dabrownman's blog

1/1/2015 - New Years Eve Pizza

1/2/2015 - 50 % Whole Grain Sprouted 8 Grain SD/YW with Japanese Black Rice & Seeds

1/9/2015 - 50 Percent Whole Sprouted 16 Grain SD with Lake Havasu Desert Magic IPA

It is supposed to rain for the net two days here in the AZ desert but be clear for the Super Bowl on Sunday.  No worries anyway since the stadium has a real grass movable field and a movable roof too.  Still, Lucy was thinking about how beautiful, if dry and desolate, the desert usually is while I was thinking about how much the desert and Lucy’s brain are alike.  It’s odd how the names of her breads come about.

We baked a version of rye bread called Lucy’s Sorta Tzitzel back in the middle of August and it turned out to be one of the very best rye breads we have made to date – found here.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/39721/lucy%E2%80%99s-sorta-tzitzel-sprouted-sourdough

I guess this isn’t technically a white bread but is about as close a Lucy gets to one at 23% whole grain with all the whole grains sprouted, dried and milled at home.  This one was a little bit different with the hydration reduced to 73% making for a much  less sloppy dough than usual.

Lucy decided to do another take in her minimum 15 grain no more than 30 ingredient challenge bake found here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/39184/4th-july-%E2%80%93-15-grain-independence-sourdough-challenge-bake  but this time using sprouted whole grains for 50% of the grain and cutting way back the other ingredients to a total of 22 (LaFama AP, KA bread flour, salt, water, IPA  added to the 16 whole sprouted grains.  22 is a pretty big number around here

Lucy originally set out to do her take on combining Karin’s take on Maria Speck’s Aroma Bread and Karin’s Great Wild Rice bread.  Both of these breads are on our favorite list and on Lucy’s top three breads for various years.

We have a tradition to bring in the New Year with pizza.  How this got started I can’t remember but I do remember the lobster tails that used to be NY Eve fare.  This year’s crust was the best yet though and so was the sauce according to my daughter who keeps track of these things.

We took another step down the sprouted grain trail this week, even after vowing not too, when we decided to defrost the chest freezer and found a peanut butter jar full of frozen whey in the bottom of the icy depths near the bottom-  along with too many quarter hunks of bread.

After last week’s Cosmic Calamity, Lucy has settled back down to her normal self but had to have a beer to celebrate her notoriety as the center of the universe even if only for one day.  She has an affinity for darker beers and decided that Deschutes Black Butte Porter was perfect, not only for celebrating but for bread making too.

With the excitement and highlighting of Ancient Grains and Sprouted Grains in the bread world that we may be paying too much attention to, other really cool and interesting developments in the world can sometimes take a back seat and go nearly unnoticed.  One of those ‘other’ things came to light this past week when Lucy found out that one thing that has baffled cosmologists and physicists for decades was finally answered..... and it involved her.