Benito's blog

It was really strange that I had stopped adding nuts or seeds to my bread for quite a long time.  Now that I have started to add inclusions again, it reminds me how much I love them.  Running low on bread, this is what I decided to do for this all wholewheat loaf.  The lobes didn’t come out that evenly when baked, this does happen sometimes when they are shaped a bit too fat, it doesn’t affect the flavor but does make the mountains of Hokkaido look a bit wonky LOL.

My partner requested another Roman Pizza so how could I say no?  I wanted to use up a bit more of the whole Kamut that I have left so changed the spelt to Kamut.  Also having made this once I wanted to improve it, the last time the crust didn’t brown as well as I would have expected for the baking time.  So I added a tiny amount of sugar and some diastatic malt.  This worked well to improve the browning of the crust so I am happy with that.

I needed more bread, so what’s new?  Wanting some whole grain bread though I decided to use some spelt with the whole wheat for some variety.  I also wanted some seeds in this bread because I love seeds so decided to add pepitas and sunflower seeds at 10% each.

This first time I tried making one of these I used Full Proof Baking’s Kristen’s formula. It was great, but I had some technical issues related with shaping and transferring the dough from the countertop into the pan.  This time I thought I’d try a different one, Maurizio’s The Perfect Loaf formula.  Some of the minor changes I made are in brackets.

This recipe is for 11”x17” that I have decreased to 80% of the original weights. 

Having to practice more to get the rust out of my processes and shaping.  I was able to get my preferred organic all purpose flour similar to T55 for baguettes.  Also continuing to see how far I can push fermentation with every so slightly more gluten development with each bake.  In this bake along with the Rubaud kneading in the bowl when adding the levain and later when adding the bassinage water, I did a total of 300 slap and folds.  These recent bakes do support the fact that doing more gluten development does support longer fermentation without loss of grigne/ears.

Being back in Toronto I have access to ingredients that I couldn’t find in Fort Lauderdale Florida.  Yesterday I went to Chinatown and picked up some purple sweet potatoes and some BBQ Pork.  I’ve been wanting to try making fully sourdough (not hybrid with IDY) Baozi for a while, the last attempt at it didn’t go well.  Given the expense of buying BBQ Pork these needed to be successful and they were.  

I was disappointed in my last set of baguettes so had to bake another set.  With this set, I was using this new AP flour again and based on the last set decided to go with 76% hydration and do hand mixing so I could better assess how the dough felt.  I also didn’t do any cold retard because the dough in the last set really resisted stretching as it was still a bit cold during shaping.

I still have some rhubarb from a friend’s farm from last year frozen in my freezer.  We are hosting a dinner party for neighbours tonight so wanted to bake a pie with a pate brisée pastry crust using the rhubarb.  I couldn’t source any sour cherries so decided to try a spiced peach rhubarb filling for the first time.  I recently purchased a Fat Daddio’s pie dish.  I have always used glass pie dishes because I could see the crust and tell if it was fully baked.

I am definitely out of practice shaping baguettes.  Looking at my index I see it has been almost exactly 6 months, much too long.  Based on the three baguettes I baked you can see the improvement with the shaping from the first to the third.  Another variable is that I couldn’t find my preferred flour that I have been using for baguettes so had to use a flour I haven’t used for baguettes before.

We’re back home and as usual out of bread.  I found some Einkorn flour so decided to use it in this loaf.  No bread flour or VWG will be used for this loaf.  As I have recently started to use a stiffer tangzhong and have increased the percentage up to 20% I haven found that I don’t need to use any VWG at all and can still get a great rise for this style of bread.  So this loaf is 100% whole grain, 20% of that whole einkorn.  I also like the flavour that einkorn gives to bread, but it is definitely hard to come by around here.