy is something like 104%! It's a batter, and since I don't own a stand mixer (the recipe says to leave it in the mixer for 20 minutes) I went the food processor route, a la Peter Reinhart, and let it churn away for 45 seconds.

Did it work? I've no idea. But the dough (if you want to call it that) was smooth, and I was able to spread it over the pan.

It was a good potato pizza, but a little too starchy for my taste what with bread and potatoes together. Not sure I'll make it again.

I also decided to give Ponsford's Ciabatta from this same book another go, which has previously given me fits. As usual, probably because my house is so cold (below 60 at night sometimes) it took about 36 hours instead of 24 for the biga to develop. But this time around, I actually got a decent loaf of bread. Truth be told, though, I thought the poolish ciabattas I've made before tasted better. I don't see much advantage in using so little yeast (1/4 tsp of yeast is disolved into a cup of water -- then 1/2 tsp of that water is used to leaven the biga!) for the home baker, though I can see how it would be a big advantage for a professional baker to be able to let it ripen 24 hours.

Finally, I made a couple of Colombia batards, also from Glazer's book. MountainDog turned me on to this bread, for which I'm very grateful. Clearly, as bulbous as these loaves are, I should have let them proof another 30-60 minutes, but odd-looking bread for dinner is better than day-old bread the next day (well, most of the time). They tasted lovely, as always.

And the innerds, which, had I waited another 45 minutes, would have likely been more open. But, alas, the soup would have had no accompaniment.

These are made using half the recipe given at http://northwestsourdough.com .  I have made these before and they are very good with plenty of nooks and crannies with a mild sourdough flavor.

These are baked in the oven for a few minutes after grilling!

Half recipe made 18 muffins! 

Sylvia

Hi,

I just wanted to share a successful (provided you are VERY fond of bananas) experiment: the "bananas only" bread.

This is not a proper recipe, but more of a method.

Take any wholewheat or dinkel rolls recipe (if you are using a sourdough process, follow standard procedures until you reach the "baking day" or "final dough" stage). Then substitute ALL liquid in the recipe with equal volume of mashed, ripe bananas. Omit any sweeteners or fats included in the recipe - the bananas are moist and sweet enough - but do include salt.

Bake according to recipe.

For variation, try one or several of the following additions:

ground cinnamon, ground cardamom, nuts, seeds, raisins, apricots

Some suggestions for toppings when enjoying these rolls are:

simply good quality butter

peanut butter

Turkish youghurt

cream cheese

blue cheese

Enjoy!

A Sesame Street clip from the 90s about making homemade bread:

I made a couple loaves of French bread and also tried Dan Lepard's Onion Bay Leaf Bread. 

Subtle but quite good

Here's a photo of some whole rye and whole spelt small breads that I pulled from the oven this morning. They're made from approx. 50% high extraction wheat flour and 25% each of whole rye and whole spelt. The rye comes from a ripe sourdough. To shape them, I form the dough into a batard that I cut crosswise into eight or nine equal pieces. One of the "cut" sides are brushed with water and gently placed in a seed mix. They're flipped and put onto a pan. Delicious and filling, with a savory, "earthy" flavor.

Next up is the spelt bread from Suas' Advanced Bread and Pastry. This was a great dough to work with, 90% spelt and 10% whole spelt, gently mixed, and bulk fermented for three hours. The dough is mixed very carefully, and some dough strength is developed over three folds during the bulk fermentation. 33% of the flour comes from a spelt poolish, so the dough feels quite slack and extensible all the way to final shaping. Suas writes that there's no pre-shaping for these, the dough is simply cut in two, and placed as "rectangles" on "well dusted linen". I think the dough behaved remarkably like a ciabatta dough, even though the hydration is only 68%. Quite fragile and sticky, but still smooth and a joy to work with. A fragrant, great bake that had a tremendous oven spring. The crust is very crispy, and there's a slight nutty flavor (probably coming from the poolish and the inherent "spelt" flavor). I made two of these rustic loaves, and they're well worth the effort! Advanced Bread and Pastry is a book I'm getting more and more fond of.

Finally, slightly branching out ("The Fresh Cake" anyone?): Apple breakfast cake, also from Suas. Lots of apples, walnuts and raisins. Yum!! Probably the best apple cake I've tasted... I picked this one, as it was the least intimidating of Suas' cake recipes ;-)

I tried something different this weekend, Duivekater. I read about it a while ago in a newspaper and last year we visited the Open Air Museum and received a recipe. It is 'special occasian bread', with Germanic roots, alltough I found a link to the French Hugenotes as well.

You can find the bread in paintings of Jan Steen at the Rijksmuseum, in this particular painting it is leaning against the wall. 

I am not too happy with the result. The dough did not rise as much as expected, I did not follow the recipe for 100% (e.g. warm butter instead of cold). Brioche or Zopf is much softer then this; it tastes more cakelike. I tried Pretzels as well, but failed there with the lye mixture (too high a percentage). The 'simple' bread (full wheat, slow rise, boule) turned out nice. Within a day all bread was gone....

Any tips on a better Duivekater are welcome. I will translate the recipe on request.

Cheers,
Jw.

The majority of us have tried different steaming techniques..professional steamers, ice cubes in the bottom of the oven, ice cubes in cast iron pan, spraying the loaves, spraying the oven walls, drip pans, pouring water into hot pans, pans with water heated during the preheat and combos of these techniques.

I have found that heating 1/4" hot water in a metal pan during the preheat gives me an oven full of steam by baking time, so much so that I have to be careful and keep my face away from the oven door when I open it to avoid getting a steam burn. Even after loading the oven, a few minutes later I see steam coming out the vent.

I recently tried the suggested method of pouring 3/4 cup hot water into a sheet pan that had been preheated with the oven. I thought even better was to use boiling water. Quite frankly, it seemed that I hardly had any steam compared to the way I had been doing it.

Does the temperature of the water poured into the pan make any difference? If I had used just hot water vs boiling would there have been more steam? It looked like it evaporated almost as fast as I poured it.

I do remember (I think) that someone said what was being produced was vapor not steam by most of these methods. 

Betty

One caveat for all new bakers..If you have glass doors, be sure to cover with a dry towel when pouring water to avoid cracking the window.

I've been baking various breads with seeds. When Lindy tried Hamelman's "Sourdough Seed Bread" it sounded so good. It has 92% bread and 8% rye flours and uses a white flour starter. I have a whole wheat starter so used JMonkey's version from the new TFL Handbook, the 'Three-Seed Sourdough Bread' which uses  80% white and 20% whole wheat flours. Both recipes use sunflower, sesame, and flaxseeds. My bread came out tasting very good. See node 10286. 

But I wanted a bread with more whole wheat flour, so I tried R.L. Beranbaum's 'Sourdough Wheat Bread with Seeds' from "The Bread Bible". It has 50% each of white and whole wheat flours and a whole wheat starter. I followed the recipe fairly exactly with expanding/feeding the whole wheat stiff sourdough starter as described, used the five seeds she used (pumpkin, sesame, sunflower, polenta -- I used medium coarse grind cornmeal -- and flaxseeds.) The fermentation and proofing times went along well, I shaped two batards, the oven rise was nice, the browning seemed good, and the aroma heavenly. 

  sourdough wheat with seeds     sourdough wheat with lame scoring

  sourdough wheat crumb  

I've been trying new scoring after reading dmsynder's tutorial and have been better with my slashing. In the top photo, the left loaf was slashed with a bread knife and the right with a lame. I wish we got more times to slash per loaf. I want more practice - just means we get to bake more bread, right? 

Overall, I liked the taste of the three seeds alone rather than the five, but the whole wheat flavor of RLB's better.  

Anet  

This is my first attempt at a Ciabatta bread.  The motherdough was aged 3 days under refrigeration before using.  The recipe came from NWSD site  I followed recipe up to the shaping!  I changed it to one I thought simpler and just as effective!  It must have tasted ok as my husband ate nearly half the loaf before I could get some photos...it was still slightly warm when sliced : (   the crumb had a nice creamy taste

I added some extra hydration to the dough.

Sliced it into 4 pieces...I also had cut the original recipe in half!

The front two were dimpled before baking and the back two were not dimpled! 

Crumb and crust!

Sylvia