Catomi's blog

Awhile ago I bought a screen for bolting flour. I'd done a bit of reading and it sounded like nothing but a good thing; you get the nutritional and flavor benefits of whole grain, with the structure of white flour. I made several loaves using Bob's Red Mill flour, shaking it through the screen to produce maybe 1/4 cup of chaff for the 500 g of flour I needed for my recipe. I couldn't really tell if it was making a difference (I should really do a comparison bake, but frankly my time is limited and I'd want to have plenty of flexibility for a project like that), but I did it anyway.

So life got busy, it got hot outside, and I got lazy about updating. Here's the last several weeks, roughly condensed into one blog post.

In my last couple of blog posts, I had some questions and difficulties. People were very helpful with suggestions, and this week's baking was much more successful. Thank you!

This was Take 2 of Tartine's Ode to Bourdin (white-wheat blend), and the first time that I tried using bolted flour (the previous loaves used bread flour in place of the bolted wheat flour). So this was actually 100% whole wheat, just with some if the bran sifted out and applied to the outside during proofing. 

I made these from the following post by kjknits: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/3241/sourdough-english-muffins

I used:

almost 1/2 cup of starter (needed to reserve some to propagate)

2 cups white whole wheat flour (the closest I had to all-purpose)

1 c whole milk

Mixed and left the dough, covered, at room temp overnight. I estimate room temp was probably about 70 degrees.  

When it starts getting hot and muggy out, my husband and I start grilling more. Today was hot and muggy for sure. Grilled pizzas sounded like just the thing. I've fixed the Cook's Illustrated version several times before, usually with white whole wheat flour (that being what I had). Today I had the bread flour the recipe called for, so I went ahead and used it. I'm blaming the difficulties I had on that change in flours. 

Here is the dough after I mixed it up, plus what was stuck to my oiled hand. 

Today I baked two loaves of oatmeal porridge bread, about 12 hours apart. The plan was to bake them one after the other (I bake in my cast iron dutch oven and only have the one, so simultaneous baking is out). However, I wound up needing to run an extra errand this morning so the second loaf of bread was left in the fridge all day, until I had time to bake it and it had cooled off enough that I felt OK cranking the oven to 500 degrees. 

In Tartine No. 3, Robertson says that all of the bread recipes (with the exception of the Rene-style loaves, which are too seedy) can be adapted for crispbreads simply by decreasing hydration to 50-60%. I decided to try this with the brown rice porridge bread, as I think rice crackers are tasty. I added some sesame seeds on top of most of them.

I wound up using:

250 g BRM whole wheat flour 

250 g KA bread flour

I just bought and started experimenting with Tartine Book No. 3. I don't have the others, but I did some reading online (especially tartine-bread.blogspot.com, now girlmeetsrye.blogspot.com). Based on her recommendation, I'm working with a 100% rye, 100% hydration starter that I started at the end of May. So far I've made 3 recipes from Book No. 3, and decided to sign up here in order to start a record of my loaves where I can relate photos to recipes.