ifs201's blog

My husband requested a recipe I'd made a few years back (before I got into sourdough) of kubaneh from the cookbook Golden. Since I now know a bit more about bread, I decided to make some slight changes. I didn't have time to convert to sourdough, but I did add 10% sourdough starter and added some whole wheat. It was even better than I remembered! Next time I'll convert the recipe to sourdough. This bread is baked in an 8-inch deep cake tin covered in tinfoil and the outside gets beautifully dark and caramelized. The burnt bits are the best part. Yum!

I had some bananas sitting around and was inspired by a banana sourdough post from Trailrunner. I'd also been itching to make another chocolate sourdough, so I decided to make the two doughs and laminate the two together. I found it pretty hard to develop the gluten in the banana dough (which uses almost no water and just bananas for hydration), so I won't be surprised if this is a dense loaf. One loaf looks quite pretty from the outside, the other is a lovable mutant with bumps and lumps. 

I've really been enjoying reducing my levain to 10% and doing a longer bulk ferment this winter. I wanted to make some loaves to give away and to serve at a party, so I tried mixing dough for 6 loaves at once. Boy, that was a mistake! My scale couldn't handle the weight so all of my measurement were thrown off, but somehow the breads may be my best ever (at least visually).

Given a busy holiday season and the very cold weather in my apartment, I wanted to try letting the bulk ferment go overnight. With the encouragement of the good TFL folks, I decided to try two loaves using 5% pre-fermented flour (50g starter/500g flour/375g water/10g salt) for an 11 hour room temp bulk (approximately 65 degrees) followed by 11 hours in the fridge. 

This was a beet sourdough with 36% roasted beet, 25% Hard Red Winter Redeemer, 5% rye, and 70% KABF. The hydration was 70% + the liquid from the beets. I did a 2 hour autolyse and let the bulk go for 6 hours (kitchen was 64 degrees). The oven spring was fine, but maybe the bulk could have gone shorter. Interestingly I made a leek loaf simultaneously and those loaves had huge oven spring. Maybe the beets sped up the fermentation? 

The crumb isn't super open, but I think it's fair for a vegetable loaf. 

I bought a boatload of spelt berries and have been using them bit by bit in all of my bakes, but I decided to try a loaf that was 45%+ whole grain using 25% spelt, hard red winter wheat (Redeemer) and rye. I tried the Full Proof Baking method of making two separate doughs, one whole grain and one white, and then laminating them together. I also divided the dough into 2 loaves during the lamination stage, which Full Proof Baking recommends. I've always divided during the shaping stage. 

Despite only moderate success with my previous squash loaf, I decided to try again! I upped the hydration to 65% this time (not including liquid from the squash). I roasted the kabocha squash and pureed it and incorporated so that the dough was 40% squash, 2% salt, 70% organic stone-ground T85, and 30% KAF, 20% levain. I also added a bit of honey. 

During the lamination, I turned half of the dough into squash/walnut/raisin/cranberry and the other half into squash/cumin/coriander/chipotle chili powder rolls. 

This bread was a real experiment! I had some apples from the farmer's market that I wanted to use, hard apple cider, and apple YW. I had also wanted to make another bread using oat porridge so I decided to do it all taking inspiration from the idea of apple/raisin oatmeal. This bread uses 5 different flours, oat porridge, sourdough levain, YW levain, raisins, hard cider, and grated apple. I kept the hydration at 55% because I was worried that the dough would turn to soup with all of the liquid from the oats and apple. The oats were not cooked, but were soaked overnight in the hard cider.

I made babka a month or two ago using a combo of instant yeast, sourdough starter, and yeast water. This time around I decided to follow an actual recipe! This is 100% sourdough babka using the recipe for the dough from Artisan Bryan. I didn't use his fillings and instead did two babkas using a baklava-type filling (walnut, pistachio, almond and rose water) from Smitten Kitchen and one using a chocolate and nut filling.

I previously made the turmeric and leek loaf from Sarah Owens and it remains one of my tastiest loaves. I decided to make it again, but to follow my own process with the dough, to up the hydration to 80%, and to change the mix of flours. I hope it's as tasty as the first time! One of my loaves has a small tumor on the side because it was too big for my DO and it stuck to the side as I put it in - oops!