Plain sourdough is not something I make often, though I intended to but I seems to easily get distracted by multigrain and/or fruit breads. Somehow, I feel like one last weekend and I picked the Pain au Levain with whole wheat from jeffrey Hamelman's Bread cookbook.
I can't recall I ever had whole-wheat pizza. It sounds rather un-Italian but I want to experiment a little and see how the whole-wheat pizza would turn out. It would be great if it works so that we can, at least, claim that it's wholegrain pizza and somewhat a healthy choice, even though it is fully loaded with cheeses, chorizo, and etc, lol.
I used pizza base recipe from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker Apprentice and replaced 70% of bread flour with whole wheat flour.
This is the recipe I love from Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker Apprentice. This bread makes a great toast. The bread has 16% grains which contribute to the sweetness and fantastic aroma. The bread is very moist from many grains that hold the moisture and contribute to the natural sweetness.
The recipe also contains brown rice that can be substituted by white rice or wild rice, but brown rice seems to blend in the best. I used white rice as I had some left over frozen from few weeks ago.
I haven't made the fruit loaves for a while. Not that I don't like them, I do love fruit toast (a lot actually), but I've been obsessed about making grains, seeds, whole wheat breads recently and kind of overlooking my old-time favourite, sourdough fruit toast.
Sometimes, one needs a reminder or a nag. My boyfriend just mentioned the other day what a great fruit toast from the Dench Baker (artisan bakery and café in Fitzroy, Melbourne) he had. It sorted of giving me a signal that maybe I should be baking other breads apart from grain and seed breads.
Green tea and red bean are the food pair that I love. The bitterness from green tea complements the sweetness from the red bean paste really well. I have the left over of red bean paste I made for my homemade green tea ice cream last week. I have a big container of it and I don't like to see them going to waste. So, it makes a perfect timing to get on baking some green tea bread buns.
First rule of baking - KNOW YOUR OWN OVEN.
I think I did until a couple of weeks ago when I finally found out that I have been baking my breads in a not-so-correct oven mode for the past 6 months.
Instead of pre-heating my oven with fan+top & bottom heat, I pre-heated my oven and baked in a fan-assisted (with some heating elements) mode. The result after using the correct baking mode is significantly improved.
The loaves are more open with nicer ears and crumbs. Finally, I have a decent looking loaves.
Whole wheat multigrain sourdough from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread cookbook is the bread that I bake quite often. I really like the mild sweetness from honey and the aroma from the mix of honey, whole wheat flour and grains. It got a nice texture and taste. I am always amazed at how sweet the bread is for a little amount of honey in it.
Finally, I got over my procrastination of making baguettes and got on with making one.
My first attempt wasn't great and wasn't too bad either. There are things that I've learnt and will take them to my next bake. There were no issues with the taste and the dough strengths and extensibility.
The issues I had with this bake were scoring, underestimation of the baguette size when it's fully-proof (i.e. it extended beyond my baking tray), baguette transfer from couche to baking tray.
