dabrownman's blog

2014 Dabrownman’s TFL Blog Index

1/1/2014 - New Year’s Panettone - 2014

1/3/2014 - YW SD Spelt and White Whole Wheat Miche

1/5/2014 -  Saturday Night Pizza - 1/4/2014

Lucy loves naan more than she loves Indian food but she really loves Indian food the best of all.  So when she found out we were going to make Fusion Chicken Curry for dinner at 10 AM she was a little put off since she likes her naan to snea a long cold nap in the fridge just like pizza dough.

This was festive around here this week.  Our daughter turned 23 yesterday so a more festive bread was in order.  We decided to go back to baking two smaller loaves instead of one larger one.  That way we could get two different breads, one plain and one festive, out of the same dough and one bake.  The festive one would be packed with fruit and seeds which Lucy says is way more festive than a plain loaf…. even if neither was a pumpernickel

Since we have about 15 minutes worth of levain work to do on Wednesdays, this leaves Lucy and I with lots of spare time to spend on our favorite Wednesday pastime – Dominoes!  But it’s not any old Dominoes game either.  If you know of some of Lucy’s wild bread recipes you can imagine what her version of dominoes is like…or maybe not since it so weird.

Lucy finally got back to her bread and butter with a high percent whole grain multi-grain bread.   It has been a while but this one may prove she hasn’t lost her touch - if she ever had one.

I'm always amazed how much the acid in the levain leaches out the color becoming almost white compared to the autolyse which has exactly the same grain in the same proportions at nearly the same hydration..

This would sort of be our everyday sandwich bread if we had one t least one with a crumb that doesn’t have bits of seeds, nuts and fruits in it.   We do like bits of stuff in the crumb a lot but we have been working on improving the tastes of Lucy’s take on  Josh’s more whole grain version of Pain Maggione.

This year we decided to update our Ballymaloe 100% whole wheat bake from last year by including a 100 % white shamrock on top of the 100 % whole wheat base.  We cut the scald by 25% and used Young’s Double Chocolate Stout for the liquid in the while wheat portion.

The girls really liked this week’s YW Italian bread we baked using a take in the poolish calzone recipe by replacing the poolish with YW.  That will be a tough bread to beat but We though we would give it a go at using nearly the same recipe and replacing the YW with SD this time. 

It seems ever since Sylvia posted her fine calzones we haven’t had pizza night but have calzone night instead.  We like both my daughter loves seasoned ricotta and that is a calzone ingredient if there ever was one.  You could say that our calzones are a cross between lasagna and pizza.

We have wanted to smoke some flour ever since we saw Evon from Malaysia using it in her breads that seemed always have interesting and unique combinations of ingredients.  Why we haven’t gotten around to it till now is a mystery but it finally got to the top of Lucy’s formula list.