proth5's blog

You’ve heard that expression, right? It isn’t that it does it well – it’s that it does it at all.

In that vein, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we love the wheat from America’s Heartland. The gluten is strong and tolerant – mix it gently or intensively, it stands up.  Throw it in the retarder – it just gets stronger.  Put it in a poolish and let it go slightly over ripe – well, it won’t be perfection, but it will still make decent bread.  Shape it aggressively and it still holds together.

for Challah

It has been awhile, but recently I was reminded that there is more to making bread than baguettes.  A cold front in the Rockies also gave me a window to bake.

Still can't take those photos so good...

3 pounds or so of Challah dough.  A base of a flat 6 strand braid (6 ozs per strand) with a 5 strand braid (4 oz per strand) on top.

Happy Baking!

Pat

 For the one or two of you following my continuing work with triticale, the Great Triticale Crisis of 2011 had me down to my very last bag of tribble food which finally I decided to mill.

 Well, you know.

Although I went into some detail with my panned bread recipe (which has stabilized at my last published formula (or can get snazzed up with the addition of 12-15% each of toasted chopped walnuts and prunes) I've been working up other formulas and channeling Richard Blais - ever unhappy with my baguettes -  I have been tweaking formulas that others might call successful.

Last weekend things seemed to go well.

Once again Captain Kirk has saved the Federation.  A new shipment of quadrotriticale will be delivered to  Sherman's Planet.  But how are they to eat it?  Yes, it can be cooked liked rice or flaked and cooked into porridge.  But what if the good people of Sherman's Planet want sammiches?  What are they to do?

 (Apologies to Jimmy Buffett)

One of the many objectives of the formula development project is to gain understanding of the baking process.  I have found that nothing beats working with the same general dough over and over, with very minor variations to understand the impact of various elements of the baking process.

So when comments on my last entry wound around to "intensive mix" vs. "improved mix" and the somewhat weak crumb of my last loaf, I really wanted to give them full consideration.

I may have mentioned somewhere in passing on these pages that I have a koi pond in my backyard.  It is a beautiful and peaceful thing in the warmer months, but can be just a little grim in the clutches of a Rocky Mountain winter and fatalities among the inhabitants can occur.  Since I am an omnivore, I try to be unsentimental about this, but there are always two factors that come into play in any fish death.  One, even though fish must die some time, as with all living things, I always feel that it has been some failure on my part to provide them with the right environment th

Here's where the long slog starts.

In the world of the internet six weeks is a long time and six blog installments on the same old bread is reaching interminable.  Yet I haven't even started to get down to work on this formula.

My grandmother cooked professionally. I may have mentioned this before on these pages. She was not the "trained in culinary school" type of cook, she was a professional in the sense that a poor woman would be paid to cook in the home of a wealthy woman. As part of the whole "American Dream" experience for my family (a belated American dream perhaps as my ancestors were in America before the War for Independence) she cooked for many years in the home of the president of the university from which my brother and I obtained our undergraduate degrees.

 Sometimes I get giddy - and that isn't a pretty sight.