Mebake's blog

This is an illustration of Shaping a batard i thought i would share with TFL memebers.

I Hope this helps new TFL members with shaping skills.

This is another one of Hamelman's Pain Au Levain With whole wheat from His book "BREAD".

I'am testing out my new flour's performance with naturally leavened breads.

I mixed my dough ever so lightly, and did two stretched and folds (letter fold on the bench) @ 60 minutes intead of one at 50min. So, the fermentation time was 3 hours intead of 2.5.

I retarded the shaped loaves right after shaping for 8 hours, and left them to proof at room temp. for 1 hour while the oven was preheating to 510F.

In reference to the comment of TFL member : subfuscpersona, here, where SF thankfully shared his idea of Freezing a yeasted BIGA for future use; i have finally done the proposed method, with little deviations of my own.

The recipe was adapted from Peter Reinhart's (Transitional Multigrain Hearth bread).

Ingredients:

Soaker:       223g    Bran + coarse whole Wheat middlings

I have finally found a relatively affordable, reliable source for Bread flour in Dubai! I wanted to test run it by baking Poolish baguettes.  I have sourced the flour from a local mill. They had always stocked this product, though only sold it upon demand, which seems to be non-existant Market wise. I believe, that only high end western style Artisanal cafes spread around Dubai malls such as PAUL, LE Pain Quotidient, BREAD and Co... etc, would order such a premium Product. Now its Me, too  :P

I have not made any bread blogs for a while now, as i was moving to a another apartment.

Yesterday, i saw a bag of sifted wholewheat flour (truns out to be a high extraction, as i was unable to get rid of tiny bran and germ particles through my sifter), and decided to bake PR's wholewheat sandwich loaf from it (Found in Whole grain breads book).

I always wanted to know how Pakistani wheat kernels i have in stock would perform in a loaf pan. I mill my own wheat, so i made a wholewheat loaf from Peter Reinhart's (Wholegrain breads). The loaf is seen here. I happened to find a pullman pan-look-alike on sale, and i purchased it without hesitation. The difference in this loaf, is that i sifted most of the bran out of the milled flour.

I made this bread yesterday from Hamelman's yeasted prefermets section. I used 50% Strong white Hovis bread flour, and 50% Snowflake Nutty Wheat Flour. As the latter contains too much bran, i adjusted by adding some all purpose flour to the final dough.

I mounted two baking stones on two separate racks. The oven spring was better this way, i think. I used Sylvia's Steaming technique.. (very effective).

This is my second try at baguettes, my first was unworthy of a blog, it was overmixed, shaping was lousy, and crust and color were lacking. Now that iam getting the hang of it, i really love Poolish baguettes. The nutty fragrance of a poolish is indeed intoxicating.

I Have blogged about my first 66% Sourdough Rye before Here, but this time, its more like what it should be: close textured, more sour, More Rye-ish. This time i used Medium Rye (I mixed sifted Rye Flour with Whole Rye Flour in 50/50 ratio).

The fermentation happens faster when whole rye is added, and my bulk fermentation was 45 minutes only. As expected, the dough never came together as it would with lower Rye breads, but the falvor of sour rye was very pronounced.

Sometimes, one needs to bake bread without having to plan ahead. This is from "BREAD"'s straight dough bread

section that needs no planning ahead. 5 Grain bread is an enriched, wholewheat bread that contains rolled oats, eggs, oil, corn meal, and flax seeds It is 50% wholegrain, with 40% wholewheat flour, and 10% Rye flour. The rest is high Gluten Flour, and i used a good bread flour+Vital Wheat gluten.

Total time from mixing to baking is 3.5-4Hrs. it is a quick bread, a very very flavorful quick bread that hits its pinnacle when toasted, i guarantee.