joc1954's blog

After many months being so busy finally the time of holidays/vacations arrived. Again this year we (my wife, our dog and me) are having great time on Island of Hvar in middle Dalmatia in the Adriatic Sea.

Happy Easter to everybody!. 

Alleluia!

Joze

Today there was a state level assessment and this time there were three family members attending this competition besides me: my daughter, my granddaughter and my wife, so four breads were thrown into the fight for best scores.

Due to heavy involvement in one project I am recently not very active in writing at TFL because I really have no time. However, this dos not mean that I am not baking.  

Yesterday we were looking after three of four grandchildren because my daughter and son in law and the oldest grandson were involved in "International Water Count" of birds which always takes place mid January practically worldwide.

I decided to involve my eleven and half year old granddaughter into baking and she was also very keen on baking. She is an incredible girl playing trumpet and riding horses. We made two loaves of bread and three baguettes. The boules were baked in wood fired oven while baguettes were baked in electric steam oven.

Some time ago I bought about 250g of hemp seed flour and today I made the first attempt to use it. Recipe was simple: 20% wholegrain spelt flour, 9% hemp seed flour, rest was AP flour, hydration 70%, 8% of  starter @100% hydration, 5% white sesame seeds, 2% salt (all bakers percents).

Some time ago I promised alfanso to make baguettes once and they are here. Not really very nice, but not too bad at all for the first time. Definitely I have to learn baguette scoring.

I used Alfanso's recipe with a small change that I was using 100% hydration starter, the rest was the same.

I was baking them in my steam oven at 230 dC and high steam for about 25 minutes and at the beginning I dropped 2 ice cubes on a hot skillet to generate a steam blast.

I have really enjoyed while baking for this challenge. I was on a business trip 11 days and my starter had a rest period in fridge. The weather today was beautiful although -7 dC in the morning but warmed quite a bit before noon. I decided to use my Weber Performer grill to bake a bread for this challenge. 

Here I am posting something what was going on at the end of August this year. Unfortunately I had not enough time to prepare this post earlier, so better late than never.

Probably everybody who was reading my recent posts is interested to hear how the bread assessment finished. As this will be a slightly longer post I am revealing now the most important fact: I got the gold award.

So you can stop reading here, you already got the crucial part of information. However, maybe you would like to continue and read some background information and some interesting facts about this kind of assessment.