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On the day that we decided to have this extravaganza of eggs with Hollandaise, I was hoping to make Eggs Florentine. But we didn't have any spinach, so I decided to try using radish greens instead.

WHAT a brilliant idea!

So was the multigrain bread toasted for the base. And the bacon. And the chopped chives from the garden. And the radishes on the side.

You've got to try this combination and make "Eggs Fauxrentine"! (Hard boiled eggs* with bacon, radish greens and hollandaise garnished with fresh chives and radish roots).

* Instead of hard-boiling the eggs, you can gently poach them so the yolks are still soft. (Brrrr. Personally, I can't think of a more disgusting way to start the day, but there it is.)

Did I mention how great this is? The multigrain bread was particularly good as the base. Its nutty flavour is the perfect complement to the Hollandaise - especially this particular Hollandaise that had a little more lemon than some.

Yes, you really must try this!

Just a word of caution, make sure that the radish greens are young and tender rather than large and furry. A couple of days ago, I added some radish greens from a more mature bunch of radishes to a sandwich and it was just a little too much like having a bit of wool in the sandwich....

Please read more about radish greens:

• Eggs Fauxrentine (WHB#142: radish greens)

Oh yes, and here are our recipes for:

• Hollandaise sauce


• multigrain bread


• Eggs Fauxrentine

This is a "YeastSpotting" post. For details on how to be included in Susan's (Wild Yeast) weekly YeastSpotting round up, please read the following:

• wildyeastblog.com: YeastSpotting Archive

Light Rye & pumpernickel

Silesian Light Rye from Leader's "Local Breads" 

Silesian Light Rye crumb 

Pumpernickel crumb 

The Silesian Light Rye from Daniel Leader's "Local Breads" is even lighter than the usual "Jewish Sour Rye." It is a lovely bread that my wife and I always enjoy fresh or toasted.

 Leader's recipe calls for free form loaves, but I've usually made it in brotformen. I recently bought a couple of oval brotformen from SFBI, and this was their maiden voyage. The dough was quite extensible. It was hard to form the loaves short enough for the brotform, so they ended up sort of brot-deformed. 

Also, Leader calls for caraway seeds as an optional coating, but I like them in the bread, so I added them for the final minute of mixing.

Greenstein's pumpernickel is another favorite of mine. It is made with rye sour, pumpernickel flour, first clear flour and altus (stale rye bread, soaked in water, then wrung out and added to the dough). I use granular caramel coloring, which not only makes the color "black" but adds a bitter flavor without which this bread just doesn't taste "right" to me. This is a bread that makes good sandwiches, but my favorite way to eat it is spread with cream cheese , untoasted, as an accompaniment to scrambled eggs. That's my breakfast for tomorrow morning.

Dough for Nury's rye is retarding to bake tomorrow. I'm thinking of cutting some of the dough into squares to bake as rolls (hamburger buns?). I may set up another bread or two, if time allows.

Hey! I haven't baked for the past two weeks. I was getting kind of twitchy. I feel so much better now. :-)

David

How can I get into the forum conversation, without creating a new subject. I live in Devon, south west on the UK. Just recently found your site, because I have only recently started to bake. Hello everyone.

[DELETED BY AUTHOR]

I have been baking for about 2 years now. A check of my history shows that I have been on the road to enlightenment for 1 year and 23 weeks at TFL. I started with the BBA by Peter Reinhart and then his Whole Grain Breads. A few other books have caught my interest along the way and I noticed that Hamelman's "Bread" always got high marks but some thought he was really talking to the pro audience. I started to notice that many of the breads I liked had references to Jeffrey Hamelman so I thought I would take the plunge and see if I could keep up.

To my delight, I spent the afternoon browsing my new copy of Bread. This is a wonderful book. The recipes are easy to understand and well described. Yes there are larger volume recipes for a commercial bakery but in every case there is a 10% Home version for my uses. Every technique I have been curious about, every style of bread common in this part of the Artisan world is covered with clarity and detail. Many have options for enhancing the flavors or adding ingredients to change the personality.

I have already been baking some of these recipes so I know they work, not that that would be a serious question. I'm going to enjoy trying some of the more unusual breads in this collection and learning the special techniques.

We at TFL are generous with sharing our recipes and methods and that's a good thing. Being able to pick up this book and understand the author from the first page is saying something. Mr. Hamelman is an effective communicator. This is a well written book and I highly recommend anyone who desires to understand baking and the methods involved, purchase a copy or try to get your local library to get it for you. The Amazon link from the front page here will take you to a link where TFL will get credit for the sale.

I'll be posting the results of my experiments here.

Eric

Recently I have been trying to find breads that deliver great flavor with a nutty after taste and also look good. After I found Mark Sinclair's Back Home Bakery recipe for Multi Grain bread I have come to appreciate his experience and sense for selecting grains and methods. I have made 5 or 6 batches of the Multi Grain and it is just so full of flavor I can't get over it.

I thought I would give his Rustic White Bread a try since he had recently changed the formula to include a Biga or sponge and it's a simple recipe that only requires starting the process the evening before. The link to the new recipe is here "Mark's Rustic White"


The recipe calls for a rye sour starter which I have going most of the time. I just started feeding my white 100% starter with Rye whole flour and in a day or 2 it was very active. The recipe calls for 15 grams of starter and if you don't want to convert or don't have a starter at the moment you can use 15 grams or whole rye and 1/4th tsp of yeast instead.

After about 10 hours the biga is active and has doubled at least and I think any time after that you can mix the dough. Mark has you add 50 grams of Whole Wheat in the final dough which is one of the things that helps with the flavor. It seems like a small amount but believe me this is a very good white bread.

One thing I did change the second time I made this bread was to reduce the amount of salt slightly. He calls for 25 grams in 1050 G of flour which I could taste. It wasn't salty enough that any one else has tasted it however so maybe it's just me. I lowered the salt to 2% or 21g, it's a little thing.

The dough is soft and not quite ciabatta like so you need to use flour on the counter when you do the folds and move quickly. The 2 in the picture below are 1.5 and 1 pound (on the right) which I didn't get the end tucked in.  It does seal up well when I put the bottom side up in the banneton for proofing. The crumb is slightly ope, just enough that it's a great sandwich loaf also if you use a pan to bake in.

This is a simple white bread that has a complex and delicious flavor. The biga is a natural yeast so you do get a hint of mild sourdough taste.  I retarded a loaf in the banneton overnight and got a slightly more sour flavor which was nice.

I think this would be a good base for all sorts of things. Savory or raisin come to mind. This will be my "Daily Bread" for a while. It's easy and surprisingly full of after taste flavor.  

Mark's Rustic White

Here are some pictures of a batch of Hamelman's light rye that I made using a couple of dutch ovens simultaneously.  I did the entire mixing/kneading process by hand just to be able to get a good feel for the dough.  I doubled Hamelman's recipe and made 2 three pound loaves using 2 dutch ovens. We're talking "serious workout" by hand :-)  I also did a a couple of stretch and folds during bulk fermentation (20 minute intervals).  He calls for dividing the dough for a single batch into two 1 1/2 pound loaves but I decided, since I had doubled his recipe, I would bake 2 large 3 pound boules using 2 dutch ovens.  I used 2 large parchment lined skillets to proof the loaves under 2 large clear plastic bins (Walmart), then holding each end of the parchment I lifted each loaf into a preheated 500 deg. F. dutch oven (oven mittens highly recommended for this procedure), put on the lids on placed them into the oven and immediately lowered the oven temp. to 450 deg. F.  Baked them for 25 minutes, took off the lid and let them top brown for about 10-12 minutes.  Then shut off the oven and cracked the door for another five minutes before removing them from the oven.  At the end of the baking cycle the intermal temp. of the loaves was 205 deg. F.

I did not use carraway seeds in this interatation.  I wanted to compare Hamelman's light rye with Leader's Pierre Nury light rye to see the difference.  Hamelman's loaves turned out to be a very good without the carraway seeds.  But without the carraway seeds it didn't have the pronounced taste that you get with good Jewish rye, which the carraway seeds impart.  This recipe is slightly different from Leader's recipe, but very good.  I think Leader's Nury rye has a bit more flavor as a result of the process and the ovenight retardation in the fridge for 12-18 hours.  But overall they're both great recipes, only slightly different in taste and texture.  The Hamelman recipe is somewhat easier and quicker (uses a bit of yeast in the dough) but I still think it's near impossible to top the Nury rye.

Anyway, that's my experiment for the week. I recently bought a couple of bags of King Arthur whole grain with my last flour order, which have been sitting in the refrigerator waiting for some "action".  So, later this week I'm going to make some whole grain.  Haven't done the soaker thing yet but after seeing Eric Hanner's beautiful whole grain loaves he recently posted I'm anxious to try Mark Sinclair's recipe.

P.S. The memory stick on my camera filled up and I couldn't get a photo of the crumb (yeah, likely story) but it was nice and open. Not as nice and open, with large holes, as Leader's Nury rye but still a very nice crumb.

Hamelman's light rye baked in a dutch oven: Hamelman's light rye no. 1

Hamelman's light rye baked in a dutch oven: Hamelman's light rye no. 2

Hamelman's light rye baked in a dutch oven: Hamelman's light rye no. 3

Hamelman's light rye baked in a dutch oven: Hamelman's light rye no. 4

3 loaves

Sponge

512 gram AP

608 gram water

68 gram honey

4.5 gram active dry yeast (1 tspn)

-combine all until very smooth

-ferment 1 hour at room temp, 8 to 24 chilled.

as some rather large cracks were forming last night, i decided to pull out the sand.

and it didn't collapse, explode or catch on fire.

i spent an hour or so patching the cracks and then put a pan of charcoal inside to help with the drying process. tonight i'll light a small fire.

here i am putting the mud layer over the sand form:

here are the pics of the cracks after one hot day of drying. i think i didn't use enough sand in my mud mixture:

another view of the cracks:

the oven without the sand form, after patching:

inside!:

next: the insulation layer of mud and straw. so far so good!

from gardener to baker:

We (4 of us) met in 2005 Master Gardener class and continue volunteer working in our community using our garden knowledge and also learning at the same time.
Two of us are experienced bakers and the other two never bake bread before. We start our bread baking journey last week, the first bread we did was the no-knead bread, it come out perfect. These two new bakers are really interest to continue their journey of bread making. Yesterday, we used three different kinds of method to bake bread and see the result of the breads. From left to right, the high rise bread is used by bread machine and set on dough setting. Second one by mixer (Kitchen Aid), and the last two are by kneading and French fold. The students did the kneading and folding of the dough, they learn to feel the texture of the dough, check the dough with window panel, and score the dough before baking, baking the bread and cooling. The rolls above we learn to braid and row into shapes. We had a wonderful time and a great baking day.

siuflower

siuflower