headupinclouds's blog

I stopped by the Grow NY grain stand at the local farmers market and picked up the lone bag of Frederick soft white wheat berries they had and a few bags of stone-ground flour from Farmer Ground and Small Valley Farm so I could sample some local wheat varieties and try a few bakes with professionally milled whole grain flour for comparison with Mockmilled flour.  Larger bags of wheat berries can be ordered for pick up in advance.  I am interested in the Renan flour, but a 50 lb minimum is a bit intimidating.  If someone in the NYC area is interested in splitting an order plea

This was an end-of-week project to use up the bran from my tempering + bolting experiments with Yecora Rojo.  It is named after Phil Hartman's (RIP) Colon Blow cereal skit on SNL:

None of this was measured very precisely, but I wanted a classic moist carrot cake type bran muffin texture.  I was surprised how pleasant, moist and fluffy the bran can be as the main ingredient.

This is my second attempt at the home oven home milled soft white wheat pizza napoletana from Adam Leonti's Flour Lab.  The first attempt was posted here.  This version uses a sourdough starter instead of the yeast called for in the recipe and I increased the hydration from 63% to 70% -- an adjustment based on experience with the first attempt (I would probably take the mean of these next time).  The bran was sifted with a #50 mesh and added to the starter ahead of time.

CB 1:

A continuation of JMonkey's Desem with a whole wheat soaker (the epoxy method outlined in Whole Grain Breads) and an aliquot jar for proofing.  Bulk fermentation ended at <= 25% and final proof ended at around 75%.

Notes:

This summer, while social distancing in our cabin, I purchased a small wood fired pizza oven where I practiced applying my sourdough starter to making sourdough pizza.  At temperatures between 900F and 1000F (the later being "Hi" or my IR gun) the challenge is to continuously rotate the pizza to keep things from burning while ensuring the top and bottom cook evenly in 1 or 2 minutes.  In addition, chopping lots of tiny hardwood pieces of the precise size needed to keep the little firebox roaring adds to the list of chores.  Our felled locust burns very hot and works exception

This post illustrates starter maintenance and an end-to-end bake of a whole wheat Desem loaf using home milled hard white spring wheat berries (Prairie Gold) using JMonkey's Desem post as a blueprint. It is relevant to some of the starter yeast-vs-LAB ratio discussions on TFL this past week.   It is fun to find such useful posts and discussions from the TFL "archives" back in 2009.  He summarizes the style succinctly, and helps dispel a lot of mystique around this style of bread:

Yeast vs LAB lag phase (may be relevant to Desem starter optimization)

• http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/83047#comment-83047
• http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/459976#comment-459976

Debra Wink writes:

Aspergillus Oryzae is at the heart of many delicious East Asian ferments, including miso, tempeh, sake, etc.  I have been reading through The Noma Guide to Fermentation, where Rene Redzepi and David Zilber of Noma fame lay out a number of aspergillus oryzae ferments critical to much of the success of their restaurant.  This is really a fusion of a culinary practice with an incredibly long history in East Asia, with local ingredients and flavors of Denmark -- their culinary terroir.  Somewhat surprisingly, bread is almost completely lacking from the book, except as a