loydb's blog

So my wife is starting to get the 'Pizza again? Really?' look in her eye, so I may wait a few days for the next experiment :)

This is still a grocery store dough ball rolled out to 2-3mm, but I replaced the store jar with homemade no-cook sauce. The salami is homemade, as is the shredded gruyere. Mozz balls from the store, basil from the garden. The wild mushrooms were a mix of Blue Oyster, Lion's Mane and Chestnut mushrooms, cooked way down in olive oil until they gave up most of their moisture, but hadn't started to get crispy. 

Amazon had the Chefman pizza oven on sale for $229, and I couldn't resist.

This is the first pie. In somewhat of a twist, the dough ball and sauce are grocery store, but I made the Romano, Asiago and White Cheddar cheeses, as well as the pepperoni. 

This was using the New York style preset (650F bottom, 600F top). I rotated 2.5 mins into the 5 minute bake, then added an addition 1.5 minutes at the end. 

It's not perfect, but I can definitely see that I can get there.

I woke up at 3:00 this morning, and after half an hour trying to go back to sleep, I gave up. So I made pineapple turnovers.

This is the first of five focaccia I'm making that will be identical except for the olive oil used.

Dough:
350g whole wheat flour
200g of 100% hydration sourdough starter
250g water 
1 tsp fine sea salt
2 tablespoons olive oil

Toppings
Big handful of pistachios chopped up in a food processor
Dried dates cut into smaller chunks

I started with 125g of spelt and 225g of wheat, milled twice, once coarse, then as fine as my Mockmill will get it.

I was looking for an easy way to make a slab of butter for laminated dough, and this worked a dream. I used the two sizes of vac bag in the first pic to plan out how big I wanted to roll the dough out. Then I vac sealed the butter (straight out of the fridge, no need to soften), flattened initially by hand, then used the rolling pin to fill all the corners of the bag with butter. 

To remove, put the bag in the freezer for 30-45 mins until it is frozen hard. Cut open and peel away the bag. It is soft enough to work after 10-15 minutes sitting on the dough.

It's been awhile... I've started venturing out again beyond my weekly sourdough. This was primarily spurred on by starting to get my whole grain from Barton Springs Mill instead of Azure. I cannot heap enough praises on the flavor and aroma from everything I've got from there. The ryes, in particular, are stunning. More on ryes down the line, I've had some good successes there.

After a brief dalliance with PR's whole wheat sandwich bread, I'm back to my traditional sourdough loaf (starter + water + flour + salt). These were around 80% hydration.The sandwich bread was delicious, but didn't keep nearly as well as the traditional loaf.

I had shoulder surgery a little over three months ago, which cut into the baking time pretty severely. I spent the last ten days rebuilding my starter, and made my first loaf yesterday. 100% fresh-milled whole wheat sourdough using Reinhart's basic whole wheat bread recipe (except no yeast).