Benito's blog

I know I’ve made this before but I wanted to see if my techniques have improved at all with more baking and for this dinner I wanted a simple sourdough without a lot of whole grain or other flavours added to the bread.

I baked the Seeded Sourdough recipe from The Perfect Loaf.  I didn’t get the oven spring that I should have because I tore the skin on the dough when I was pre-shaping.  I was having too much fun and did too much during pre-shaping, there was no need whatsoever to try to get it as perfectly round as I was doing.  Silly mistake.  Unfortunately that meant that when I unloaded the dough from the banneton, I kind of flattened more than it should have and of course, it didn’t get the rise it should have as well.

This sourdough has a lovely light orange crumb.  I modified the original recipe which was 100% white flour and instead used a combination of white bread, whole red fife and whole rye flours.  The tomato paste is complimented with rosemary and celery seeds, I couldn’t find nigella seeds so subbed celery seeds, but I think nigella would have been better.

311 g white bread flour

46 g whole wheat flour

21 g dark rye flour

2 tbsp freshly chopped rosemary leaves

3 g celery seeds

287 g warm water reserve 21 g for later

31 g tomato paste

I didn’t make anything with my sourdough discard last weekend and my container of discard was almost overflowing after baking the tomato sourdough bread today.  I decided I’d try a variation on the crackers with another flavour that I hadn’t tried yet.  

This is a new recipe for me, the first time I made a whole grain pastry and first time baking a pie with plumcots.  The whole wheat pastry recipe is by Stella Parks, although as with her regular pie crust recipe I increase everything by 25% to ensure that I had plenty of pastry dough since my experience with her regular pastry was that there wasn’t quite enough.

I based my recipe on Maurizio’s Fifty-Fifty Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread.  I decided to lower the whole wheat just a bit.

For single loaf weight 750 grams 40% Red Fife

A bit of background about me, I quite new to bread baking having only really starting this year and having some success following the methods of Peter Reinhart in Artisan Breads Everyday for commercial yeasted breads.  I decided that I would like to try sourdough and if I was going to do that I would also try my hand at making a sourdough starter.

My first attempt didn’t seem to work out, I followed Peter Reinhart’s instructions from Artisan Breads Everyday, but after several days and little apparent activity I gave up and started again.