rhag's blog

Just posting up some results from my saturday wood fired bake. I did a pain au levain, running off of thoms country french but I increased the hydration a bit because my high extraction flour absorbs a lot of water due to a small bran content. I mill the flour myself and dont have a super fine sifter so the extra water gives quite an open structure. Comments and Questions are always welcome.

I work at a small Organic Bakery in Winnipeg,MB. We get our grain directly from the farmers and mill our own flour/grain and press our own organic sunflower oil at the bakery . The bread is pretty basic but is made with the best ingredients possible. I work the night shift from 8pm to 430am by myself and on average I make between 275 and 400 loaves each night along with roughly 700 buns and 250 WW cinnamon buns. I make 9 kinds of bread during the night: Wholewheat, Wholewheat Multi, White, Cracked Wheat, White Multi, Wild Rice, Light Sourdough Rye, Spelt, and Ciabatta.

As requested here's the recipe I use to make baguettes. This recipe yields about 10-390g baguettes. For use in a home oven i would scale down the weight otherwise you'll end up with a small loaf rather than the slender french icon.

Baguettes:

Poolish:

Flour (Hard) 850g

Water           850g

Yeast           Pinch

On Saturday the 7th at 9pm I started mixing my first dough and began my overnight bake to have fresh bread out for my display at the 2009 culinary salon. As the night progressed I created my take on the epi loaf, guinness and barley bread, ciabatta, palmiers, croissant, danish pastries, 5 grain buns, 5 strand challahs and my centre piece. I set up the display around 6 am on sunday after a relaxing night bake. Judging began at 8am and i was allowed back at 1pm. I arrived with much anticipation and found my peice awarded a 1st place standing in my category!. Gold!

Today i put together a decorative plaque, baguettes, ciabatta, and the beer and barley bread. I'm entering a baking competition this weekend and have been practicing for the last little while. On Sunday I'll be doing the decorative plaque, baguettes, ciabatta, beer bread, multi buns, challah, palmiers, croissants, and danish dough for my display. Thoughts and comments are always welcome. If people are at all interested in a tutorial for the plaque just let me know!

This weekend I decided to get in touch with my sweet side. I made cinnamon buns on sat and croissants, chocolate hazelnut danish and an apricot basket ( unglazed in pictures). I used the recipe out of artisan baking by ciril hitz. My assistant was also helping me out with the weekend bake.

Assistant below:

Todays Bake included the Five grain bread, Pain Au Levain, semolina baguettes and the vermont sourdough (no pictures sry) out of hamelmans book. But upon looking at the 5 grain recipe i only came up with 4 grains. If anyone could clarify for me that would be awesome. I stuck with the batard shape as i will be picking up a few wicker baskets soon. al so if anyone has any ideas on loaf shapes let me know! enjoy comments questions and whatever else are always welcome. ( sorry about the medicore pictures they came off my iphone.)

Todays Bake  included a few baguettes and I tried out the Beer and barley bread from hamelmans book. This is a solid recipe and i opted to use guinness as the beer because it definitly my favourite to drink on its own and figured it wuld give the bread great flavour. I would definitly recommend this recipe to anyone looking for a semi whole wheat bread with lots of flavour! Questions, thoughts, comments are always welcome.

So this is my first post here. I've got a few pictures here of the bread display I am putting on for the open house at the college. Theres Baguettes, Ciabatta, Miche, Light Sourdough Rye, and Challah. I also had a semolina loaf but someone decided to drop the dough on the floor. Enjoy!