Benito's blog

This is a 25% whole red fife sourdough I baked today.  I made a double batch so I could give one away, unfortunately I think I’ve overproofed these, live and learn.

For two loaves 890 g 

748 g bread flour 75%

160 g whole red fife (total 252 g with the levain) 25%

688 g water gives 78% hydration - add levain and salt without reserved water

4.5 diastatic malt

18 g salt

184 g levain 1:2:2 starter 40 g, 80 g whole red fife 80 g water

This is my first attempt with this formula I’ve put together for a Japanese inspired sourdough using red miso paste and furikake.  Furikake for those unfamiliar with it is a seasoning blend that can vary that Japanese often use to top their steamed rice.  This particular one has nori flakes, bonito and sesame seeds as the primary ingredient.  I’ve based this on Kristen’s basic sourdough recipe.

Total Dough Weight 900 g

Total Flour 494 g 

Bread Flour 80%

Whole Wheat 20%

I baked a sourdough loaf using Kamut for the first time.  It wasn’t the easiest thing to find here in Toronto, but I recently came upon a new organic market that carries Kamut grown in Canada.  The colour the whole grain flour is a lovely butter like yellow.

This is a 20% Kamut, 80% strong white flour.  9% pre-fermented flour.

This has quickly become our home’s favourite sourdough.  There is something special about the Einkorn with the Red Fife.  There is a hint of cinnamon flavour from this bread, which doesn’t contain any cinnamon, and a sweetness to the crust which is wonderful and that we love.

Third in my series of Einkorn bakes.  This time I increased the Einkorn to 20% and reduced the Red Fife to 9% all of which was in the preferment.  Other changes I used the aliquot jar and ended bulk fermentation at 40%.  I did a preshape, bench rested for 15-20 mins then final shaped and into the banneton.  I left it out on the counter until the aliquot jar showed just over 50% total rise (not 50% additional rise) then put it into a 2ºC fridge for cold retard.

I’ve made this once before and wanted to give it another go since I still have some Einkorn and wanted to inch up the % of it in the bake.  Being aware of the difficulty baking with Einkorn, I just increased the amount from about 10% to 13.5%.  The dough handled just fine.

Bread flour 71%

Whole Red Fife 15.5%

Whole Einkorn 13.5%

Prefermented flour 9%

Diastatic malt 0.5% 

Hydration 80% 

Levain 1:1:1 with whole red fife fermented 78ºF for 6 hours.

Autolyse 3 hours.

I wanted to see how far I could push bulk fermentation and with this bake I probably went a bit far.  I’ve baked this bread before which is in total 50% whole grains but I’ve never pushed the hydration to 83% which I did for this bake.  I also used my aliquot jar and shaped once it showed that the dough had risen 50%.  Given the lack of oven spring, I think for my skill set, 83% hydration and 50% rise made the resultant dough a bit too loose to shape tightly and attain better oven spring.  I’ll post photos of the crumb when I slice it tomorrow.

Once again using my favourite sourdough pizza dough recipe that was written by Will the Pie King and shared during the Community Bake, I made a Marinated Artichoke and Olive sourdough pizza.  Actually I made two 9-10” pizzas tonight and will make another two tomorrow.  In the past I have usually cold retarded them for 48 and 72 hours.  This time I wanted to see what would happen if I cold retarded for 72 and 96 hours.  Well tonight of course was the 72 hours and the dough performed as expected, very well.

So I decided to try baguettes again having had one previous attempt.  This time I tried the Anis Bouabsa recipe more or less based on what MTloaf and Alfanso posted here.

So after much prodding from certain people, you know who you are, I finally tried making baguettes.  I decided to try to keep it as simple as possible and just try an IDY recipe.  I had a look at Peter Reinhart’s recipe and decided to have a go at that.  It didn’t require a poolish nor levain, just IDY.