Isand66's blog

    Based on one of David Snyder's' popular formulas  this one includes dried cherries and a maple smoked cheddar cheese I picked up on my last trip to Vermont while visiting King Arthur Flour to stock up.

I used about half freshly milled whole wheat along with KAF French style flour and a little bit of fresh milled rye.

The end result was a tasty bread but I was disappointed in the crumb as it was a little too tight.  I think I would up the water content even more to compensate for the large portion of freshly ground whole wheat next time.

  Fresh milled Spelt flour and Rye along with rye chops, cracked wheat and barley flakes were left to autolyse for 24 hours.  The resulting bread was an earthy, nutty wholesome bread perfect for sandwiches, grilled bread or just spread with some butter.

    I wanted to make some good soft and flavorful potato bread and this formula ended up as close to what I imagined as possible.

It's very similar to store bought potato bread but much, much better.  The ricotta cheese combined with the sweet potatoes and red potatoes really gave the crumb a nice soft and moist texture which is perfect for this type of bread.

The crumb was not terribly open, but that's okay, since who wants your sandwich fillings pouring out anyway :).

My Lexi

      Last week I took a few days off for vacation and my wife and I decided to do a day trip to the Mecca of baking King Arthur Flour in Vermont.  It was a fun and long trip starting out with the delay on the ferry ride due to a backpack that nobody wanted to claim.

In any case we had a great day and visited a couple of cheese and maple syrup shops as well.

      This was an interesting experimental bread.  I decided to use a potato cut up into little pieces along with the polenta in the actual porridge.  I wanted to have actual pieces of potato in the bread and it worked like a charm.  It was especially interesting on the crust of the bread where the potatoes that were sticking out got nice and crisp like potato sticks.

I used a bottle of hard apple cider in the main dough hoping it would give a nice tart apple flavor but you don't really taste it very much so water will work just as well.

 The last batch of rolls I made were very rich so I wanted to make something a bit more lean this time.  I omitted the cream cheese and changed up some of the flours and used whole eggs and olive oil in place of the cream cheese and butter.

They came out very tasty and while not as rich and buttery as the last batch, they still make great burger buns and sandwich rolls as well.

    It's been a while since I baked with a Yeast Water starter and I now that cherries are in season and inexpensive I figured it was time to build one again.

It took a few days to bring the YW to life with a handful of cherries, water and a little honey.  Once it was ready to use I built up a levain in 2 stages and used a nice combination of flours including freshly milled whole wheat and durum flour.

Naturally I needed to add some cherries to the main dough and figured some walnuts would make this a winner.

   I wanted to use some fresh milled flour from my Mock Mill that I'm testing out so I through together a simple bread using fresh milled whole wheat, fresh milled Kamut and some barley flakes.

I do have to say I'm very impressed with the control you get with the Mock Mill.  I used the second finest settings and did one sift and reground the sifted out parts again.

The end result was a very tasty wholesome bread with a moderate crumb.

 It finally feels like summer here on Long Island, so that means it's time to fire up the Barbecue and throw on some hamburgers and hot dogs.  I whipped up a version of a yeasted bun I've made many times and changed it over to use a SD starter and made a few other flour swaps as well.

These ended up great and were nice and tasty and soft but not too soft to hold up to a grilled burger and hot dog.