gavinc's blog

Honey Spelt Bread

 

This is a Hamelman’s recipe that I’ve baked a few times. It is 75% Whole-Spelt flour that I stone-milled the day before baking. The Pate Fermentee is made 14 hours before mixing. I love the taste of this bread as it is full flavoured and quite different from our everyday Vermont sourdough loaf.

100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Loaf - 3rd Attempt

I have a quest to improve the rise and softness of a 100% Whole-Wheat Sandwich Bread. This is the third time baking this and I have been tweaking the formula with each attempt. There has been a gradual improvement with each bake and this time I got a good rise, soft crumb, and wonderful flavour. Debra Wink has graciously given her advice and ideas given that it is her recipe in Hamelman’s 3rd Edition of Bread.

100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Loaf - Debra Wink

Today I baked Debra Winks 100% Whole-Wheat Sandwich Bread from Hamelman’s Bread Edition 3. I never thought that 100% whole-wheat would produce such a soft and pleasantly tasty sandwich loaf. I milled the whole wheat yesterday, but I’m not sure of the protein level as Debra recommends about 14% protein. Debra also recommended some recent changes to the formula and process tweaks for the home baker that I adopted.

Hamburger Brioche Buns

I made these a while ago and thought to post them to my blog during our 4th COVID lockdown (bored). I learned how to make these during Chef Jacob Burton’s online culinary boot camp.  I learned the bun sizes for large, regular and slider buns.

155 g each for large (4.5 inch) buns - about 114 mm

100 g each for regular size (4 inch) buns - about 100 mm

55 g each for slider size (3 inch) buns - about 76 mm

A well-formed bun was baked using foil ring molds held together with a couple of staples.

Bagels

This is my first attempt at baking Hamelman’s bagels. Dough made and shaped the night before, then refrigerated overnight, then boiled and baked early this morning. I also tested my DIY bagel boards. Hand-mixed, kneaded and shaped. The final shaping was to join the ends to seal the ring, however, my arthritic hands wouldn’t quite manage, but generally very pleased with the results. Tasted very nice and slightly chewy. Cream cheese at the ready!

Using the maximum space in our home oven.

I wanted to post about baking three baguettes at the same time in our home oven and how easy it was to load the doughs onto the baking stone using my DIY dough loader.

Developing the dough went well as did the shaping, proof and moving the dough to the loader. Trouble struck when I scored the dough as my lame was blunt. The lame dragged the dough rather than cutting neatly, resulting in jagged and ugly scoring. My concerns are evident in the baked loaves.

Hot Cross Buns for Easter

Getting ready for our camping adventure over Easter with family. Baked these Hamelman's Traditional English Hot Cross Buns today. I may have to bake another lot. These are 75-gram dough each; formula below.