alfanso's blog

Recently I began to try out a rye levain breads, and having leftover rye starter I figured I'd continue on that riff.  I cleave off a bit at a time from the remaining rye starter ball and still have a few bakes left in the slowly diminishing ball.  For the liquid levain, I used a recently refreshed stiff levain stater.

Not to be confused with the Lansky-Luciano Gang.

I was okay at best with my first try at the Jewish Sour Rye bread the other day, and learned a lot.  But I was anxious to get back Jack and Do It Again.  And there were lessons learned, which I applied here.

I made the rye sour from some of the leftover ball of rye starter from the other day.  20g along with 375g rye and 375g water.  One stage build - 5 1/2 hours to complete.

Lessons applied:

A recent comment by fotomat1 led me to the link for PiPs Fighting Gravity blog entry.  I hadn’t seen it before as I had not yet  known of TFL until a number months later.  I was enchanted not simply due to the photographic skill of the pictures, but specifically the photogenic images of his batards.  They struck me as being as beautiful a set of batards as I have ever seen.  So...it was time to give it a go.

Not to be confused with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Gang.
 
Having no experience with rye sour levains, I thought it was high time to get on the stick and rustle me up a dose.  I think the idea came to me after seeing Varda’s recent comment and quest for NY rye.  So off I went.  

Not quite the same as a comb-over.  Back from my northern voyage where I was able to handily empty out the freezer from the warehoused batards for the in-laws, I had a hankering' to make a batch of Ken's Bakery's Country Blonde batards.  (vs. the FWSY version)

Retarded fully shaped and couched, these rested comfortably in the refrigerator for about 18 hours.  

Well, really to the In Laws.  I've been baking up and warehousing a few different breads to pack in my bags as treats for them.  They've been documented here before, but here's the lot of them:

1 dmsnyder style son of SJSD batard (sesame seeds added just for kicks!)

1 Forkish bakery style Raisin Pecan Whole Wheat Levain batard

1 FWSY Field Blend #2 Levain batard

Now enamored with stiff levains (until the next thrill comes along), this adventure had me bake a batch of SJSD dough.  But instead of as baguettes, I am also somewhat enamored with batards these days (until the next thrill comes along).

I'm running a cycle of breads now, warehousing a few different styles to pack in my suitcase for my In-laws at the end of the month.  As they've been the beneficiary of baguettes in the past and I've been shaping batards recently, I thought that I'd bake up a bunch and store them in deep freeze until the journey.

The way that I’ve been doing levain builds recently has been addition by subtraction, a three stage build, started out more or less as such (for ex:):

“My recent straying from baguettes to batards is a mere bagatelle, a minor distraction”, Alfanso said when recently quoted in the World Baking Journal**.