Ilya Flyamer's blog

The holidays are playing all kinds of tricks with my baking schedule and thinking, so here is another salvaged near-flop.

My girlfriend's brother has been staying with us over the holidays, and when he was leaving yesterday I wanted to gift him a loaf of bread to take with him. But of course I didn't manage to plan it properly, and only could set up the very simple sourdough dough the night before, and spend minimal amount of hands-on time on it yesterday during the day.

Merry Christmas and Happy upcoming New Year everyone!

After my previous 40% Beremeal (barley) sourdough (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/66746/40-beremeal-vssdr), I repeated it almost exactly - but with half amount of Beremeal, and I slightly reduced the hydration, in line with reduced amount of whole grain flour. Also doubled for two loaves. Formula: https://fgbc.dk/149f

As I posted the other day, I had some beremeal, flour from an ancient variety of barley, I wanted to try using in a bread. And I also wanted to try Abe's very simple sourdough recipe (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/66384/very-simple-sourdough-recipe). And although combining two unknowns (new ingredient and new process) - what's the worst that could happen?

We had a combined leaving/welcome/Christmas celebration at work today, so I wanted to make a festive bake, something fruity, with a little spices. And Abe shared with me a yeasted recipe from a bread machine which seemed to tick all the boxes. Here is a rescaled version converted to sourdough with a stiff starter and a stiff preferment: https://fgbc.dk/13ja

Ilya's deli rye bake #1

Well, I finally found some time to try a deli rye bread for the CB this weekend. I like the rye flavour, so I went for dmsnyder's recipe, but without any CY: https://fgbc.dk/12se

Everyone is producing such perfect loaves, time for a bake with at least one issue :)

I was working a lot this week and didn't have time to bake since the "sweet" bread on Monday. So yesterday while getting ready for a rye bake I went looking for a bread recipe using discard - since I had quite a lot of that stuff stored in the fridge. And I wanted it to be really quick, so not really leavened with sourdough or yeast - hence, I started searching for flatbreads. And this is the recipe that caught my eye: https://peckham.kitchen/chef-notes/2020/10/7/sourdough-discard-flatbreads

Today we had a first in-person lab meeting at work since the beginning of the pandemic, and I wanted to bring a loaf of bread to share with my colleagues. Usually we would have something sweet, like cake, at these meetings, so I wanted a flavourful bread on the sweeter side, that would also not require butter or any other topping, to enjoy. So I improvised with the ingredients (almost wrote "reagents") that I had: I selected dried cranberries, poppy seeds and grapefruit zest. I also added a little honey to the mix for a little additional sweetness.

I bought a bag of semola rimacinata a few weeks ago, and finally decided to try it. Found the recipe here, and basically followed it, except increased the hydration to 70% (and even that maybe was a bit low, I feel the flour could have taken more): http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/14268/pane-con-semola-rimacinata-di-grano-duro

Here is my formula: https://fgbc.dk/123b

I bought some emmer flour a couple of months just because I saw it and though "Huh never heard of emmer, I'll give it a go" - and then never tried it (except using in banana bread once). So I finally decided to try it. I recently got the book "Sourdough" by Lugg & Fjeld, and while it's not very advanced, I just followed their simple procedure and formula for 40% emmer sourdough (except added some slap&folds in the beginning until medium development, instead of simply relying on stretch&folds during bulk).