PiPs's blog

To be honest, I hadn’t a clue what I felt like baking this weekend. My mind wandered over many possibilities. In the end my inspiration for this bake came from Nat. Though she is an avid admirer of all things bread, when I put the question to her about this weekend's bake, the answer came swiftly …

Olive bread!

Of course…

…  how could I have forgotten Nat the Rat’s most favoured of all loaves.

The strange thing is, I can’t remember the last time I made an olive bread …

Saturday

What better reason to bake than catching up with family and friends for lunch. On a hot humid Saturday we drove down to Nat’s parents for a lunch with old family friends from her childhood. In our possession was our contribution to lunch … bread. A bread based on Gérard Rubaud’s formula for Pain au Levain.

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Formula

Nat has booked us a well deserved weekend away from the city rat race in the hinterland north of Brisbane as part of my birthday gift. This means a weekend away from the kitchen and the endless washing up I seem to create. 

Nat adores the Rye and Caraway loaf from the Bourke Street Bakery cookbook. So I have baked it for her/us so we may take it away with us for picnicking and the like.

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Formula

What do you do with the fruits of a couple of less than successful attempts at a Dark 100% Rye bread?

Altus!

What is altus you ask?

Old bread …namely, ground up leftover rye bread usually soaked in water.

In my case its old (ugly) dark sour 100% rye bread that is soaked overnight in water. I also crumbled dry altus and fed my rye starter portions of this along with normal rye flour.

I have returned to last weeks Dark Rye formula with a test bake to determine if the rye flour I am milling is creating havoc with the 100% rye formula.

Two batches of dough were prepared using different flour in each.

For one I used organic wholegrain rye flour from Kialla Pure Foods and for the other I milled organic rye grains from the same company in my Komo Fidibus XL mill.

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Saturdays are my day of play in the kitchen. I rise early in our quiet house to bake bread for the week. A boiled kettle, a cup of tea, then I start mixing and planning my day just as the sun pokes through the kitchen window. After mixing, we enjoy a lazy breakfast while I watch the dough and wait. By midday the baking is done, enticing me to cut a slice (or two) for lunch.

One of the foremost incentives for purchasing my own grain mill was rye.

From coarsely milled rye grains soaked and added to wheat dough, to freshly milled flour and a thriving rye starter.

Rye has been on my mind this week … probably a little too much to be called healthy. So with some free time available last night, I shifted thinking into practise.

How to cheer up sad, sick children?

Chocolate chips!

We have a case of glandular fever in our house at the moment making for a worrying week. Several trips to doctors, blood tests and we finally seem to have a boy with a smile and energy again.

This bake was in fact planned for a 40th birthday party in a park today, but the party was cancelled due to the increasing number of storms we have been having. We had another storm this morning, similar to last Saturday.