So last weekend I made two loaves, one for us and one for the daughter. The daughter's looked better, but smallish. Ours was way too heavy on the whole wheat, came out short and dense, but all still tasty.
This holiday weekend's batch is a hopefully more balanced bread/ww flour blend. The dough rose very much overnight!
Started like this:
Any pics at this stage would look just like last week's batch, so I'll hold off until it comes out of the oven. Using whole wheat because my wife is officially retiring on her next birthday, and I realized I have about 10 weeks to use up a LOT of whole wheat flour before we leave town and head for Mexico. Wish me luck!...
[UPDATE: late edit, catching up on photos since changing online image sources :) ]
Because ... that's what we have in the fridge. Dried cherries. :)
I started the levain last night, but it spent the night and most of today in the fridge in-between build stages. I'm not sure if this will be good or bad for it, guess we'll see...?
May or may not get the dough ready tonight. I would like to, just so I can bake in the morning. The last loaf is running low!
This weekend's baking project comes to you courtesy of pantry leftovers!
So I asked the wife what dried fruit we had on hand. We have cherries in the fridge and raisins in the pantry. The raisins sport a 'best sold by' date of Oct. last year, so I thought it might be best to use those up. Nearby I spied some walnuts. Then I Googled for a recipe and came across this lovely...
It started out innocently enough. There I was, looking at my starter, and I thought, "Hey, I know. I'll just go ahead and reboot the starter into a straight NMNF batch, really dilute the last of the whole wheat out of it, get it up to 95%+ rye. That's what I'll do." And so I did. Pulled 8 grams out, washed out the jar, put the 8 grams back in and added flour and water, set the timer.
Just decided I would use this space to help document my various starter and bread experiments.
Starter: Have gone from spelt (not sure why I tried that) to whole wheat, now shifting to rye. As soon as the size of the existing batch is down a bit I will shift to the NMNF method to keep it going.
Bread: Slight shift here from must-be-done-all-right-now to spreading things out a bit. Basically, I am starting to plan ahead better. Start levain, then mix and rise overnight, fold, shape and proof and bake in the morning.
