Benito's blog

These are my first go at an all white flour 10% protein, in this case from Quebec, that is sourdough and no commercial yeast.  After the good results I had with the sesame semolina sourdough baguettes without commercial yeast I decided I needed to give it a go again but with the Quebec white flour.  These are essentially Abel’s baguettes au levain without the commercial yeast and hydration increased to 70% during bassinage and finally encrusted with poppy seeds.  So I’ll just call them Yorkville Baguettes since that is the neighborhood that I live in ?

This is my first ever cinnamon raisin bread if you can believe it.  It was feeling very autumnal here in Toronto when I started working on this loaf, but today it will reach a high of 26ºC and feel very summer like.  I followed the general outline for this bread on The Perfect Loaf by Maurizio’s, but used my usual dough development with a bench letterfold, lamination then coil folds.

Total Formula

Bread Flour 66% 290 g 

Whole Red Fife Flour 34% 152 g includes levain 

Total flour = 442 

Cinnamon 1%

Raisins 20% 

This time I used yellow miso which is milder in flavour than the more assertive red miso I usually use, only because red miso was unavailable the last time I bought miso.  Also my homemade miso is far from ready yet needing many more months to ferment.  The furikake I bought for this bake didn’t have the bonito flakes in it so instead was a simpler seaweed and sesame seed.  The furikake is so delicious with just steamed rice and that is what I usually eat it with.

Back at the same sesame semolina sourdough baguettes but with some changes to try to improve the crumb. So I made some changes in the hopes of achieving a more open crumb. The first significant change I made was to delete the commercial yeast altogether, this change was made by accident and wasn’t planned as removing the commercial yeast wasn’t something that I thought would improve the crumb.  In fact, I thought that the addition of commercial yeast was part of what was giving my an open crumb.

I’ve wanted to make a mashed potato bread for some time and just got around to it.  This has 25% butter mashed potatoes, 82% hydration, 9% prefermented flour.  I did an overnight levain build which grew to over 3x and was used young just as the dome started to flatten.  A saltolyse was done also overnight, both starting in the fridge to slow things down.  The mashed potatoes were added to half the dough after Rubaud mixing when the levain was added.  Then was fully mixed with slap and folds on the counter.

We loved the Kamut flavour in the last loaf I baked last week but wanted a stronger flavour from the Kamut.  This week I decided to inch up they percentage of Kamut to 30%.  Still being unsure about going higher because I wasn’t sure how thirsty Kamut is and what effect on the gluten it would have.  I increased the hydration to 78% with the assumption that more whole Kamut would make the dough thirstier.  I still think that the Kamut adds a lot of extensibility to the dough and doesn’t seem that thirsty compared to other whole grains.

We LOVED the blueberry rhubarb galette I made last week so much I had to make it as a double crust pie this week to bring to friends.  Because of the pandemic we haven’t seen our best friends since 2019.  We are allowed to have a bubble of 10 people but haven’t really taken advantage of this so far.  

This is my second go at baking a 20% Kamut sourdough. I wanted to try an overnight levain build and saltolyse (autolyse with salt included) because it would allow me to get the bake done on the same day as the mix while still including a short cold retard.  I think this actually works out quite well and I may continue to do this int he future.  I once again used the aliquot jar and ended bulk fermentation when the aliquot jar showed a rise of 50% and after final shaping did a short bench rest of 15 minutes.

This is set number 15 of my baguette trials and tribulations and in some ways one of the most successful baguette bakes I’ve had where I figured something out that has turned out to be critical to my baguettes.  I have been stumped by the lack of ears and grigne on my baguettes, but happy with the crumb.  Well in this bake I reduced bulk fermentation aiming for only a 25% rise in bulk and then eliminated bench room temperature proofing of the shaped dough instead putting the baguettes into the fridge after final shaping.