I had half a bag of fine cornmeal left in my pantry, and thought of making some corn bread. I consulted Ian's 2014 post on Broa de Milho before baking, and decided to use rye (10%), cornmeal (40%) and bread flour (50%).
A back to basics day with two simple bakes.
First - gluten free crunchy-outside-chewy-inside almond cookies that take 5 mins to mix and another 13 to bake.
To make 30 small cookies
This is an earthy, delicious and easy loaf to make. Flour composition is: 22% whole red spelt, 22% wholegrain, 20% whole barley, 16% whole teff and 20% white bread flour. Hydration is 75%.
I began the night before by making a biga with the 22% spelt and 22% wholegrain. The biga was 45% hydration and consisted of 10% of my standard rye starter. I left this to ferment for 15 hours at around 15 degrees.
When I still lived in Singapore I greatly enjoyed a specific soft swirl milk bread from a Japanese bakery. It had an amazingly delicious but soft, thick crust, and the crumb was very light, with some uneven holes, but had what I thought was depth of flavour - really the taste of wheat, rather than sugar or butter. This wasn't a typical fast fermented milk bread. I've been wanting to recreate it.
A bit of an experimental ciabatta. I intended to make a 90% biga ciabatta but thought - what if I used a levain to make the biga, rather than my starter+water? The idea was that I could develop a more complex flavour profile by making a higher temp spelt-rye levain from my basic starter (5 hour fermentation, 22 degrees), and then use that to form the 45% hydration of the cool biga (16 hour fermentation, 14 degrees).
This is a follow up to clazar123's post on gluten free rice shokupan.
The idea was to use very simple pantry ingredients to make a gluten free loaf with rice. This means: rice, water, salt, oil, sugar and yeast. A few days ago, I managed to make a simple loaf with soaked short-grain rice. Today, I made two loaves with brown rice, one short-grain, and the other long-grain.
The request was for two loaves of bread for a family party of about 30. The bread would be served with pumpkin soup and alongside some tomato-based vegetarian mains.
I thought I would make two rather contrasting loaves but both 50% whole grain 50% white bread flour. One seeded loaf with khorasan and wholewheat, and the other with spelt and rye, mixed with a tablespoon of malt and some walnuts (ran out of cranberries).
Made a 50% khorasan/bread flour with the khorasan in a biga. Whole khorasan flour was hydrated at 45% with 10% sourdough starter and left at 15 degrees for 14 hours. I then mixed the biga with bread flour this afternoon to make a loaf at 75% hydration. Bulk fermented at 18 degrees for 4 hours, proofed for 1.5 hours and baked at 220 degrees for 40 mins.
I was expecting the mixing by hand to be very difficult, but it was really just like any other loaf. I enjoyed making the "apple crumble" texture biga!
In a few weeks it's time to celebrate chinese new year and this means getting pineapple tarts baked well in advance, since there's way too much cooking to be done leading up to the day itself. In Singapore these are consumed in the weeks leading up to the new year and as kids they had to be hidden from us to ensure that there were some left for visiting guests during CNY itself! I've continued baking these tarts ever since I left, and my kids and family here have grown to like them.
I have only posted hearth loaves so far because that's where the bulk of my experimentation goes on, but I do bake soft loaf pan bread for my kids twice a week. Preparing breakfast and lunch sandwiches for the kids five days a week means a lot of bread, and I prefer to know what goes into this significant part of their diet!
The usual formula for the kid's bread is simple. For a 1.1kg loaf, I combine 25% whole grain with 75% bread flour, milk, 1.5g yeast, 10g salt, 2 tablespoons of butter, and 1 tablespoon of sugar, around 77% hydration.
