I don't have the book in front of me, but there's a single sentence in FWSY where Forkish describes serving a traditional French version of pain au chocolat in his bakery: Not the chocolate croissant with which I was familiar, but instead a simple slice of bread with a swipe of butter and a sprinkle of dark chocolate.
That's what I served to my coworkers today, after a very long week of weather-related stress.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a coworker that I was interested in acquiring spent grains from local breweries. I'd read a few different sources on baking with spent grains, and a few were sort of intimidating (my apartment is tiny, so I don't know where I'd lay them out to dry!), but some just described dumping them in with the dough. Appealing to my experimental spirit.
A few days later, she appeared in my doorway with a plastic bag full of wet spent grains from Big Boss Brewing Company right here in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Inspired by necessity: I had a lot of pesto, and I hate wasting food.
Rather than mixing the pesto into the dough, I decided to create a simple sourdough, and then spread the pesto onto the pre-shaped loaves just before final shaping, to create a sort of "filled" effect. Pretty good results!
Ingredients:
350 g AP flour
100 g whole wheat flour
350 g water
100 g ripe white starter
11 g salt
10 g sugar
5 g toasted wheat bran
5 g toasted wheat germ
Method:
I'm still on this 5% levain, 80% hydration kick! Both of these loaves built on the formula I referred to in my previous post.
The first was inspired by Dave's recent rosemary and black olive loaf. I just added a tablespoon of fresh rosemary, 60 g black olives, and 60 g green olives:
Phew. I've baked for a number of friends over the last few days! Many of them just wanted or needed a very generalized designation of "bread" for events, so I was able to experiment a bit with sourdough baking.
Disclaimer: All ciabatte described are "pre-dabrownman-flip-recommendation," so don't judge me too harshly...I still haven't acquired a second pastry scraper, so all ciabatta experiments are on a temporary hold...
Saturday, I baked some whole wheat ciabatte and a few small simple batards.
As it turns out, the only bread style that could tear me away from my preoccupation with the intricacies of batard shaping and scoring is a style that shines brightest with the least possible handling. The process of guiding the ciabatta from bulk container to baking stone is uniquely challenging and satisfying.
Many loaves for friends this weekend! My most consuming experiments were with 1) loooooong room temperature autolyse, and 2) pate fermentee as all of the leaven in a loaf. Unfortunately, I don't have crumb pictures for all loaves. The plight of the gifted loaf.
For this dark chocolate chunk levain, I did a 12-hour autolyse of only flour and water, added levain at 5% of the total weight, carried out a 12-hour room-temperature bulk fermentation, retarded for 12 more hours, shaped and proofed in the refrigerator for another 10 hours:
That's what my closest coworker calls me, and she's probably not wrong. Ever since falling in love with baking bread, I've found myself unconsciously (it really is unconsciously!) seeing the world around me through the lens of bread-creation. I'm not TRYING to glance at the wicker baskets on friends' desks, only drift out of the conversation to imagine how they would make perfect brotforms.
