hungryscholar's blog

Anybody have a handy cheat sheet for calculating hydration when adding ingredients like pumpkin? The Internet is full of recipes for sweet pumpkin quick bread, and the last time I forgot to account for the water content in pumpkin puree I got soup, not bread. I had a hunch that TFL would come through, and sure enough, big thanks to Karin's post here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/34842/dan-lepards-pumpkin-whey-bread, and to Dan Lepard's original recipe.

I'm just popping in here to make a note so I'll hopefully remember this so I can make it again. (And keep tweaking the recipe, of course). Anyhow, I was reading local breads this morning and contemplating making some olive rolls from it, couldn't find oil cured olives in the grocery store, but the final dusting with cornmeal stuck with me to this afternoon. Once again a case where I intended to make sub rolls, but my hands decided I needed more practice with baguettes (which I clearly do).

If you have thought about getting a sourdough culture going but don't feel up for a lot of watching and waiting, I highly recommend the method outlined by Ian on his now rather empty Ars Pistorica blog. I nearly posted yesterday, because it sure looked like sourdough starter and tasted like it, and had lots of little bubbles. But, I feel, the proof is in the pudding, or my old friend, sourdough bread. So, here I am Sunday morning with two little loaves that managed to surprise me with some solid oven spring 10 hours after bulk fermentation start.

I've been fascinated with the fougasse shape ever since reading about it in one bread book or another, but I finally got to see some examples "in the wild" when visiting Nice earlier this Spring, where it seemed like there was a loaf of bread I couldn't resist at nearly every turn in the maze of narrow streets inVieux Nice. And then there was the socca and pissaladière, but I digress. Here are a couple examples from the market in Nice, one plain, and one filled:

It's not hot here, not yet, but I am dreading the season of too hot to bake. What we have now is the sort of weather that has me firing up the grill only to have to call the whole thing off due to rain. So I am crossing my fingers for today, Memorial day.

In any case, I've made something resembling pizza on the stovetop with my cast iron grill pan and this week expanded to focaccia and something shaped reasonably like ciabatta, but lacking in the sort of holes I was hoping for, which I think means it's time to toss the last of that batch of yeast.

 Lapsang Souchong iced tea with a splash of tart cherry juice is one of my favorite drinks. I think the smoky tea and the cherry play very nicely together. This bread is my first attempt at recreating that combination in bread form. I guess I'm on a bit of tea bread kick....

We broke bread and the rules last night. I know we were meant to let this kind of bread rest for 12-24 hrs before cutting, but we wanted something to go with the soup and it was just sitting there on the cutting board, calling to us. So this is one of those times when I didn't get a chance to take a picture before quite a bit of the loaf was devoured. The slightly sweet, wheaty taste of the Great River Milling "bread" flour(really closer to a high extraction type of flour, the germ is retained and 80%of the bran sifted out) goes well with the bittersweet flavor of the green tea powder.

I've been experimenting with beer bread and granary style bread. For this round I used a doppelbock along with some stuff labeled malt powder that I got at my local Korean grocery store. I tried it with WW flour as is included in a lot of recipes, but I felt like it was competing with the malt powder, so this one is just AP flour, plus what's in my starter.