dabrownman's blog

I was a busy week around the homestead.  We hit 100 F for the first time and it was 86 F in the kitchen.  It was Cinco de Mayo and we were continuing our quest to make better pastrami than Katz’s in NYC at home in the smoker. 

I was lucky enough to get out of town and go visit my daughter in Houston for 3 days this week.  I also got to seem my brother and SIL who lives there too.  We had a great dinner on Tuesday night down in Rice Village at a nice Italian restaurant that served good Italian bread – not SD but still good with olive oil on it.  The Mud Bug Ravioli with a good fruity Zin was very nice too.   We don’t get together enough….

After last week’s mooshed Altamura shaped loaf we decided not to try to moosh this one.  Lucy wanted to give it another go to try and make amends but she has been acting oddly of late and frankly just can’t be trusted - especially on Earth Day.

Seems many things come in spurts on the TFL.  We are always looking for something new and interesting to do on the bread front.  Recently, we have seen a few Pain di Altamura breads with the odd folding of the dough a few minutes before baking.  The most interesting thing is this folding.  The bread itself is a straightforward durum wheat one but the look of the weird lump of bread you end up with is its calling card.

Last time we under filled the new Oriental Pullman pan so this week Lucy though she would overfill it.   It was perfectly filled until she duped in a bunch of add ins that made for about 400 g of too much dough.  From famine to feast still means the pan is struggling to do its thing because of a lackadaisical master and overly ambitious apprentice bordering on a doofus twofer.

Now that is some windowpane!

We are getting pretty good at keeping baked bread out of the freezer by sticking to only baking one loaf a week.  When out future son-in-law came over for breakfast in Easter weekend he rolled away with the last of the frozen bread and a couple of homemade jams and some citrus to take back to Colorado.

The garden had volunteer daisies and Red Romaine lettuce growing side by side.

Lucy has been busy working on here new billion-dollar invention of bio-nanobots that you put into the flour after milling that would go to work as soon as you added water to mix for an autolyze and then tell you when to add the salt and leaven.  That sounded pretty good since I have forgotten to the salt before but she wasn’t done. 

We haven’t made any pizza for a while around her for some reason.  It isn’t like we don’t like pizza but it is pretty messy when it comes right down to it – at least it is when Lucy and I make it at any rate!  Flour, semolina, corn meal everywhere, frying the Sausage, chopping all the toppings…..Yep I’m guilty and Lucy looks guilty.

We have been making 50% whole grain, half sprouted bread the past couple of weeks and Lucy was about to have a conniption fit since we are out of the rye bread we like so much.  The whole grains were 70% rye and the rest wheat with half of them being sprouted.

The first version had King Arthur and Winco Hi Gluten flours, 50/50, for the half of the flour that wasn’t whole and sprouted whole grain flour.  That bread turned out very well, open, soft, moist crumb, good spring and bloom with a well browned, thin chewy crust at a bit under 80% hydration.  The best part is that the 6 whole and sprouted grains really pumped up the flavor.