JennyBakesBread's blog

My usual starter lives on the counter top and is fed every morning a 1:2:2:4 ratio of starter, bread flour, whole wheat flour and water. The temperature in the kitchen is a stubborn 66-70F in the daytime and dips quite a bit at night so the starter lives on one feed a day for most of the week with 2 feeds per day in the run up to bake day. I've been managing my starter like this for about a year (with additional feeding in hot weather), it leavens bread just fine so I've had no reason to complain.

Last week I was considering baking a bread with corn porridge to use up some polenta lurking around in the back of the cupboard. As a northern European, cooking with corn is unfamiliar to me and associated with Italian and/or American cuisine. As a child in the 80's, I thought maize = corn = tinned sweetcorn. Tinned sweetcorn was either an unwelcome addition to tuna mayonnaise or one of the 10,000 things crammed into salads along with boiled eggs and cubes of cheese.

This loaf is Pan de Mais made using the straight dough recipe for maize bread from Dan Lepard's book 'The Handmade Loaf'.

I've baked quite a few of the porridge bread recipes from Tartine #3 as well.

This bread was inspired by STUinLouisa's spring cleaning post. The nuts and dried fruit in the cupboard were, unfortunately, limited to 70g of hazelnuts and 160g prunes left over from Christmas.

This was a cautious attempt at making bread with spelt flour using a recipe from Tartine #3. Overall there is 40% spelt flour and 60% wheat flour. It's probably not enough spelt flour to really raise any serious issues but still a little intimidating...

The last of the stollen and speculaas biscuits have been eaten. The Christmas decorations are back in their box gathering dust. The weather in Manchester is about as depressing as physically possible so it must be time for the first few loaves of 2015.

50% Whole Wheat

A 50% Whole wheat, 50% high extraction, 87.5% hydration loaf

Hello fellow TFL'ers!

I've decided to stop lurking and share a couple of my recent loaves.

Khorasan, semolina bread with sesame seeds

This bread was inspired the sesame-wheat bread from Tartine #3. The idea being to switch out the wholemeal flour in order to use up the last little bit of Khorasan flour hiding in the back of my cupboard. I love baking with Khorasan flour as it poses a lot less problems than other ancient grains.

Overall formula for 2 medium loaves