My sourdough loaf came out really nice today.
I used a firmer starter than I usually do. I believe it was 30 grams starter, 50 grams water, 50 grams rye flour that I left out overnight. In the AM I added 500 grams bread flour, 370 grams water, and 10 grams salt. Folded 3-4 times over 3-4 hours, shaped it, baked it in a pot for 45 minutes.
As Breadsong already posted about, this past weekend the Bakery Congress 2013, the largest annual baking industry event in Western Canada, was held in Vancouver, BC. As tradeshows go it was cheap and I was looking for an excuse for a bike ride on a beautiful sunny day, so I pedaled over to the PNE to take a look.
I only recently discovered that one thing that doesn't appear to be available in Canada is Hawaiian Sweet Bread. At least on the West Coast in the US, King's Hawaiian bread is easy to find at most any grocery store. It's something I grew up with and that I associate with being a kid and snacking on in the car. We certainly fed it to our kids a number of times on road trips.
I haven't baked with my starter in a couple of weeks, so Wednesday evening I fed my starter some rye flour and water. Thursday mid-day I made my dough (1kg bread flour, 20g salt, 730g water, "a bunch" of starter). It has turned cool again in Vancouver though and my dough was moving slowly, so I bulk retarded it overnight until Friday morning.
Things are finally starting to settle down a bit. I baked today the first time since kicking off the site move, another batch of the Hokkaido Milk Bread with Tangzhong.
I make another batch of the Hokkaido Milk Bread with Tangzhong this weekend, this time adding 2 cups of soaked sultana raisins.
That was two cups of raisins before soaking. After soaking it was more like 3 or 3 1/2 cups, which was a lot of raisins. I was afraid it was going to be too much and really weigh the loaves down, but they still rose quite nicely.
As I've mentioned previously, I've been working for the past few months to upgrade TFL to a new version of the content management system it runs on, Drupal. I'm also redesigning the interface a bit, mainly so it works better on tablets and phones.
Every now and then you learn a new technique in the kitchen that really knocks your socks off. Tangzhong is one of them.
Tangzhong
Tangzhong is the technique of heating a portion of the flour and liquid in your recipe to approximately 65C to make a paste (roux). At this temperature the flour undergoes a change (gelatinizes?). Adding this roux to your final dough makes a huge difference in the softness and fluffiness of your final dough.
This is my last post about my trip before returning to posts about managing the site and baking, I promise! -Floyd
As far as I can recall, we ate Polish food exclusive on this trip. Not out of necessity, mind you: at least in cities like Warszawa and Kraków you can dine on sushi, burgers, Italian food, phó, pretty much anything you like now. Chains like Starbucks, McDonalds, Hard Rock Cafe, and KFC are about as common as in the rest of Europe. We didn’t take this trip to eat American or Italian or Japanese though, we went to eat Polish.
