inlovewbread's blog

As of late, I have been taken by the flavor of durum flour in my breads. Most often I make Susan's sourdough and use about 15% rye and 5% durum along with the bread flour. I had been using more than 5% of durum flour but got a bit carried away. The flavor enhancing effect turns into flavor dominating if you go above 10%.(imho) Less than 10%, it adds a slight buttery flavor and beautiful color to the crumb.

The inspiration for this bake: 

http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2008/04/24/name-that-loaf/  

Susan at Wild Yeast has incredible breads on her site and I've printed out quite a few to try. This was one of them. 

I've been wanting to try "Pain Normande" ever since seeing it on SteveB's blog recently. Not only did I want to attempt to replicate his lovely bread, but I also conveniently have a ton of apples that I needed to use up. There are a lot of orchards around where I live so it's easy to come by (free!) great apples and fresh pressed apple cider. So, I threw a bunch of these apples in the dehydrator and got out the cider for this loaf. 

This year I hope to make Pain de Campagne shaped as pain de epi for the Thanksgiving table. I did a run-through to practice the cuts....

The one in the middle fit on my baking stone, the other did not- so I cut that one in two. Next time I will make skinnier baguettes before cutting and will probably make 3. Little individual epi rolls would be cute too.

I've become somewhat obsessed lately with Durum flour. It adds such a sweet, buttery flavor to the bread, which is good- because then I don't add butter when I have slice after slice of this bread!

For this loaf I roughly followed Daniel Leader's "Quintessential French Sourdough" formula and added Kalamata olives and fresh rosemary from my garden. 

Very tasty, and even more so on the second day.

Crust...

and crumb.

Well, this is really "Idaho Sourdough". I loved finding this formula because I wanted to cold retard the loaves overnight (to bring about more flavor and to make slashing easier) and also it fits perfectly into the 2 (and only) brotforms that I have. 

The flavor was great and I think this will end up being a regular at our table.

Tiny bit of an ear? 

This past week I tried "Chad Robertson's Country Sourdough" as relayed by Shiao-Ping here:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13525/my-imitation-chad-robertson039s-country-sourdough

Her formula (of course) turned out perfect. My attempt? Well, not so much. BUT- I was still very pleased with the results. :-)

In addition to the baguettes I made yesterday, I also mixed up my first batch of Susan's Sourdough. I built my firm starter last week and it was ready to go for today's bake. I converted my 80% hydration starter to both a 50% firm starter and a 100% hydration starter. Instead of the 25g white whole wheat called for in the original formula, I used 25g Medium Rye.

The "Magic Bowl" method is great. I can't believe the oven spring on this little loaf! However, I made quite a few mistakes on this loaf.

Today was a good day :-) I made baguettes.

I used the Pain a' l'Ancienne formula as recorded here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/8524/philippe-gosselin039s-pain-à-l039ancienne-according-peter-reinhart-interpretted-dmsnyder-m