Pablo's blog

Cell phones rock for casual photography!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCBxX42GQmU

A friend asked me about my bread baking technique and so I made a Youtube video.  It's pretty homey and casual.  Maybe someone will get something out of it.

Errors: "baguette" should be "batard", baking time 525 10 minutes, 470 20 minutes.

:-Paul

I've been away from The Loaf for awhile and I thought I'd post an update to my bread-state.

I've been messing with Hamelman's 40% rye with caraway.  I like to stick to wild yeast and the bread calls for a bit of commercial yeast.  He does suggest that you can just leave it out and ferment it longer, but I wanted to experiment with a long bulk fermentation of the wheat along with the 15 hour preparation of the rye sour.  I wanted to bring out more flavour in the wheat as a background against the caraway.  It worked out well with my starter refreshment schedule; I have 30g of 100% rye starter discard, I used 17g with the 363g of rye flour and 300g of water. 

I wondered how much abuse this method could take.  I had ~200g 50% hydration starter in the 'fridge from a few days ago.  I used no yeast.  76g of the flour was rye.  The dough temp was 96F.  I did 3 fold sessions per schedule then put it in the 'fridge overnight.  Today I did the remaining 2 fold sessions, proofed for an hour at 85F room temp and baked 65 minutes per instructions (450/350).

Looks reasonable above, but camera angles can hide things.

Hamelman's 40% Caraway Rye without commercial yeast:

I haven't cut into this yet, but I'm so pleased!  I modified the recipe and only used the rye levain.  It looks great.  This bodes well for paying attention to fermentation temperatures.

I cut the recipe down to make a single loaf:

This poor bread had a tough time of it with me.  It's Pumpernickel Bread from the BBA.  I made the levain version without instant yeast.

Ingredients:

7 oz. starter - 100% hydration

7oz. Giusto's pumpernickel flour

6oz. water

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A Tale of Two Boules

Sourdough is going great right now.  Things have changed a lot.  I had been doing Xtreme low maintenance with my seed culture but ultimately I was disappointed.  Sure it bakes bread and sure it's very low maintenance, but I've been getting more and more suspicious that the oven spring has not be spectacular due to my culture maintenance technique.