I've been on hiatus since we moved back to Austin, but since we're now in the middle of a flour and bread shortage (because apparently everyone is suddenly going to bake!), I've started milling flour for myself and my friends, and am back to baking my own again.
I don't currently have an active starter, so this is a yeasted loaf, about 75% fresh milled hard white wheat and 25% KABF.
This is a continuation of tweaking Maurizio Leo's Best Sourdough Recipe My first efforts can be found in my blog here.
Back when I first started this blog, I was trying out the San Francisco starter from sourdo.com. I was never able to get a flavor I loved from it. Almost six years down the line, I've learned a ton about sourdough in the interim. I was also growing bored with the rye strain I've been baking with for the last few years -- so I'm trying again with it. I've been building the starter for the last week, finally it was active enough to use.
I've been very quiet -- mainly because I've spent the last year baking the same recipe over and over, tweaking it slightly until I've got it completely reproducible. I've varied the additions (various seeds, dried fruits, etc.), but the base bread has been the same. For 2018, I'm going to venture out of this comfort zone and get more experimental again.
I've been working on this recipe for about 5 weeks now, I think this is loaf #11. It has finally started coming together like I want. 20% sprouted rye sourdough, 35% sprouted hard red wheat sourdough starter, 45% KABF, 75% hydration. I'm doing another couple of loaves on Sunday repeating this recipe, if I'm still happy with it then I'll do a detailed post.
I had about 500g extra of my 100% hydration WW start (90% hard red winter wheat, 10% rye), and needed to bake a loaf for some friends, plus some for us. I wanted a bit more rise than I've been getting with 100% WW, so I used AP for half the flour bill (Reinhart's basic sourdough recipe). I'm really happy with how it came out.
edit: Crumb Shot
I started up a new starter culture last week using Sourdo's Polish Rye. It is now working well enough that I'm starting to have extra levain, so the first thing I made with it were sourdough pancakes. I really liked Knead_Love's "Meditation on Sourdough Pancakes" blog entry (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32308/meditation-sourdough-pancakes), so I used that as my base recipe with the following mods:
* Tripled the batch size, except for the brown sugar, which I just doubled (4 T total)
Being a 3-minute drive from Seven Stars Bakery here in Providence meant that I essentially stopped baking (other than the occasional buttermilk biscuit or cornbread) for 2013. I've resolved to change that for 2014, and have already made my first loaf of 2014 (Reinhart's transitional wheat sandwich bread).
Happy New Year (a little late) to everyone!
I'm continuing with the theme of 'corn' this week. This time, I'm starting with a 50/50 mix of Heartland Mill's organic blue and yellow corn. It took me a little time to get the mill dialed in for the coarseness I was after -- and I ended up sifting out roughly 50% of the meal, leaving me with true grits (and a bunch of corn flour for my next loaf of bread).
Saturday was pickup day for Pioneer Valley's grain CSA. I am really impressed with the variety and quality of the grains and beans we got. I'll do a more extensive post on what we got later, but here's the first cooking effort. I used the same recipe from my blue corn cornbread entry, using Red Llamas Wheat and Mandan Bride Corn.
