Apparently ‘tis the season for clan gatherings – and the associated baking. Fortunately, the weather is pretty nice for it (I’d much rather be working in an 18 - 20 deg C kitchen instead of 30), and it gives me an opportunity to indulge my obsession without over-filling the freezer ;-)
So – it seems that I have succumbed to the siren song of the baguette…
Round 1 last week turned out better than I had expected, and the non-traditional blend of flours that I chose was both a treat to work with and absolutely delicious. The spelt / durum / rye diluted the strong gluten of my Canadian AP flour, so the dough ended up wonderfully extensible, and quite fun to shape.
Well, for last week I got to do a bigger bake than normal, since I was baking not just for ourselves but also to take a few things out to my In-laws for dinner on Friday (there were some East coast relatives in for a visit, so a clan dinner was in order).
It ended up being a very mixed bake, with a lot of inspiration from missing-but-now-happily-returned posters, as well as the steadfast posters who always give me something to try…
There were a few things going on here this week, so I figured on keeping my bake pretty simple and straight-forward. The only “extra” that was in the plan was to build up a bunch of both my rye and durum starters and get them spread out and dried to store as back-up, and to give to some family members who asked for some.
Thanks to the influence of Isand66 and danni3ll3 and dabrownman (among others), I seem to have become somewhat hooked on the textures and flavours created by adding a cooked porridge made with toasted grains. Since I wasn't sure how my "challenge" rolls would taste, I still wanted a moist and flavourful loaf for our sandwiches, and went with one of my favourite techniques:
INGREDIENT | AMOUNT (g) | FLOUR TOTAL (g) | % WATER |
A couple of weeks back, leslieruf posted another gorgeous bake http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/387329#comment-387329 , and in the conversation about it issued a challenge for a one-day bake – to see whether “good” flavour could be built that quickly.
Last week was another busy week with a high need for sandwich bread and not a lot of time to make it. It was also still stupidly hot (27 deg C or more), and continuously hazy / smoky from all of the fires off to the west and south. We don’t have air-conditioning, and opening the windows was questionable, so I needed to plan leaven amounts and refrigeration for best bake timing.
Along with my play-time (the Eclipse experiments), I also needed a basic sandwich loaf for the week. We've had hot, dry weather, bringing on the need for an early harvest, so not much time at home right now and a need for much portable food!
For our sandwiches this week, I wanted to use up the last of my older durum and kamut berries (since I had stocked up again), use up the rest of the rye levain that I had built, and keep it fairly high in whole grains.
With Mini Oven’s Eclipse Bread challenge in mind, and the need to get my “mother” durum starter built back up, I started last week by pulling out 10g each of my 65% hydration rye and durum starters and starting with 3-stage levain builds, getting them both up to 80% hydration, and shooting for about 270g total of each levain.
While I was putting together our "treats" (rolls for the man and rye for me), I still wanted to bake some day-to-day sandwich bread that we both would enjoy. I hadn't done any high-percentage whole durum for a while, so I put together a dough with 55% durum on the Thursday, and it ended up in the fridge to ferment overnight.
