ll433's blog

I've done levain in stages to build flavour and gone up to 70% PFF in a previous rye loaf, so I thought why not try out a two-stage biga, go up to 80% PFF, and skip bulk fermentation since there should already be so much flavour?

This ended up being a 40% teff-rye loaf at 70% hydration. 

I felt like making my standard loaf yesterday but also felt like messing up processes that I have settled into for some time, just for the fun of it. 

These are 40% white rye rolls with a little crunchy hat on top of them. God, the hats are so delicious. I generally only have enough stomach capacity for a roll, max 1.5 rolls, but I just want to eat the hats of all the buns. I asked the husband if I could please peel the hat off his bun and he says, yes, but please don't eat it because it's the best part of the bun! Zzzzz

Yes, I could bake a tray of hats exclusively, but it's different when the hat is on a bun.

These loaves turned out surprisingly sweet and earthy. I used to make ground walnut loaves very frequently years ago - with some cocoa included as well - but the teff and rye here definitely contribute some complexity that I've never had with previous loaves.

Dry ingredients: 30% medium rye and 13% teff pre-fermented, 13% ground walnuts, 44% bread flour. Total hydration: 66%, be careful with over-hydrating because the ground walnuts don't really soak up much water.

Just back from Singapore and already craving savoury asian delights. Decided to a version of these pepper buns, which I first tried in Taipei. They make these in a huge charcoal oven on the streets, and the peppery filling paired with the flaky crust is unbelievable.

The traditional filling is meat-based, but here I decided to use a stewed mushroom filling. 

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).