Reynard's blog

I stumbled across Paul Hollywood's "City Bakes" series on TV the other week whilst channel hopping and saw him visit this New York bakery where the proprietor was famous for no-knead bread. It's been intriguing me ever since, so I thought I'd give it a whirl - at most I'd wasted half a kilo of flour and a little bit of time...

The program didn't say much about the ingredients beyond the fact that he used half a gram of instant yeast and let the dough sit in a cool place for 24 hours, but I figured what the heck, I could play around and see where it took me.

Well, I did pose the question the other day about converting a Polish babka to sourdough (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/45314/converting-babka-recipe-sourdough)

Anyways, I took the plunge, tweaked the original yeasted recipe (upping the salt from a pinch to 2%) and here goes...

Ingredients:

Levain:

30g 100% hydration wholegrain rye starter

50g strong white bread flour

125ml whole milk

Dough:

All of the levain

Well, new for me, anyway... Actually, several new things... I'm a sourdough, rye and generally and wholegrain-ish kind of gal, but the Parental Unit requested crusty white French-style bread this week. So of course, I attempted to oblige. With the help of the resources and things I've learnt on here, (and a brain fart along the way) this is what I came up with:

INGREDIENTS

Poolish:

100g white bread flour

100g tepid water

1g dried active yeast

Dough:

Poolish

400g white bread flour

150g durum flour

315g tepid water

This was one of the first sourdough recipes I tried when starting out last spring - and I failed royally with it, ending up with blown-out wonky loaves with flying crusts and a kitchen smeared in sticky dough. Admittedly I was a relative newcomer to baking bread and made every possible newbie mistake with it.

Wanting a change from the last few loaves of pain sur poolish, my baking supervisors - Poppy and Lexi - suggested I take the plunge and give this a whirl again. But this time, I've taken a lot of advice, lessons and feline displeasure on board.

After the craziness of the festive season, it's good to get back into the bread baking saddle. Not that I was entirely out of the kitchen as the holidays are a wonderful time to cook great food. And it was a leftover from that cooking that provided the inspiration - a head and a half of roasted garlic...

Now, I adore garlic, so yes, I decided to make a loaf of bread with that much garlic in it... Not that the neighbours will be thanking me, I'm sure... I kept the bake simple in order to showcase the garlic.

Poolish:

100g bread flour

100g water

Well, my new chicken brick arrived the other week, but it's been crazy-busy chez Casa Witty and I've not really had the chance to post... Anyways, here is my new brick - it's the Mason Cash one, bigger than the one I had. I think it will easily take a kilo of dough, though this time I stuck to my standard-sized loaf.

AKA using-up-the-open-packets-of-flour-in-the-cupboard bread. ;-)

Am still working with my usual recipe formula, which I can now recite by heart. I think it's been a really worthwhile exercise in improving both my technique and consistency. But it's amazing how many different breads I can turn out using the same basic formula... And I can vary the quantity of yeast according to how much (or little) time I have.

It's amazing how far your confidence can plummet after baking a whole string of inedible sourdough frisbees. Necessity (and hunger) got the better of me, so this week I switched back to a hybrid recipe that's always worked well.

405g flour

20g oat bran

300g tepid water

9g salt

4g dried active yeast

45g rye starter

Tablespoon vegetable oil (I use rape seed oil)

As the porridge bread received the thumbs up from the parental unit, I thought I'd have another crack at it for this week's bake. With sound advice in my head and a better sense of timing than starting to make bread at stupid o'clock in the evening, I set to it. I started out with the same recipe, scaled it up by half to give me two medium loaves and made a few minor tweaks to the ingredients, namely ditching the dried active yeast entirely, swapping the spelt in the soaker for wholegrain rye and reducing the water in the dough.

Soaker:

113g porridge oats

On Tuesday afternoon a friend popped by, and we, as you do, sat there over tea and cake putting the world to rights while the rain was hammering down outside. Next thing we know it's supper time, with more tea, bread and deli. And then, at the end of the evening, there are only crumbs on the board and half a fruit loaf in the bread bin. So there I was, at eight o'clock at night trying to rectify the situation - just as well I'm something of a night owl... And I felt adventurous to boot. So instead of reaching for a set recipe, I thought I'd try putting something together on the fly.