albacore's blog

I have been struggling with crumpets for a while. I've tried several recipes and always ended up with blind crumpets (no holes).

So I gave up for a while but not liking to be beaten, I decided to have another go. This time I tried Andy's (Ananda) TFL recipe from way back.

To my surprise I had success! Nice tasty crumpets with open holes, crispy exterior and good flavour. One thing that stands out with Andy's recipe is the large amount of yeast used - 6%! But it does seem to work.

Vienna Bread

While looking through my copy of "Manna" for a particular recipe, I chanced upon the chapter entitled "Vienna Bread". Vienna bread became very popular throughout most of Europe towards the end of the 19th century, with the arrival of roller milled white flour, compressed  yeast and steam injected ovens.

It is characterised by a soft, fairly tight crumb and a thin crispy crust and is usually made as rolls or small batons.

We had some voracious bread eaters staying over Christmas (always nice to see your bread consumed enthusiastically!), so I needed to replenish supplies rapidly.

I decided upon a variation of Gavin's 100% freshly ground WW loaf, for which he kindly provided the recipe here.

Two rye mashes for upcoming Russian bread bakes. Both done together in the sous-vide bath.

First is a mash for Riga bread with homemade rye malt and T997 light rye; 2.5hrs at 66C:

Second made with Russian solod and home ground rye with the course bran sifted off; 5 hrs at 66C:

Now that winter's here (even though they call it autumn still), the wood fired oven is all wrapped up in its waterproof coat and our pizza is made in the kitchen oven.

Lately I've been making pizza in teglia alla Romana as I think it works better than pizza Napolitana in a domestic oven.

I was reading how UK bakers, especially in Scotland and Ireland, used to bake their batch loaves in wooden frames. That's right - the wooden frame goes INTO the oven! Originally, the bakers didn't even use a frame - it was just lengths of heavy timber inserted into the oven defining a rectangle with the dough pieces inside the rectangle. Interestingly, these lengths of wood were called "upsets".

I was very taken with HungryShots/Denisa's recent blog post on her 40% spelt SD loaf and her excellent description of the evolution of her Mk IV version.

So when I found a bag of Doves Farm white spelt flour in a local shop, I thought it was time to give it a try.

Denisa had done all the hard work, so I changed very little:

I recently saw the Nussknacker (eng: Nutcracker) on Dietmar Kappl's Instagram feed and decided straight away that I wanted to bake it.  It comprises a tasty mix of wholemeal spelt and coarse rye flours, leavened with a rye sour and packed full of roasted hazelnuts, almonds, sunflower and hemp seeds.

I chanced upon this recipe for wholemeal rolls on Abel Sierra's wordpress blog. I liked the look of them and thought I would give them a try.

Sadly, Abel's blog no longer exists, but it can still be accessed via The Wayback Machine.

Here is a screenshot with my English translation of the ingredient list:

I decided to do a classic English 4hr sponge:

440g BF 13%

389g H2O

3.1g diastatic malt flour

2.65g IDY

DT 26C

This is the second time I've made these buns and they really are very tasty. I was so pleased with the first batch that I used exactly the same recipe second time around.

The recipe is courtesy of chef Rick Stein. I watched him make the buns in an episode of his recent Cornwall series. I more or less followed his recipe, but, as always, did a few tweaks: