leslieruf's blog

I had a small quantity of sprouted wholewheat that I found in the pantry.  Looking back through my notes I found that I had sprouted the wheat in September 2015! Other things took precedence in my life after that with things getting back to normality (or what passes as normality) recently.  I wanted to make this Potato water SD recipe from NE Sourdough again, it's my favourite white loaf and always turns out well.  So I ground the wheat in my coffee grinder and included this sprouted wheat flour in the recipe.  I also upped the hydration a little.  

this started off as a simple 1:2:3 sourdough And I fiddled with the flours and came up with something resembling Forkish's Field blend #2 quite unintentionally. then I started weighing the flours and found I didn't have what I wanted. ended up with

higrade flour 66%

rye  flour 20%

wholewheat flour 5% (all I had)

potato flour 8% 

salt 2%

This weekend I decided to start my journey into rye breads with Hamelman's 40% Caraway rye but I chickened out of the 40% reducing it to 30% for this first try(double anything I have made before).

Last night I mixed the rye levain and left overnight on bench.

300g rye meal flour

100g Hi grade (11.5% protein so not quite Hamelman's Hi gluten flour)

332 g water

20 gm starter.

This morning I added 600 g Hi grade flour

348g water

17.5 g caraway seed

18 g salt and 4.2g instant yeast.

I decided I needed to check starter activity as it had been untouched in fridge since early August appart from a refresh last week.  I had quite a few grains in the pantry so decided these needed to be used up.  I made my favourite multigrain recipe but made a couple of small changes.  

Today's bake was just a simple 1:2:3 sourdough with 11% rye, 11% wholewheat and the rest Hi grade flour. It was proof that my dried "backup" starter was still viable after a sample of it it failed to activate after longhaul international flights.  Happy now my backup is viable, I added some freshly dried starter to my 'backup stash" and I could gift a loaf to a friend.

Leslie

This morning I was baking the SD bread I had made yesterday and retarded overnight, as I often do.  I had to be out and was running out of time so decided to bake two at the same time, 1 in the DO (righthand loaf), the other on a small sheet pan (lefthand loaf).  They had identical treatment otherwise. 

here is the underside.

todays bake was my favourite multigrain sourdough (3 righthand loves). Looking at my notes it must have been at least 12 months since I last made this one. I winged it a bit but really happy with the result.  crumb shot

Finally decided it was time to try something different again.  I've not been in a very good space for a few months and whilst I have continued to bake it has been from necessity rather than pleasure. Slowly the pleasure has returned and I decided to try Jeffrey Hammelman's 5 seeded levain but to leave out the yeast. 

Today I dedicate this bake to my eldest son, who suddenly collapsed and passed away 4 weeks ago today. My head is everything except okay but we could no longer accept store bought bread.  So I chose a simple loaf to start baking again (Forkish overnight white) but I have to say the pleasure I normally have is missing. 

crumb shot

decided to have another go at Reinhart's Oat Bran Broom bread. Recipe as follows (I changed a couple of things as I wanted to lighten the loaf a little)

Soaker (as per recipe)
184 g whole wheat flour
16.7 g oat bran
14 g flax seed
4 g salt
198 g water
Mixed and left on bench overnight.